AfflHBQBQI nnv t.trkapv PREHISTORIC MAN. .. t -.*- ->i '. ***» ,c*< ■ / ^pfvv#'^ PREHISTORIC MAN RESEARCHES INTO THE ORIGIN OF CIVILISATION IN THE OLD AND THE NEW WORLD r.v DANIEL WILSON, LL.D. PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, TORONTO; AUTHOR OF THE " PREHISTORIC USNALS OF SCOTLAND," ETC SECOND EDITION. ITonboit : MACMILLAN AND CO. 18 6 5. ••• .. .•••» • • « ••••.•• •• • •« • • • EDINBURGB : T. 0ONSTAB1 r. PRINT! i: TO THE QUEEN, AND TO THE (JNTVER8ITY, IN FOND MEMORIAL OF A BROTHERS LIFE-LONG SYMPATHY IN MANY FAVOURITE RESEARCHES THIS VOLUME DEPRIVED BY DEATH OF ITS PURPOSED DEDICATION IS INSCRIBED WITH THE LOVED NAME OF GEORGE WILSON, M.D. F.R.S.E. LATE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH AND DIRECTOR OF THE INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM OF SCOTLAND. PAGE CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. [INTRODUCTION. The Old World and the New— American Phases oi Life- The Term Prehistoric — Influence of Migrations What is < !ivilisation .'—Domestication — Indian Philo- sophy Aborigines — The Tartar; the Arab- Languages of America — Wander- ings of the Nations — Fossil Man— The New World a Mysterv, CHAPTER IT. THE NEW WORLD. The Latest Migrations — Founding a Capital Tin' [nfani City— Beginnings of His- tory— Superior City -Entering on Historic Life Prehistoric Phases, . . II CHAPTER III. THE PRIMEVAL TRANSITION. The Primeval Foresl -The Genesis of Man— Non-Metallurgic Eras— Oscillations of the Land— The Flint-Polk of the Drift— Advent of European Man— The Drift Implements— Chronology of the French Drift— Scottish Alluvium— Preceltic Races — Their Imitative Arts— Man Primeval — His Intellectual Condition- Instinct— Accumulated Knowledge— Primeval Britain— Its Fossil Fauna — Bone Implements — Food— American Drift— Relics of Ancient Life — Extinct Fauna— Man and the Mastodon — Indian Traditions— Giants— Drift Disclosures —Antiquity of the American Man— Primitive Arts, . . ... 21 CHAPTER IV. SPEECH. The Reasoning Faculty — Language : its Origin— Abstract Terms —Names of Animals — Wild Men— Borrowed Terms — The Mimetic Element— Multiplica- tion of Words — The Coptic Vocabulary— Ma, Mamma— Indian Languages— The Whip-Poor- Will— Descriptive Names— Indian Onomatopoeia— Names for Natural Sounds — Emotional Utterances — Phonetic Types — Elements of Lan- guage — Agassiz on Language — Growth of Root-words— Norman Speech — Voice of Animals — Vowel Sounds — Laura Bridgeman— Associated Sounds — Vocal Signs of Ideas — Grammatical Forms — Mute Signs— Rudiments of Vocal Lan- guage — Sounds of Domesticated Animals — Patois — Natural Evolution of Roots, 49 viii Contents. CHAPTER V. FIRE. PAGE The Fire-using Animal — The Aurignac Sepulchre — Post-Pliocene Funeral Fires — Tin- Australian Fire-Myth First (Jses of Fire -The Aztecs' Sacred Fire— Permian Sun-Worshippers Sacrifice of the White Dog— Sacred Fires of the Mound-Builders— Chinook Fire-making— Tierra Del Fuego— Fire the grand Alchymist The First Flash of Intellect, 82 CHAPTER VI. THE CANOE. The Use of Tools— Novel Arts — Tool-using Instincts — Primitive River Craft — The Guanahane Canoe — Ocean Navigation — The Ethnological Problem — Polynesian Migrations — Ancient Clyde Fleets — African Canoe-making — Oregon Cedar Canoes — Native Whalers of the Pacific — The Prehistoric Boat-builders — Mawai's Canoes — The Proa and Outrigger— The Terra Australis Incognita— Peopling of the Pacific Islands — Aboriginal Maritime Skill — Traces of Oceanic Migra- tion — The Birch-bark Canoe — The Ancient British Coracle — The Esquimaux Kaiak — The Peruvian Balsa — Peruvian Ocean Navigation, .... 95 CHAPTER VII. TOOLS. Man the Artificer— Revelations for the Future— The Law of Reason — Man's capa- city for Deterioration — What is a Stone Period? — Materials of Primitive Art —Evidences of their Geographical Origin — Indications of Extinct Races — A Primitive Shell-Period — Shell Currency — Shell Necklaces — Costly Sepulchral Offerings — Chinook Funeral Rites — Motives for Human Sacrifice — Arts of the South Pacific — Malayan Influence — Feejeean Constructive Skill — Carib Shell- Implements — Native Monuments of St. Domingo — Ancient Rock-Sculptures -Honduras Flint Implements — Mexican Migration Scene — Sepulchral De- posits of Tennessee— Tropical Sea-Shell Relics — Asiatic Sacred Shell-Vessels — The Flint-edged Sword — The League of the Five Nations — Iroquois Influence Fate of Savage Nations, 119 CHAPTER VIII. THE METALS. Dawn of a Metallurgic Era— Primitive Copper-working — The Copper Region of Lake Superior The Pictured Rocks — Le Grand Portail — Jackson Iron Moun- tain The ( 'lift Mine— Copper Tools— Ancient Mining Trenches— Great Extent of the Works Mines of Isle Royale- Their estimated Age— Ancient Mining implements Stone Mauls and Axes Ontonagon Mining Relics— Sites of Copper Manufactories Los1 Metallurgic Arts Brockville Copper implements Chemical Analyses Native Terra-Cottas -Ancient British Mining-Tools — The Pace of the Copper Mines Chippewa Traditions — Earliest Notices of the Copper Region Ontonagon Mass of Copper Ancient Native Traffic— Source of the Mound-Builders' Copper Arts of the Mississippi Valleys— Antiquity of the Copper Working Desertion of the Mines, 148 Contents. ix CHAPTER IX. ALLOYS. PAGE The Age of Bronze — An intermediate Copper Age — Native Silver and Copper — Tin and Copper Ores — The Cassiterides— Ancient Sources of Tin — Arts of Yucatan — Alloyed ('upper Axe-Blades — Bronze Silver-mining Tool — Peruvian Bronzes —Native Metallnrgic Processes .Metallic Treasures of the Incas — Traces of an Older Race — Peruvian Mining Operations The Toltecs and Mexicans — Bar- barian Excesses — Native Goldsmith's Work — Mexican Metallic Currency- Discovery of Alloying— Experimental Processes Ancient European Bronzes —Tests of Civilisation— Ancient American Bronzes — The Native Metallurgist, 178 CHAPTER X. THE MOUND -BUILDERS. Earth-pyramids— The Mississippi Valley- Its River Navigation— Monuments of the Mound-Builders Condition of the Race — Seats of Ancient Population -Different Classes of Works Ancient Strongholds — Fort Hill, Ohio — Fort Ancient [roquois Strongholds — Fortified Civic Sites — Sacred Enclosures— The Newark Works-^Geometrical Groups Proportionate Scale of Parts— Standard of Measurement— The Cincinnati Tablet— A Geometrical Instrument Traces u|' Extinct Arts, 202 CHAPTER XL SEPULCHRAL MOUNDS. Sources of Information— Hill Mounds Black Bird's Grave - His Memorial Mound — Scioto Valley Mound- Symbolical Rites Human Sacrifices— The Grave Creek Mound— Common Sepulchres Cremation— Scioto Mound Cranium- Sacred Festivals, 224 CHAPTER XII. SACRIFICIAL MOUNDS. Mound Altars — Altar Deposits— Quenching the Altar Fires— Mound City— Military Altar Mounds — Their Structure and Contents — Uncovered Altars — Signifi- cance of their Deposits— Analogous Indian Rites— Transitional Civilisation, . 236 CHAPTER XIII. SYMBOLIC MOUNDS. The Wisconsin Region— Animal Mounds— Absence of Enclosed Relics— Mound- Devices — Dade County Works— Indian Totems — The Northern Aztalan — Ancient Garden Beds — A Sacred Neutral Land — Ancient Mounds of Ohio— The Alligator Mound — The Great Serpent, Ohio — Intaglio Earthworks — Legi- timate Inferences, 246 CHAPTER XIV. N ATI V E A M ERICAN CIVILISATION. The Toltecs — The Aztecs — American Architecture — Egyptian Analogies — Aztalan The Valley of Mexico — Montezuma's Capital— Its Vanished Splendour— Mexican Calendar Stone— Mexican Deities -Toltec Civilisation — The Toltec Capital— The Tezcucan Palaces — Their Modern Vestiges Quetzalcoatl — The Pyramid of Cholula— The Sacred City— The Moqui Indians— The Holy City of Peru Worship of the Sun— Astronomical Knowledge — Agriculture — Woven IVxtures Science and Art — Native Institutions — Contrast of Mexico and Peru —Origin of the Mexicans— Mingling of Races, CHAPTER XV. ART CHRONICLLNGS. Imitative Skill — Archaic European Art — Conventional Ornamentation — Analogies in Rites and Customs — Altar Records — Common Source of Metals — The Race of the Mounds — Mound Sculprtires — Portrait Carvings — Pulszky's Icono- graphic Researches — Peculiar Features represented — Female Portraiture — Antique Iconographic Pottery — Peculiar Imitative Skill— Animals represented —Process of Carving — Extensive Geographical Relations — Knowledge of Tro- pical Fauna — The Toucan and Manatee — Wanderings of the Nations — Analo- gous European Sculptures — Peruvian Imitative Skill — Carved Stone Mortars — Nicotian Religious Rites — Institution of the Peace-pipe — The Red Pipe-stone Quarry — Mandan Traditions — Sioux Legend of the Peace-pipe — The Sacred Coca-plant — Knisteneaux Legend of the Deluge — Indications of former Migrations — Chimpseyan Art — Imitative Claystone Carvings — Tawatin Ivory Carving— The Medicine Pipe-stem — Indian Expiatory Sacrifices — Nicotian Rites of Divination, CHAPTER XVI. PRIMITIVE ARCHITECTURE. Earth -pyramids — Architectural Disclosures of Copan — Mysterious Ruins of Palenque— Sculptures of a Lost Race — Reappearance of the Ancient Type- Wide Extent of Ruins — Quiche Palaces of Utatlan — Traditions of a Living City— Character of the Architecture — Unique Style of Ornamentation — Native Character of the Civilisation — Contrast of Mexico and Peru — Buildings of the Incas — Cyclopean Masonry at Cuzco — Peruvian Roads and Aqueducts — Mega- lithic Era of Art, CHAPTER XVII. CERAMIC ART. Art Traces of Domestic Life Historical Value of Pottery — Modelling and Graving Tools Chinook Woven Vessels — Ancienl Peruvian Basket-Vessel — Pottery nt' the Gulf Ceramic Art ofthe Mound-Builders Peculiar Ornamentation— Use of the Potter's Wheel American Archaeology Mexican Antiquities— Art common to two Hemispheres The American Frctte— The Modeller's Art — Contents. x i PAGE Mexican Terra-eottas— Comic Clay Masks — Pottery of Central America— Cliiriqui Earthenware — Porcelain Musical Instruments — Peruvian Mental Characteristics— Pottery of Pern— Acoustic Vessels — Analogies to European Devices — Fictile Portraiture — Portrait Vases— Illustrations of Native Civilisa- tion— Grotesque and Humorous Designs — Contrast of Northern and Southern \ 1 1 , . . . . . . . . • . . . . t 0O0 CHAPTER XVIII. LETTERS. The Peruvian Quipu— Origin of Letters — The Indian Cadmus — Ideographic Writing — Picture- Writing of the Aztecs — Toltecan System— Signs of the Aztec Year — System of Notation — Palenque Hieroglyphics— Alphabetic Characters — Poly- synethic Writing — Abbreviated Characters — Anticipations of future Dis- coveries—Chinese Written Characters — The Dresden Codex — System of Quipu Records -Quipus and Wampum— Peruvian Symbolic Painting— Indian Wam- pum— The Wampanoag's Wampum-Belts— Iroquois Keeper of the Wampum — Wampum Mound-Records, .......... 369 CHAPTER XIX. ANTE-COLUMBIAN TRACES. The Landing of Columbus— The Lost Atlantis- Amerigo Vespucci— Colonization of Greenland— -Discovery of Vinland— Evidence of the Sagas — Traces of the Northmen Runic [inscriptions — The Kingiktorsoak Tablet— The Igalikko In- scription — The Ikigeit Sepulchral Slab— Characteristic Graphic Records — The Dighton Rock -The Phoenicians in America New England Antiquaries— Thor- ium's Runic Record— The Monhegan Inscription— The Grave Creek Stone— Its Alphabetic Characters— Assigned Date — Libyan Theories— Other American Inscriptions— Inscribed Axe-blades — Engraved Aztec Hatchet — Figured Stone Sphere — Perforated Stone Cylinders— Geometric Instrument — The Alabama Stone— The Manlius Stone— Early European Traces, 391 CHAPTER XX. THE AMERICAN TYPE. The Race of Guanahane — First Indians in Europe — A distinct Race of Men — Views of Dr. Morton— The American Cranial Type— Exceptional Varieties— Views of Asrassiz — Morton's barbarous Nations — Other Observers — Canadian Crania — Deviations from Normal Type— The Alleghans— The Scioto Mound Skull- General Formula— The Cherokee Head — The Grave Creek Mound Skull — Mound and Cave Crania — The Peruvians and Mexicans — Peruvian Sepulture — A Peruvian Tomb — Female Mummy — The Mano Colorado— Sepulchral Relics — Infant Mummies — Peruvian Head-Forms- -Relative Cerebral Capacity — Mor- ton's Final Views — Dolichocephalic Peruvian Head — Artificial Compression — Peruvian Infant Skulls— The Normal Head — The Abnormal Head- Peruvian Dolichocephalic Crania — Embalmed Head — Origin of Embalming — Sources of Evidence — Geographical Phases of Civilisation — Mexican Dolichocephalic Crania— Mexican Brachyeephalic Crania— The Toltecan Family— Divergent Head-Forms— Theoretical Type— Iroquois and Algonquins — The Algonquin Stock [Instable Conditions of Life— Canadian Crania — Significance of Occi- pital Forms— Western Canada -The Huron Country— The Iroquois Stock— Algonquin Crania— Natick Indians — New England Crania— Algonquin- Lenape* Crania Diversities of Physical Character- The Esquimaux Head — Elements of Comparison — Esquimaux Crania — The Tschuktchi Head — Tsehuktchi Crania — The Esquimaux Area — Mean Cranial Measurements — Results of Compara- tive Analyses — American Ethnic Unity — Opinions of Observers— The Mongo- lian Ethnic Centre, CHAPTER XXL ARTIFICIAL CRANIAL DISTORTION. Prevalent Mode of Sepulture — Widely-diffused Sepulchral Rites— Indian Ossuaries — Scaffolding the Dead — The Ancient Macrocephali — Cranial Deformation — ■ Macrocephali of the Crimea— Compressed Peruvian Crania— Hun and Avar Skulls— The Huns of Attila — Cave Skull from Jerusalem — Asiatic Skull- Flattening — French Skull-Compression — The Hochelaga Skull — Posthumous Malformation — Common Abnormal Forms — Undesigned Modifications — Effects of the Cradle-Board— Kanaka Flatheads — Mongol Custom — Influence of Syno- stosis — Ossification of Sutures — The Flathead Tribes — Process of Deformation — Intellectual Influences— Peruvian Custom, CHAPTER XXII. THE RED BLOOD OF THE WEST. The Indigenous Race — Historical Records perishing — Extinction of Nations — American Isolation — The American Mongol — The Blessing of Shem — The Canaanites— The Mediterranean Shores— Extirpation of the Canaanites — Dis- placement and Extinction— Absorption— Red and White Blood — American Half-Castes— First Stage of Colonization — Disproportion of Sexes — Tribe of Half breeds— White and Indian Intermarriage— Red River Half breeds— The Half breed Hunters — Aptitude for Self-Government — The Euro-american — Indian Exterminations — The Canadian Nations — The Neutral Nation — The Hurons and Eries — The Mohawks — Destiny of the Iroquois— The Cherokees — Slaveholding Indians— Indian Colour-Indians of Lower Canada— Iroquois of St. Regis — The Abenakis — The Hurons of Lorette — The Micmacs — The Mon- tagnars — The Unsettled Tribes — Indians of Upper Canada — Wyandots of Anderdon — Bay of Quinte Mohawks— Their Mixed Blood — Sources of Hybridity The Oneidas — The Semi-civilized Indians— Relations of the White and Red Races — Blending of Ethnical Elements, CHAPTER XXIII. INTRUSIVE RACES. Ethnological Experiments— Traditions of the Aztecs— Processes of Migration Rate of Progress African Endurance — Coloured Population of Canada- Voluntary [solation The Island of Hayti — Indians of Hispaniola — The Haytian Republic— Inherited Ethnical Progress Haytian Exports — Popula- Contents. xiii PAGE tion of Hayti — Affinities and Repulsions— Man in a State of Nature — A Modi- fier of Creation — Condition of the Coloured Race — Mixed White and Negro Blood — Phenomena of Hybridity — Amalgamation — Development of New Varieties — The White Races in America — Theory of Assimilation — Permanency of Types — The New Englander — The Englishman — Pigeon English— Patois— The Oregon Jargon — Accent and Emphasis— British Columbia— The New World's Future, 559 CHAPTER XXIV. MIGRATIONS. American Ethnology — American Monsyllabic Roots — Synthetic Element of Lan- guage — Analogies to Asiatic Languages— Sources of Population — Peculiar Gender in Language [ndications of Migrations— Samoyed Affinities — Currents of Migration— Esquimaux Traditions — The Finnic Hypothesis — Traces of Mexican Influence— Purity of Race — Intellectual Interchanges — Guesses at Truth, 591 CHAPTER XXV. THE AGE OF REASON. Received Chronology — The American and Asiatic Man— Darwin's Speculations- Multiplication of Species — Language — Development of Languages— Domestica- tion (it Animals— Origin of Civilisation Agriculture — Letters and Numerals — Appreciation of Number — Idea of Abstracl Numbers — Solar Time — Astronomy — Primitive Calendars— Difficulties Unsolved— Value of Time, . . . 606 • ILLUSTRATIONS. FIG. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. IS. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. Caw-we-litcks, a Flathead Woman and Child, — Frontispiece. Chimpseyan Chief, to face page xiv. British Bone Implements, Clyde Stone Axe, Clalam Stone Adze, Grangemouth Skull, South Pacific Stone Implements, Carib Shell-knives, Honduras Flint Implements, Honduras Implement, . Tennessee Idol and Shrine, Aimers' ShovelsTT" Miners' Stone Mauls, Ontonagon Copper Implement, Brockville Copper Implements, Brockville Copper Spear, Terra-cotta Mask, Newark Earthworks, Cincinnati Tablet, Mask, Mexican Calendar Stone, Peruvian Web, Portrait Mound-Pipe, Portrait Mound-Pipe, profile, Portrait Mound-Pipe, Female, Manatee Pipe-sculpture, Toucan Pipe-sculpture, Peruvian Black Ware, Toucan, Peruvian Stone Mortars, Chippewa Pipe, Babeen Pipe, Babeen Pipe-sculpture, Tawatin Ivory Carving, Tawatin Ivory Carving, Whale, Mexican Terra-cotta, Mexican Frette, Black Pottery, Berue, . Mexican Clay Mask, PAGE 38 104 105 107 124 136 139 140 142 160 161 163 165 166 167 216 221 268 282 297 298 299 304 306 309 310 319 320 320 321 321 351 352 353 355 XVI Illustrations. FIG. 36, 37. Comic Mexican Masks, 3S. Ticul Hieroglyphic Vase, ■ 39. Chiriqui Musical Instrument, 40. Peruvian Pottery, •41. Peruvian Drinking- vessel, 42. Portrait Vases, 43. Palenque Hieroglyphics, 44. Hieroglyphic Writing, 45. Kingiktorsoak Runic Inscription, 4G. Igalikko Runic Inscription, 47. Monkegan Inscription, . 4S. Grave Creek Mound Inscription, 49. Pemberton Inscribed Stone Axe, 50. Pemberton Axe Inscription, . 51. Engraved Aztec Hatcket, 52. Graven Stone Sphere, 53. Scioto Mound Skull, profile, 54. Scioto Mound Skull, vertical, 55. Moro Pock Inscription, 56. Moro Monogram, 57. Peruvian Brachy cephalic Skull, 58. Peruvian Depressed Skull, 59. Peruvian Dolichocephalic Skull, ! 60. Peruvian Child's Skull, Profile, Normal, 61. Peruvian Child's Skull, Normal, 62. Peruvian Child's Skull, Profile, Abnormal, 63. Peruvian Child's Skull, Abnormal, 64. Terra-cotta, Bay of Honduras, 65. Chippewa Grave, Saskatchewan, 66. Canoe Bier, Columbia River, 67. Hochelaga Skull, 68. Newatee Chief, 69. Flathead Child, . PAGE 356 357 359 361 364 365 378 383 399 400 407 409 412 413 414 416 433 434 442 442 445 446 449 451 451 452 452 456 488 490 500 508 510 PREFACE. After long investigation of the archaeology and ethnology of Britain, and to some extent of Europe at large, it was the Author's fortune to be transferred to a young colony of the New World, from whence, during the last twelve years, he lias looked on many novel phases of life, strikingly contrasting with all that had previously excited his interest and attracted his study. During the same period many zealous observers have been striving to recover the traces of Man in that strange era of Europe's un- chronicled centuries, which long preceded all beginnings of history. But while their researches are being rewarded by discoveries of the profoundest interest, every fresh disclosure confirms the impression produced on the Author's mind in reference to the aboriginal tribes, and the native arts and customs of the American continent : that he had previously realized much in relation to a long obli- terated past of Britain's and Europe's infancy, which he has there found reproduced as a living reality. The Western Hemisphere is only now beginning to be his- torical ; yet it proves to have been the theatre of human life, and of many revolutions of nations, through centuries reaching back towards an antiquity as vague as that which lies behind Europe's historic dawn ; and the study alike of the prehistoric and the un - historic races of America is replete with promise of novel trull is in reference to primeval man. The argument constructed on this basis, relative to the origin of civilisation and the distinctive attri- butes natural to man, is now reproduced after extended oppor- h xviii Preface. tunities of study and careful revision. The subject treated of is undergoing such rapid development in its European phases, that the interval between this and the former edition — brief though it lias been, — has been one of marked progress. The opportunities of a new edition, which enable the Author to harmonize his own later observations with recent disclosures of European science, are all the more acceptable from the fact that the former one not only passed through the press without revision ; but, owing to delays inevitable from the Author's distance from printer and publisher, its appearance was preceded by publications and dis- coveries specially inviting notice from his point of view. Some errors beyond the reach of errata also resulted from the want of proof-sheets. But of those it is only necessary to notice here the woodcut, Fig. 58, p. 446, which was introduced with the title of one now correctly given on p. 449, as an example of the normal Peruvian dolichocephalic skull. The changes, as a whole, include both reconstruction and condensation, along with considerable additions alike in illustration and argument, Thus revised, these researches are now commended anew to readers interested in this branch of inquiry. The point of view is a novel one ; the Author's opportunities for observation and study have been in many respects favourable ; and his conclusions may perhaps possess some special claims to attention, from the fact that they embody a survey not only of America's extinct nations, but also of its strangely intermingled living races : indigenous and intrusive ; at a time when one important cycle in the peculiar re- lations of two, at least, of the latter, seems hastening to its close. r.\[VERSiTY College, Toronto, 29th April 1865. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. The object aimed at in the following work is to view Man, as far as possible, unaffected by those modifying influences which accompany the development of nations and the maturity of a true historic period, in order thereby to ascertain the sources from whence such development and maturity proceed. These researches into the origin of civilisation have accordingly been pursued under the belief which influenced the author in previous inquiries, that the investigations of the arclneologist, when carried on in an en- lightened spirit, are replete with interest in relation to some of the most important problems of modern science. To confine our studies to mere antiquities is like reading by candle-light at noon-day ; but to reject the aid of archaeology in the progress of science, and especially of ethnological science, is to extinguish the lamp of the student when most dependent on its borrowed rays. This is impressed on the mind with renewed force by the novel phases in which the problems affecting man's being are reproduced. We are no longer permitted to discuss merely the diversities of existing races. It seems as if the whole comprehensive question of man's origin must be reopened, and determined afresh in its relations to modern science. To the naturalist who turns from the study of inferior orders of life, man civilized, or even brought into close contact with civilisation, seems an essentially artificial product of many extraneous influences : a being " from nature rising slow to art." Nor has the verdict of the philosopher inva- riably conflicted with the fancy of the poet, that man devoid of all civilisation is in a state of nature, and the true type of man primeval. Against such an idea, however, all the higher attributes of his nature seem to cry out. Tested by every moral standard he xx Preface to the First Edition. is found to have deteriorated far below his normal capacities, and " the noble savage " proves at last but a poet's dream. But have we then no alternative between man plus the arti- ficialities of civilisation, and man minus the influential operation of moral laws which have their efficient equivalents in the instincts of all other animals; or can we not realize even in theory an intermediate normal condition? Such questions are replete with interest, whatever be the value of the answers rendered here to some of the difficulties they suggest. The ethnologist does indeed study man from the same point of view as the mere naturalist ; but to do so to any good purpose, this essential difference between man and all other animals must be kept in view : that in him a being- appears for the first time among the multitude of animated organi- zations, subject to natural laws as they are, but including within himself the power of interpreting and controlling the operation of those laws; of accumulating and transmitting experience; and, above all, of looking in upon the workings of his own mind, and recog- nising as part of his nature a system of moral government which he may obey or resist, though not with impunity. Our aim, therefore, is to isolate him from extraneous influences, and look, if possible, on man per sc ; or at least where he can be shown to have attained maturity, exposed only to such influences as are the offspring of his own progress. In so far as this is possible we may hope to recover some means of testing man's innate capacity, and of determining by comparison what is common to the race. Where, then, is man to be thus found ? In the days of Hero- dotus, Transalpine Europe was a greater mystery to the nations on the shores of the Mediterranean than Central Africa is to us. To the Eomans of four centuries later, Britain was still almost another world ; and the great northern hive from whence the spoilers of the dismembered empire of the Caesars were speedily to emerge, was so 01 1 1 inly unknown to them, that, as Dr. Arnold has remarked in his inaugural lecture : "The Roman colonies along the banks of the Rhine and the Danube looked out on the country beyond those rivers as we look up at the stars, and actually see with our eyes a world of which we know nothing." Nevertheless, the civilisation Preface to the First Edition. xxi of the historic centres of the ancient world around the Mediter- ranean was not without some influence on the germs of modern nations, then nursing the hardihood of a vigorous infancy beyond the Danube and the Baltic. The shores of the Atlantic and Ger- man oceans, and the islands of the British seas, had long before yielded tribute to the Phoenician mariner ; and as the archaeologist and the ethnologist pursue their researches, and restore to light memorials of Europe's infancy and early youth, they are more frequently startled with affinities to the ancient historic nations, in language, arts, and rites, than by the recovery of evidence of a wholly unfamiliar past. But it is altogether different with the New World which Columbus revealed. Superficial students of its monuments have indeed misinterpreted intellectual characteristics pertaining to the infantile instincts common to human thought, into fancied analogies with the arts of Egypt ; and more than one ingenious philosopher has traced out affinities witli the mythology and astronomical science of the ancient East : but the western continent still stands a world apart, with a peculiar people, and with languages, arts, and customs essentially its own. To whatever source the American nations may be traced, they had remained shut in for unnumbered centuries by ocean barriers from all the influences of the historic hemisphere. Yet there the first European explorers found man so little dissimilar to all with which they were already familiar, that the name of Indian originated in the belief, retained by the great cosmographer to the last, that the American continent was no new world, but only the eastern confines of Asia. Such, then, is a continent where man may be studied under circumstances which seem to furnish the best guarantee of his in- dependent development. No reflex light of Grecian or Eoman civilisation has guided him on his way. The great sources of religious and moral suasion which have given form to mediaeval and modern Europe, and so largely influenced the polity ami culture of Asia, and even of Africa, were effectually excluded ; and however prolonged the period of occupation of the western hemi sphere by its own American nations may have been, man is still xxii Preface to the First Edition. seen there in a condition which seems to reproduce some of the most familiar phases ascribed to the infancy of the unhistoric world. The records of its childhood are not obscured, as in Europe, by later chroniclings ; where, in every attempt to decipher the traces of an earlier history, we have to spell out a nearly obliterated palimpsest. Amid the simplicity of its palaeography, the aphorism, by which alone the Roman could claim to be among the world's ancient races, acquires a new force : " antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi." The revolutions of modern history, and the frequent intercourse of the nineteenth century, have indeed conjoined the western continent to ancient Christendom ; and attracted atten- tion to it most frequently as an arena whereon old political systems and religious theories are reproduced and tested anew by nations of European descent. But in the sixteenth century the absolute isolation of this "world apart" was strongly felt. Sir Thomas More was already in the household of Cardinal Morton, to which lie was admitted in 1495, when the first rumours of the discovery of America reached his ears ; and within twenty years thereafter he produced his platonic commonwealth of Utopia, an imaginary island visited by Raphael Hythloday, a companion, as he feigned, of Amerigo Vespucci, from whom the wondrous narrative was derived during a visit to Antwerp. Another century had nearly completed its cycle since the eye of Columbus beheld the long- expected land, when, in 1590, Edmund Spenser crossed the Irish Channel, bearing with him the first three books of the " Faerie Queen" in the introduction to the second of which he thus defends the verisimilitude of the fairy land in which the scenes of his " famous antique history" are laid. ' ' Wlio ever heard of th' Indian Pern ? Or who in venturous vessel measured The Amazon huge river, now found true? Or frnitf idlest Virginia, who did ever view ? Yet all these were, when no man did them know, Yet have from wisest ages hidden been ; And later times things more unknown shall show ; Why then should Avitless man so much misween That nothing is hut that which he lml.li seen ? Preface to the First Edition. xxiii What if within the moon's fair shiuing sphere ; What if in every other star unseen, Of other worlds he happily should hear ? He wonder woidd much more ; yet such to some appear." It was by the advice of Raleigh, his " shepherd of the ocean," that the poet visited England with the unpublished poem ; yei it is obvious that to his fancy the western hemisphere was still almost as much a world apart, as if the discoverers of Virginia had sailed up the blue vault of heaven, and brought back the story of another planet on which it had been their fortune to alight. Here then appears to be a point from whence it seems possible to obtain, as it were, a parallax of man, already viewed in Europe's prehistoric dawn ; to look on him as on the stars seen from Teneriffe above the clouds ; and to test anew what essentially pertains to him, and what has been artificially, or even accidentally superadded by external circumstances. Such, at least, has been the author's aim in turning to account the opportunities afforded by a prolonged residence on some of the newest sites of the New World ; and to the use made of these must be mainly due whatever value pertains to the glimpses of a remote past which the following pages attempt to disclose. But though thus far dependent on American researches, they refer no less to the origin of man and the beginnings of his history in the Old World than hi the New. The author had already familiarized himself with the unwritten chronicles of Europe's infancy and youth, when unexpectedly transplanted among the colonists of another continent, and within reach of aboriginal tribes of the American forests. " The eye sees what it brings the power to see;" and in these he discovered objects of interest on many grounds, but chiefly from the fact that he soon perceived he had already realized much in relation to a long obliterated past of Britain's and Europe's infancy, which was here reproduced in living- reality before his eyes. In 1853, he received the appointment to the chair of History and English Literature in University College, Toronto, and before the year drew to a close had commenced obser- vations, the results of which are embodied in these volumes. What- ever may be their worth, they set forth the fruits of patient and XXIV Preface to the First Edition. conscientious investigation, and concentrate into brief space deduc- tions arrived at after much labour and research. His vacations have afforded opportunities for witnessing the Red Man as he is still to be seen beyond the outskirts of modern civilisation, and for exploring the buried memorials of extinct nations on older sites. He has also twice visited Philadelphia, and minutely studied the collections formed by the author of the Crania Americana, with the additions made to that valuable ethnological department of the Academy of Natural Sciences. Eepeated references in the fol- lowing pages indicate other American collections in Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Albany, etc., as well as those of Canada, which have also furnished useful materials. In carrying out his researches, the author has been placed under many obligations to scientific friends. To Dr. Henry, the learned Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington ; Dr. J. Aitken Meigs, the Librarian of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia ; Dr. J. C. White, the Secretary of the Boston Natural History Society ; Mr. Thomas Fenwick and Dr. E. H. Davis of the American Ethnological Society ; and the Hon. George Folsom of the Historical Society of New York : he is specially indebted for the liberality with which Museums and Libraries have been placed at his command. On two different visits to Philadelphia to examine the Collection of Crania formed by Dr. Morton, the keys of the cases were freely intrusted to him ; and some of the many liberal services rendered in furtherance of his investigations by their experienced curator, Dr. J. Aitken Meigs, are acknowledged in the following pages. With equally unrestricted freedom, the collections of the Historical Society of New York, and the cabinets of the Natural History Society of Boston, as well as the private collections of Dr. J. Mason Warren, Mr. J. H. Blake, Dr. E. H. Davis, and others referred to, were thrown open to him ; and repeated exjoe- rience confirms him in the belief, that in no country in the world are public and private libraries and collections made available to the scientific inquirer with the same unrestricted freedom as in the United States. To J. H. Blake, Esq. of Boston, the author is specially indebted for the liberality with which he has placed at his disposal Preface to the First Edition. XXV notes of travel in Peru ; drawings of objects observed there ; and the valuable collection of mummies, crania, and Peruvian antiquities brought home by him, and repeatedly referred to in the following pages. To Dr. E. H. Davis, one of the authors of the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Volley, he is under great obligations, not only for access to the collections from which the illustrations of that work were derived, but for casts and photographs of special objects calculated to aid him in his researches. Among his Cana- dian friends, he owes special thanks to his colleague, Professor Croft, for carefully executed analyses of Peruvian bronzes ; to Dr. Bovell and Dr. Hodder, for free use of their collections of Indian crania ; to Mr. Paul Kane, the author of Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, for sketches made during his travels, as well as for information derived from recollections of the incidents and observations of a highly- privileged sojourner among the Indian tribes of the Hudson's Bay territory ; and to the Hon. G. W. Allan, whose ethnological collections now include the numerous objects obtained by Mr. Kane during Ids wanderings. Older friends at home, and especially Mr. T. B. Johnston, the Treasurer of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and Mr. Iiobert Cox, W.S., of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, have largely aided in renewed references to the familiar collections of those Societies. To the sympathy manifested in the author's researches by his Excellency Sir Edmund W. Head, Bart,, while Governor- General of the Province, he is indebted for instructions forwarded to the various officers and superintendents of the Indian Department, whereby he has been able to obtain valuable statistics illustrating questions which affect the present condition and future prospects of the Indians of British North America, and which are discussed here in their relations to the main subject of investigation. It only remains to be added, that while the facilities for research into the origin of civilisation and the condition of primitive races, afforded by a residence in the New World, are great, they are accompanied by one important drawback, in the want of adequate libraries or books of reference, inevitable in a young colony. As, moreover, the author has been prevented, by the impediments XXVI Preface to the First Edition. which the Atlantic interposes between him and his publishers, from revising the proof-sheets of the following pages, he must crave the intelligent forbearance of the critic should any notable blunders escape the eye of the press-reader ; and if, as may not improbably prove to be the case, some of his observations have been anticipated or disproved in recent publications, or even by the mere lapse of time : it may be added that the MS. was in the hands of the publishers in January 1861, arid the subsequent delay in the publication of (liese volumes has originated in causes lying beyond his control. University College, Toronto, 12th March 1862. PREHISTORIC MAN. PREHISTORIC MAN. CHAPTEE I. INTRODUCTION. THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW -AMERICAN PHASES OF LIFE— THE TERM PREHISTORIC — INFLUENCE OF MIGRATIONS— WHAT IS CIVILISATION ? — DOMESTICATION— DE- VELOPMENT OF HUMAN PROGRESS— INDIAN PHILOSOPHY — ABORIGINES— TUB EAST : THE TARTAR ; THE ARAB— LANGUAGES OF AMERICA — WANDERINGS OF THE NATIONS — FOSSIL MAN— THE NEW WORLD A MYSTERY. The discovery of America at the close of the fifteenth century wrought a marvellous change in the ideas and opinions of man- kind relative to the planet they occupy, and prepared the way for many subsequent revolutions in thought, as well as in action. The world as the arena of human history was thenceforth divided into the Old and the New. In the one hemisphere tradition and myth reach backward towards a dawn of undefined antiquity ; in the other, history has a definite and altogether modern beginning, and man appears there still in the initial stages of savage life. Never- theless some of the oldest problems in relation to him find their solution in that New World ; and, amid the novel inquiries which now perplex the student of science as to man's origin and antiquity, his specific characteristics, and true place in nature, answers of un- expected value are rendered from the same source. The study of man's condition and progress in Europe's prehistoric centuries by means of his remains and works of art, reveals there his beginning as a savage hunter, armed solely with weapons of flint and bone, frequenting the lake and river margins of a conti- nent clothed in primeval forests and haunted by enormous beasts of prey. Displaced by intrusive migrations, this rude pioneer dis- appears, and his traces are overlaid and erased by the improved arts of his supplanters. The infancy of the historic nations begins. > 2 American Phases of Life. [chap. Metallurgy, architecture, science, and letters are evoked, effacing the faint records of Europe's nomadic pioneers ; and the first traces of the intruders acquire so primitive an aspect, that the existence < tf older European nations than the Celtre seemed till recently too extravagant an idea for serious consideration. After devoting considerable study and research to the recovery of the traces of early arts in Britain, and realizing from many primitive disclosures some clear conception of the barbarian of Europe's pre- historic dawn, it has been my fortune to become a settler on the American continent, in the midst of scenes where the primeval forests and their savage occupants are in process of displacement by the arts and races of civilized Europe. Peculiarly favourable opportunities have helped to facilitate the study of this phase of the New World, thus seen in one of its great transitional eras : with its native tribes, and its European and African colonists in various stages of mutation, consequent on migration, intermixture, or collision. In observing the novel aspects of life resulting from such a condition of things, I have been impressed with the con viction that many of the ethnological phenomena of Europe's pre- historic centuries are there reproduced on the grandest scale. Man is once more seen subject to influences similar to those which have affected him in all great migrations and collisions of diverse races. There also is the savage in direct contact with civilisation, and exposed to the same causes by means of which the wild fauna disappear. Some difficult problems of ethnology have been simpli- fied to my own mind by what I have thus seen ; and opinions relative to Europe's prehistoric races, based purely on inference or induction, have received striking confirmation. Encouraged by this experience, I venture to set forth the results of a general inquiry into the essential characteristics of man, based chiefly on a comparison of the theoretical ethnology of primitive Europe, with such d isclosures of the New World. The tendency of modern science is to give prominence to many unheeded analogies between man and the lower animals ; but the further this line of inquiry is pursued, it tends only the more strikingly to illustrate the radical nature of those differences which separate him from them, not in degree as the higher animal, but in kind. The most ancient definition of man as a creature made in the image of God, distinguishes him by no identity of physical structure with any superhuman prototype, but by intellectual and moral attribute $. Thus endowed, man reasons on his relations to i < i.] The term Prehistoric. 3 the external universe ; and, alone of all animated beings, is capable of interpreting and controlling the operations of those natural laws to which he and they are alike subject. This twofold nature may be studied with diverse aims, and from very different points of view ; but for the purposes of the ethnologist, its characteristics are seen in their most suggestive aspects, in that contrast between savage and civilized man which forces itself on the notice of the European settler, alike in America and Australia. AVe are at no loss to recognise the wild animal as in a state of nature ; and its domesticated varieties as artificial products wdiich civilisation has educed from the wild stock for man's use. When, however, it is assumed that the savage is the type of man in his natural state, and that civilisation has been entirely superinduced on that as an artificial thing, the conclusions involve a pctitio 'princi'pii. But, in so far as we can look upon him before he consciously reasons out a past or a future for himself, we are in possession of some data whereby to test this question of his pri- meval characteristics. Man may be assumed to be prehistoric wherever his chroniclings of himself are undesigned, and his history is wholly recoverable by induction. The term is in no sense equivalent to preadamic ; nor has it, strictly speaking, any chronological significance ; but, in its relative application, corresponds to other archa3ological, in contra- distinction to geological periods. There are modern as well as ancient prehistoric races ; and both are available for solving the problem of man's true natural condition. But also the relation of man to external nature as the occupant of specific geographical areas, and subject to certain influences of climate, food, material appliances and conditions of life, involves conclusions of grow- ing importance, in view of many novel questions to which the enlarged inquiry as to his true place in nature has given rise. If races of men are indigenous to specific areas, and controlled by the same laws which seem to regulate the geographical distribution of the animal kinodom : the results of their infringement of such laws have been subjected to the most comprehensive tests since the discovery of America. The horse transported to the New World, roams in magnificent herds over the boundless pampas ; and the hog, restored to a state of nature, has exchanged the degradation of the stye for the fierce courage of the wild boar. There also the indigenous man of the prairie and the forest can still be studied unaffected by native or intruded civilisation ; while 4 Influence of Migrations. [chap. the most civilized races of Europe have been brought into contact with the African savage ; and both have been subjected to all the novel influences in which the western continent contrasts no less strikingly with the temperate than with the tropical regions of the eastern hemisphere. The resultant changes have been great, and the scale on which they have been wrought out is so ample as to stamp whatever conclusions can be legitimately deduced from them with the highest interest and value. The consequences following from changes of area and climate play a remarkable part in the history of man, and have no analogies in the migrations of the lower animals. The Frank, the Anglo- Saxon, and the Norman ; the Hungarian, the Saracen, and the Turk : are all to a great extent products of the transplantation of seemingly indigenous races to more favouring soils ; but the change to all of them was less than that to which the colonists of the New World have been subjected. There the old process was reversed ; and the offspring of Europe's highest civilisation, abruptly transferred to the virgin forest and steppes of the American wilderness, was left amid the widening inheritance of new clearings to develop what- ever tendencies lay dormant in the artificial European man. Here then are materials full of promise for the ethnical student : — the Eed-Man, indigenous, seemingly aboriginal, and still in what it is customary to call a state of nature ; the Negro, with many African attributes uneffaced, systematically precluded from the free reception of the civilisation with which he has been brought in contact, but subjected nevertheless to novel influences of climate, food, and all external appliances ; the White- Man also undergoing the transforming effects of climate, amid novel social and political institutions ; and all three extreme types of variety or race, testing, on a sufficiently comprehensive scale, their capacity for a fertile intermingling of blood. The period, moreover, is in some respects favourable for summing up results : as changes are at work which mark the close of a cycle in the novel conditions to which one at least of the intruded races has been subjected for upwards of three centuries. In Europe we study man only as he has been moulded by a thou-; i nd external circumstances. The arts, born at the very dawn of history, give form to its modern social life. The Divine law given forth from Sinai, and the faith and morals nurtured among the hills of Judah ; the intellect of Greece, the jurisprudence and military prowess of Rome, and 1 lie civil and ecclesiastical institu- i.] What is Civilisation f 5 tions of mediaeval Christendom, have all helped to make of us what we are ; till in the European of the nineteenth century it becomes a curious question how much pertains to the man, and how much to that civilisation, of which he is in part the author and in part the offspring ? In vain we strive to detach the European man from elements foreign to him, that we may look on him as he is or was by nature ; for he only exists for us as the product of all those multifarious elements which have accumulated along the track by which the generations of nineteen centuries have swept " into the younger day." The very serf of the Russian steppes cannot grow freely, as his nomade brother of Asia does ; but must don the un- familiar fashions of the Frank, as strange to him as the armour of Saul upon the youthful Ephrathite. Is, then, civilisation natural to man ; or is it only a habit or condition artificially superinduced, and as foreign to his nature as the bit and bridle to the horse, or the truck- cart to the wild ass of the desert ? Such questions involve the whole ethnological pro- blem reopened by Lamarck, Agassiz, Darwin, Huxley, and others. Whence is man ? What are his antecedents ? What — within the compass of this terrestrial arena, with which alone science deals, — are his future destinies ? Does civilisation move only through limited cycles, repeating in new centuries the work of the old; attaining, under some varying phase, to the same maximum of our imperfect humanity, and then, like the wandering comet, returning from the splendour of its perihelion back to night ? Perhaps a question preliminary even to this is : What is civi- lisation? He who has seen the Euromerican 1 and the Indian side by side, — the one adapting to his novel circumstances the accumu- lated knowledge, the arts, laws, and social economy inherited alike from ancient and modern historical nations ; the other, after cen turies of contact with European progress, still haunting the uncleared forest, preying, like its wild fauna, on the spoils of the chase, dwelling in his buffalo-skin tent or birch-bark wigwam, with little more indication of maturing his own rude arts, or replacing them by those of the European intruder, than the prairie dog or the beaver : — he who has seen this can be at no loss as to the difference between civilized and uncivilized man. But is he therefore at liberty to conclude that the element which so markedly distinguishes 1 The term Euromerican is used for the American -born offspring of parents of European origin or descent ; and Euro-american for those of mixed European and Indian blood. G Domestication. [chap. the White from the Red-man of the New World is an attribute pecu- liar to the former, rather than the development of innate powers common to man, and in the possession of which he differs from all other animals ? Domestication is, for the lower animals, the sub- jection of them to artificial changes foreign to their nature, which they could not originate for themselves, and which they neither mature nor perpetuate : but, on the contrary, hasten to throw off so soon as left to their own uncontrolled action. Civilisation is for man development. It is self- originated ; it matures all the facul- ties natural to him, and is progressive and seemingly ineradicable. Of both postulates the social life alike of the forests and the clearings of the New World seem to offer proofs ; and to other profoundly interesting questions involved in an inquiry into the origin of civilisation and man's relations to it, answers may also be recovered from the same source. There the latest developments of human progress are abruptly brought face to face with the most unprogressive phases of savage nature ; and many old problems are being solved anew under entirely novel conditions. The race by which this is chiefly effected had been isolated in an especial man- ner during many centuries of preparatory training ; and illustrates in some of the sources of its progress, the impediments to the civilisation of savage races brought in contact with others "at so dissimilar a stage. The very elements of Britain's greatness seem to lie in her slow maturity ; in her collision with successive races only a little in advance of herself ; in her natural transition through all the stages from infancy to vigorous manhood. But that done, the Old Englander becomes the New Englander; starts from his matured vantage-ground on a fresh career, and displaces the Ameri- can Red-man by the American White-man, the free product of the great past and the great present. It was with a strange and fascinating pleasure that, after hav- ing striven to resuscitate allophylian races of Britain's prehistoric ages, by means of their buried arts, 1 I found myself face to face with the aborigines of the New World. Much that had become familiar to me in fancy, as pertaining to a long obliterated past, was here the living present ; while around me, in every stage of transition, lay the phases of savage and civilized life : the nature of the forest, the art of the city; the God-made country, the man- made town : each in the very process of change, extinction, and re creation. Here, then, was a new field for the study of civilisa- 1 Vide Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, J.J Indian Philosophy. 7 tion and all that it involves. The wild beast is in its native state, and hastens, when relieved from artificial constraints, to return to the forest wilds as to its natural condition. The forest- man — is he too in his natural condition? for Europe's sons have, for upwards of three centuries, been levelling his forests, and planting their civilisation on the clearings, yet he accepts not their civi- lisation as a higher goal for him. He, at least, thinks that the white man and the red are of diverse natures ; that the city and the cultivated field are for the one, but the wild forest and the free chase for the other. He does not envy the white man, he only wonders at him as a being of a different nature. Broken-Arm, the Chief of the Crees, receiving the traveller Paul Kane and his party into his lodge, at their encampment in the valley of the Saskatchewan Eiver, told him the following tra- dition of the tribe : — One of the Crees became a Christian. He Avas a very good man, and did what was right ; and when he died he was taken up to the white man's heaven, where everything was very beautiful. All were happy amongst their friends and relatives who had gone before them ; but the Indian could not share their joy, for everything was strange to him. He met none of the spirits of his ancestors to welcome him : no hunting nor fishing, nor any of those occupations in which he was wont to delight. Then the Great Manitou called him, and asked him why he was joyless in His beautiful heaven ; and the Indian replied that he sighed for the company of the spirits of his own people. So the Great Manitou told him that he could not send him to the Indian heaven, as he had, whilst on earth, chosen this one ; but as he had been a very good man, he would send him back to earth again. The Indian does not believe in the superiority of the white man. The difference between them is only such as he dis- cerns between the social, constructive beaver, and the solitary, cunning fox. The Great Spirit implanted in each his peculiar faculties ; why should the one covet the nature of the other ? Hence one great element of the unhopeful Indian future. The progress of the white man offers even less incentive to his ambition than the cunning of the fox, or the architectural instincts of the beaver. He, at least, does not overlook, in his sylvan philosophy, that feature in the physical history of mankind, which Agassiz complains of having been neglected : viz., the natural relations between different types of man, and the animals and plants in- habiting the same regions. The American philosopher has wrought 8 Aborigines. [chap. out, as his scientific creed, the homely faith of the forest Indian. " The coincidence between the circumscription of the races of man, and the natural limits of different zoological provinces, charac- terized by peculiar distinct species of animals, is one of the most important and unexpected features in the natural history of man- kind, which the study of the geographical distribution of all the organized beings now existing upon earth has disclosed to us. It is a fact which cannot fail to throw light, at some future time, upon the very origin of the differences existing among men ; since it shows that man's physical nature is modified by the same laws as that of animals, and that any general results obtained from the animal kingdom regarding the organic differences of its various types, must also apply to man." 1 We call the western hemisphere the New World, and fancy that, in its Indians, whom we designate Aborigines, we are looking on a primitive condition of life. But the Indian of the American wilds is no more primeval than his forests. Beneath the roots of their oldest giants lie chronicled memorials of an older native civilisation ; and the American ethnologist and naturalist, while satisfying themselves of the persistency of a common type, and of specific ethnical characteristics prevailing throughout all the widely scattered tribes of the American continent : 2 have been studying only the temporary supplanters of nations strange to us as the extinct life of older geological periods. In that old East, to which science still turns when searching for the cradle-land of the human family, vast areas exist, the characteristics of which seem to stamp with unprogressive endur- ance the inheritors of the soil. We owe to the Asiatic Eesearches of Humboldt a clear understanding of the physical elements which have so materially influenced the history of that continent. Along the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Levant, and stretching from the Persian Gulf into the fertile valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, are still found seats of civilisation coexistent with the earliest dawn of man's history. But beyond these lies the elevated i able-land, of Central Asia, stretching away northward, and pouring its waters into inland seas, or directing their uncivilizing courses into the frozen waters of the Arctic circle. Abrupt mountain - chains subdivide this elevated plateau into regions which have been for unrecorded ages the hives of wild pastoral tribes, unaf- 1 " Natural Provinces <>f the Animal World,'' etc., Types of Mankind, p. 75. Morton : Crania Americana ; Nott : Indigenous Races, etc. i.] The Tartar ; the Arab. 9 fected by any intrusion of civilizing arts or settled social habits on tlieir nomade life ; until, impelled by unknown causes, they have poured southward over the seats of primitive Asiatic civilisation, or westward into the younger continent of Europe. Some also of the same wanderers may be assumed to have moved eastward towards the straits that present such obvious facilities for migration to a new continent ; and thus, subjected to novel influences, a change of manners and new modes of life have resulted. The mountain-chains which enclose and subdivide the great table-land of Asia, and stretch westward into Europe, have ex- ercised an important influence on the distribution of the entire fauna of the two continents, including man himself. A remarkable simplicity of structure is discernible in the arrangement of the continuous lines of greatest elevation, coinciding with the routes pursued by successive waves of population which have flowed from Asia to Europe ; and also indicating the probable course of a similar overflow towards the Okhotsk Sea and the Aleutian Islands : one supposed and probable route of migration to the American continent. But, besides the great table-land of Central Asia, there is also the lesser table-land of Syria and the Arabian peninsula. From the wandering hordes of the great Asiatic steppes have come the Huns, the Magyars, and the Turks, as well as a considerable por- tion of the Bulgarians of modern Europe. But the sterile penin- sula of Arabia has given birth to moral revolutions of the most enduring influence. With the Arab originated Hebrew mono- theism, and the ampler and nobler system begotten by it in the fulness of time ; and also Mohammedanism, which taught the Otto- man Turk the way to conquest, and stimulated the Semitic Saracen to an intellectual progress which revolutionized mediaeval Europe. Yet the capacity for civilisation of the Magyar or Turk, transferred to new physical conditions, and subjected to higher moral and intellectual influences ; or the wondrous intellectual vigour of the Arab of Bagdad or Cordova : affords no scale by which to gauge the immobility of the Tartar on his native steppe, or the Arab in his desert wilderness. Without agriculture or any idea of pro- perty in land, destitute of the very rudiments of architecture, knowing no written law or any form of government save the patriarchal expansion to the tribe of the primitive family ties : we can discern no change or progress in the wild nomade, though we trace him back for three thousand years. Even the numerical 10 Languages of America. [chap. progression is so partial and intermittent, that had we no other knowledge to guide us, it would be as easy to believe that these nomades had wandered over their desert homes for thirty thousand as for three thousand years. Migratory offshoots of the hordes of Central Asia, and of the wanderers of the Arabian desert, have gone forth, to prove the capacity for progress of the least progres- sive races ; but the great body tarries still in the wilderness and on the steppe, to prove what an enduring capacity man also has to live as one of the wild fauna of the waste. The Indians of the New World, whencesoever they derived their origin, present to us just such a type of unprogressive life as the nomades of the Asiatic steppe. The Bed-Indian of the North- West exhibits no change from his precursors of the fifteenth century ; and for aught that appears in him of a capacity for development, the forests of the American continent may have sheltered hunting and warring tribes of Indians, just as they have sheltered and pastured its wild herds of buffalos, for countless cen- turies since the continent rose from its ocean bed. That he is no recent intruder is indisputably proved alike by physical and intel- lectual evidence. On any theory of human origin, the blended gra- dations of America's widely diversified, indigenous races, demand a lengthened period for their development ; and equally, on any theory of the origin of languages, must time be prolonged to admit of the multiplication of mutually unintelligible dialects and tongues in the New World. It is estimated that there are nearly six hun- dred languages, and dialects matured into independent tongues, in Europe. The known origin and growth of some of these may supply a standard whereby to gauge the time indicated by such linguistic multiplications of tongues. But the languages of the American continents have been estimated to exceed twelve hun- dred and sixty. These include agglutinate languages of peculiarly elaborate structure, and inflectional forms requiring centuries for their development ; but also many more suggestive of a long-pro- tracted condition of society, multiplying petty tribes, and fostering the tendency of separated dialects to become mutually unintelligible. Of the grammar of the Lenni-Lenape Indians, Duponceau remarks : "It exhibits a language entirely the work of the children of nature, unaided by our arts and sciences, and, what is most remarkable, ignorant of the art of writing. Its forms are rich, regular, and methodical, closely following the analogy of the ideas which they are intended to express ; compounded, but not confused ; occa- i.] Wanderings of the Nations. 11 sionally elliptical in their mode of expression, but not more so than the languages of Europe, and much less so than those of a large group of nations on the eastern coast of Asia. The terminations of their verbs, expressive of number, person, time, and other modifications of action and passion, while they are richer in their extension than those of the Latin and Greek, which we call emphatically the learned languages, appear to have been formed on a similar but enlarged model, without other aid than that which was afforded by nature operating upon the intellectual faculties of man." 1 At the same time it is no less important to note, along with a highly elaborate structure, the limited range of vocabulary in many of the American languages. Those char- acteristics, taken along with their peculiar holophrastic power of inflecting complex word-sentences, so as to express by their means delicate shades of meaning, exhibit the phenomena of human speech in some of their most remarkable phases. But the range of the vocabularies furnishes a true gauge of the intel- lectual development of the Indian : incapable of abstract idealism, realizing few generic relations, and multiplying his words by com- parisons and descriptive compounds. To whatever cause we attribute such phenomena, much is gained by being able to study them apart from the complex derivative elements which trammel the study of European philo- logy. Assuming for our present argument the unity of the human race, not in the ambiguous sense of a common typical structure, but literally, as the descendants of one stock : in the primitive scattering of infant nations, the Mongol and the American went eastward, while the Indo-European began his still uncompleted wanderings towards the far west. The Mongol and the Indo- European have repeatedly met and mingled. They now share, unequally, the Indian peninsula and the continent of Europe. But the American and the Indo-European only met after an interval measurable by thousands of years, coming from opposite directions, and having made the circuit of the globe. The Pied Man, it thus appears, is among the ancients of the earth. How old he may be it is impossible to determine ; but among one American school of ethnologists, no historical antiquity is sufficient for him. The earliest contributions of the New World to the geological traces of man were little less startling, when first brought to light, than any that the European drift has since 1 American Philosopltical Transactions, N. S. vol. iii. p. 248. 12 Fossil Man. [chap. revealed. The island of Griiadaloupe, one of the Lesser Antilles, discovered by Columbus in 1493, furnished the first examples of fossil man, and of works of art, embedded in the solid rock. They seemed to the wondering naturalist to upset all preconceived ideas of the origin of the human race. But more careful investigation proved the rock to be a concretionary limestone formed from the detritus of corals and shells. The skeletons are probably by no means ancient, even according to the reckoning of American his- tory ; though supplying a curious link in the pakeontological treasures both of the British Museum and the Jardin des Plantes. Dr. Lund, the Danish naturalist, has described human bones, bear- ing, as he believed, marks of geological antiquity, found along with those of many extinct mammals, in the calcareous caves of Brazil. Fossil human remains have also been recovered from a calcareous conglomerate of the coral reefs of Florida, estimated by Professor Agassiz to be about 10,000 years old ; x and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia treasures the os innominatum of a human skeleton, a fragment of disputed antiquity, dug up near Natchez, on the Mississippi, beneath the bones of the megalonyx. 2 From those, and other discoveries of a like kind, this at least becomes apparent, that in the New World, as in the Old, the closing epoch of geology must be turned to for the initial chapters alike of archeology and ethnology. According to geological reckon- ing, much of the American continent has but recently emerged from the ocean. Among the organic remains of Canadian post-tertiary deposits are found the Phoca, Balcena, and other existing marine mammals and fishes, along with the Elephas primigenius, the Mastodon Ohioticus, and other long- extinct species belonging to that period in which our planet was passing through the latest transitional stage, prior to its occupation by man. Looking on the human skeletons of the Guadaloupe limestone in the Museums of London and Paris, — the first examples of the bones of man in a f < >ssil state, — we cannot fail to be impressed with the feeling that, judged of by such remains, the gradation in form between man and other animals is such as to present no very important contrast to the u ii instructed eye. Modern though those rock-embedded skele- tons are, they lessen our incredulity as to older traces of human remains mingling with those of extinct mammals, and present both as sinners in a common sepulchre. 1 Types of Mankind. P. 352. - Proved. Acrid. Nat. 8c. PhUad. Oct. 1840. P. 1<>7. 1. 1 The Neiv World a Mystery. 13 This novel phenomenon of fossil human bones may fitly serve as an index of the mightiest change which has transpired upon our planet since it became the theatre of life. Genera and species have come into being, multiplied through countless ages, and then given place to others. But now, for the first time, there appears among the relics of former existence traces of that latest creation, when God introduced into earth's varied life a reasonable soul, the heir of immortality. Man entered on the occupation of the New World in centuries which there, as in older historic regions, stretch backward as we strive to explore them. His early history is lost, for it is not yet four centuries since the Bed man and his western world were made known to us ; and he still exists as he did then, a being apart from all that specially distinguishes either the culti- vated or the uncultured man of Europe. His continent, too, has become the stage whereon are being tested great problems in social science, in politics, and in ethnology. There the civilized man and the savage have been brought face to face, to share together the bounties of nature and art, and to test anew how far God " giveth to all life, and breath, and all things ; and hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth ; and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." There, too, the black man and the red, whose desti- nies seemed to separate them wide as the world's hemispheres, have been brought together to try whether the African is more enduring than the indigenous American on his own soil ; to try for us, also, as could no otherwise be tried, questions of amalgamation and hybridity, of development and perpetuity of varieties of a domi- nant, a savage, and a servile race. In all ways : in its recoverable past, in its comprehensible present, in its conceivable future, the New World is a great mystery ; and even glimpses into its hidden truths reflect some clearer light on secrets of the older world. U The latest Migrations. [chap. > CHAPTER IT. THE NEW WORLD. THE LATEST MIGRATIONS - FOUNDING A CAPITAL— THE INFANT CITY— BEGINNINGS OF HISTORY— SUPERIOR CITY— ENTERING ON HISTORIC LIFE— PREHISTORIC PHASES. The striking contrasts which the New World presents, in nearly every respect, to the Old, are full of significance in relation to the origin of civilisation, and its infhience on the progress of man. Viewed merely as the latest scene of migration of European races on a great scale, America has much to disclose in illustration of primitive history. There we see the land cleared of its virgin forest, the soil prepared for its first tillage, the site of the future city chosen, and the birth of the world's historic capitals epitomized in those of the youngest American commonwealths. Taking our stand on one of the newest of these civic sites, let us trace the brief history of the political and commercial capital of Upper Canada. Built along the margin of a bay, enclosed by a peninsular spit of land running out from the north shore of Lake Ontario, the city of Toronto rests on a drift formation of sand and clay, only dis- turbed in its nearly level uniformity by the rain-gullies and ravines which mark the courses of the rivulets that drain its surface. This the original projectors of the city mapped off into parallelo- grams, by streets uniformly intersecting each other at right angles ; and in carrying out their plan, every ravine and undula- tion is smoothed and levelled, as with the ^discriminating pre- cision of the mower's scythe. The country rises to the north for about twenty miles, by a gradual slope, to the water- shed between Ontario and Lake Simcoe, and then descends to the level of the northern lake and the old hunting-grounds of the Hurons. It is il] Founding a Capital. 15 a nearly unvarying expanse of partially cleared forest : a blank, with its Indian traditions effaced, its colonial traditions uncreated. But industry already plies the willing hand. Sturdy enterprise enlivens its rivers with the noise of the busv wheel, and fashions its forest glades into smiling villages and rising towns. Its history is not only all to write, it is all to act. The cities of the old world have their mythic founders and quaint legends, still commemorated in heraldic blazonry. But there is no mystery about the begin- nings of Toronto, and little romance in its childhood and youth. Upper Canada was erected into a distinct province in 1791, only eight years after, by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, France had finally renounced all claim on the province of Quebec ; and a few months thereafter General Simcoe, the first governor of the new province, arrived at the old French fort, at the mouth of the Niagara river, and in May 1793 selected the Bay of Toronto as the site of the future capital. The chosen spot presented a dreary aspect of swamp and uncleared pine forest ; but amid these his sagacious eye saw in anticipation the city rise, which already numbers upwards of 50,000 inhabitants ; and rejecting the old Indian name, since restored, he gave to his embryo capital that of York. Colonel Bouchette, Surveyor- General of Lower Canada, was selected to lay out the projected city and harbour; and from his pen we have a graphic account of the locality as it then existed, and of the rites, accordant with ancient Saxon hospitality, by which the founder dedicated the forest-clearing to the amenities of civilisation. " It fell to my lot," says Colonel Bouchette, " to make the first sur- vey of York harbour in 1793. Lieut. -Governor the late General Simcoe, who then resided at Niagara, having formed extensive plans for the improvement of the colony, had resolved on laying the foundations of a provincial capital. I still distinctly recollect the untamed aspect which the country exhibited when first I entered the beautiful basin. Dense and trackless forests lined the margin of the lake, and reflected their inverted images in its glassy surface. The wandering savage had constructed his ephemeral habitation beneath their luxuriant foliage, the group then consist- ing of two families of Mississagas ; and the bay and neighbouring marshes were the hitherto uninvaded haunts of immense coveys of wild-fowl ; indeed, they were so abundant as in some measure to annoy us during the night." 1 1 The British Dominions in North America. Loud. 1832. Vol. i. p. 80. 10 The Infant City. [chap. The vicissitudes attending the progress of the Canadian city have been minutely chronicled by its local historians, who record how many dwellings of round logs, squared timber, or more ambi- tious frame-houses exceeding a single storey, were in existence at various dates. The first vessel which belonged to the town, and turned its harbour to account ; the first brick house, the earliest stone one ; and even the first gig of an ambitious citizen, subsequent to 1812 : are all duly chronicled. Could we learn with equal truthfulness of the first years of the city built by Eomu- lus on the Palatine Hill, its annals would tell no less homely truths, even now dimly hinted at in the legend of the scornful Eemus leaping over its infant ramparts. Tiber's hill w T as once the site only of the solitary herdsman's hut ; and an old citizen has described to me his youthful recollections of Toronto, as consisting of a few log-huts in the clearing, and an Indian village of birch- bark wigwams, near the Don, with a mere trail through the woods to the old French fort, on the line where now upwards of two miles of costly stores, hotels, and public buildings mark the prin- cipal street of the busy city. But in 1813 an important historical event occurred. General Dearborn at the head of an army of American heroes, numbering some two thousand five hundred men, embarked on board their fleet at Sachet's Harbour, for the siege of York, and the conquest of Canada. The little capital, with its round log, squared timber, and frame houses, numbered scarcely a hundred dwellings in all. These the invaders set fire to, carried off its solitary fire-engine ; and the latter is reported to be still among the trophies preserved in the Navy Yard of the United States. After such a disastrous erasure of all that the first twenty years had laboriously accomplished, it is easy to see how the abortive city might have been resigned ere this to forest and swamp, and scarcely a trace have remained to tell that civilisation had ever meditated making the site her own. After the lapse of another twenty years, M. Theodore Pavi describes it, in his Swwenirs A tl antiques, published at Paris in 1833, as still in the woods, a mere advanced post of civilisation on the outskirts of a boundless waste. " To the houses of York," says he, " succeed immediately the forests, and how profound must be those immense forests, when we reflect that they continue without interruption till they lose themselves in the icy regions of Hudson's P>ay near ii.] Beginnings of History. 17 the Arctic Pole." Upwards of a quarter of a century has since elapsed, and that for New- World cities is an aeon. Every year has witnessed more rapid strides, alike in the progress of Toronto, and in the clearing and settling of the surrounding country. Rail- ways have opened up new avenues of trade and commerce, and borne troops of sturdy pioneers into the wilderness behind. So rapid has been the clearing of the forest, and so great the rise in the price of labour, that fuel, brought from the distant coal-fields of Ohio, already undersells the cord-wood hewn in Canadian forests ; and even Newcastle coal warms many a luxurious winter hearth. All is rife with progress. The new past is despised ; the old past is unheeded ; and for antiquity there is neither reverence nor faith. These are beginnings of history ; and are full of sig- nificance to those who have wrought out some of the curious problems of an ancient past, amid historic scenes contrasting in all respects with this unhistoric but vigorous youth of the New World. And yet, as we shall see, it is not altogether new ; though we thus witness the seeds of future empires taking root on its soil. The ancient forests which give way before the axe of the new settler, are not primeval. Beneath their roots lie historic memorials, not even now so thoroughly effaced that we must abandon all hope of recovering the chronicles of that world before Columbus, and learning something of what man was, utterly disassociated from everything which has made of us what we are. AYhile thus witnessing the progress of the young Canadian capital, it has been my fortune to look on the actual birth of a great city of the future. During the summer of 1855, a western ramble— undertaken in part for the purpose of exploring traces of a long -forgotten history, recorded in a subsequent chapter devoted to the elucidation of the mining and metallurgy of America's copper period, — terminated at Fond du Lac, at the head of Lake Superior. Here, at the mouth of the Nemadji river, on a large bay into which the St. Louis and Aloues rivers also debouche, the site of the future city of Superior has been selected. I had traversed nearly four hundred miles since leav- ing the Sault Ste. Marie, itself a remote outpost of civilisation ; and had noted with curious interest, in proof of our wandering into uncultivated wilds, that part of the freight of the steamer to Eagle Harbour consisted of compressed bundles of hay, brought B 18 Superior City. [chap. from Detroit on Lake St. Clair, upwards of three hundred miles off, for the use of the cattle employed at the copper mines. Hun- dreds of miles of unoccupied land lay between the Nemadji river and the nearest settlements of Wisconsin or Minnesota, and count- less millions of acres stretched away westward and northward towards the Eocky Mountains and the pole. Yet here, on the wild hunting-grounds of the Chippewas, the future Superior City was being laid off with a large expanse of " water-lots," — a term of universal acceptance among Anglo-Americans in reference to spots mapped off for redemption from river or lake. A plan, already completed, showed them encroaching on the channel of the river, and abridging the wide expanse of Superior Bay : a singu- larly characteristic type of the intrusive race which is everywhere supplanting the Indian on his native soil. A party of Saultaux had constructed a group of birch-bark wigwams on Minnesota Point, and their slight canoes glided noiselessly over the bay. Such the Indian of the Fond du Lac may have been a thousand years ago : as unprogressive and ephemeral in all his characteristics as he there appeared. The little spot on which his wigwam stands suffices for him, as it has done for all his fathers ; and, for the rest, he claims only a small tribute from the denizens of lake and forest, wild as himself. But for the aggressive aspirations of the intruder nothing is too great ; and indeed such is the faith in the great future which awaits this most western embryo metropolis of the lakes, that two rival cities were already projected within a mile or two of each other. One of these, consisting of an unfinished frame house and two or three log-shanties, was named Superior ; the other, if possible in a still more rudimentary condition of develop- ment, had already engrossed the more ambitious name of Superior City. Yet one or other of these is unquestionably the nucleus of a great metropolis, destined ere another generation passes away, to number its inhabitants by thousands, where now only the wigwam of the Indian and the bivouac of the hunter are to be seen. In the coarse realities of conflict between rival speculators and schem- ing projectors, it is difficult for us to realize what may be abund- antly manifest to other generations : that here, in the wild west, is an event akin to that when Nimrod, the primeval hunter, began his kingdom of Babel in the land of Shinar. Already the axe of the pioneer is levelling the forest, and clear- ing out the thoroughfares of the future city; while plans are in ii.] Entering on Historic Life. 19 progress for making it the starting-point of a railway to the Mississippi, where it rolls its mighty volume of waters uninter- ruptedly to the Gulf of Florida. The scheme cannot fail ; for it is only restoring, with greatly augmented facilities, the ancient route by which, as will be seen, the metallic treasures of Lake Superior were distributed by ante-Columbian traders through the vast regions watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries ; and tropical shells, and other products of southern latitudes, were transferred to the shores of the northern lakes. It is impossible to look with indifference on such an initial stage of one of the great revolutions begot by civilisation amid the western wilds. We can only guess at the beginnings of ancient cities and empires ; but here we are present at the birth, and look on the first clearings, the rude shanty, the temporary pier and corduroy road for the city in embryo, destined to be what Chicago has proved for Lake Michigan, perchance what St. Petersburg has been for the Neva and the Baltic, or Alexandria once was, and may yet again be, for the Nile. Viewed in this light, the remarkable features of Superior Bay and its tributary rivers with their spits and sand-belts, possessed a peculiar charm, thus seen, as it were, at the close of one great cycle of their history, the gradual formation of ages, and still untouched by the hand of man. The frail village of wigwams and the tiny fleet of birch-bark canoes, only added a characteristic feature to the wild face of nature. In this, as in so many other respects, no more striking contrast could be presented to the his- toric rivers of Europe, with their dikes, and piers, and breakwaters, the monuments of enterprise and engineering skill : pertaining, like the dikes of the Essex marches on old Father Thames, to a date nearly coeval with the Christian era ; or reaching back, like those of the African Nile, to the birth-time of history and the infancy of the human race. The contrast between the neAV and the old is here sufficiently striking. Yet the old also was once new ; had even such beginnings as this ; and was as devoid of history as the rawest clearing of the Far West. There are other aspects also in which a New World, thus entering on its historic life, is calculated to throw light on the origin of civilisation. Though neither its forests nor its aborigines are primeval, they realize for us just such a primitive condition as that in which human history appears to begin. In all the most 20 Prehistoric Phases. [chap. characteristic aspects of the Indian, discussed in subsequent chapters ; as well as in the traces of native American metallurgy, architecture, letters, and science : we shall find reproduced the same phases through which man passed in oldest prehistoric times ; and when, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we witness the mineral wealth of the Andes tempting European colonisation beyond the Atlantic, we only see the expeditions of new Argo- nauts ; and realize incidents of the first voyage to the Cassite- rides ; or the planting of the infant colonies of Gadir, Massala, and Carthage by Phcecian and Punic adventurers of the historic dawn. i ii.| The Primeval Forest. 21 CHAPTEE III THE PRIMEVAL TRANSITION. THE PRIMEVAL FOREST— THE GENESIS OF MAN— NON-METALLURGIC ERAS- OSCILLA- TIONS OF THE LAND— TnE FLINT-FOLK OF THE DRIFT —ADVENT OF EUROPEAN MAN— THE DRIFT IMPLEMENTS — CHRONOLOGY OF THE FRENCH DRIFT — SCOT- TISH ALLUVIUM — PRECELTIC RACES — THEIR IMITATIVE ARTS — MAN PRIMEVAL — HIS INTELLECTUAL CONDITION— INSTINCT— ACCUMULATED KNOWLEDGE — PRIMEVAL BRITAIN— ITS FOSSIL FAUNA— BONE IMPLEMENTS— FOOD —AMERICAN DRIFT— RELICS OF ANCIENT LIFE— EXTINCT FAUNA— MAN AND THE MASTODON — INDIAN TRADITIONS— GIANTS— DRIFT DISCLOSURES— ANTEQUITY OF THE AME- RICAN MAN— PRIMITIVE ARTS. On the busy scene of the Western Canadian capital, little more than half a century ago, stood, as we have seen, the wigwam of the .Red Man, and the forest swept like a leafy sea back from the shores of the great lakes to the Arctic circle. At times a little more remote, within the last three centuries, the same was the case on every civic site of the New World. We call the forest primeval, and Ave speak of the savage as the child of nature. But we do neither in any very strict or scientific sense. What, indeed, is the natural condition of man, is even now by no means a settled point. But it cannot be overlooked that, while America discloses an interesting phase of primitive social life : the life of the forest savage, inherited from an ancient past ; beyond this lie half- obliterated traces of an extinct civilisation, with memorials of rites and mythology, which suggest comparisons with the oldest chro- nicles of social life in Egypt, India, and China. Nor are illustra- tions of the first crude efforts of intellect, and the rudimentary traces of art, peculiar to ancient races, or to be sought for only in primitive times. They remain as expressive still in the ingenuity of the Red Indian arrow-maker or pipe- sculptor, as when they puzzled the observant credulity of Herodotus, or dignified to Tacitus the chroniclings of Rome's barbarian conquests. We 22 The Genesis of Man. [chap. cannot, indeed, with all their aid, demonstrate man's primeval condition, or the probable duration of the race ; but they supply very significant analogies to recently discovered works of art of the cave-breccias and the drift, which tell ns all that we yet know by means of geological revelations in reference to primeval man. In the moral contrast which the savage presents to our conceptions of Edenic life, no less curious questions are suggested as to the intellectual endowments requisite for any consistent theory of Adamic creation. Without looking for systems of science in the Bible, which it was never designed to furnish, either in relation to the organic or inorganic world : we nevertheless derive from thence incidental notices of the highest value in reference to the genesis of man. The geologist may turn aside from the Mosaic record as a book never designed for his aid, but the ethnologist cannot do so, unless he is prepared entirely to reject its authority ; for man is its theme, and the earth's creation is only considered there in so far as it relates to him. Moreover, there only can he look for any authori- tative information relative to the origin of our race. If that is rejected, there remain for us only the vague inductions of science on a point beyond its ken ; or the childish fables of tradition, in which the intellectual Greek and the untutored savage are on a par. There, then, w T e learn of primeval man as no savage, but a being of intellectual power and moral purity ; and other records seem to point towards the same eastern area indicated there as the birthplace of the nations. But, also, the further investigations are pursued in other directions, the more clearly does it seem to be forced on our acceptance, that the primitive condition of man in- cluded none of those appliances of inventive skill associated with all modern ideas of civilisation and intellectual progress ; but, on the contrary, the analogies to his earliest arts reappear in those of the modern savage. It becomes important, therefore, to inquire how far such seemingly contradictory indications admit of recon- cilement, or tend to favour the idea of man being merely the latest result of physical processes by which the lowest have been trans- united into all higher forms of animal life. The investigation of the underlying chronicles of Europe's most ancient human history, has placed beyond question that its historic period was preceded by an unhistoric one of long duration, marked by a slow progression from arts of the rudest kind to others which involved the germs of all later development. From Europe, and the historic lands of Asia and Africa, we derive our ideas of man ; in.] Non-Metallurgie Eras. 23 and of the youngest of these continents, on which he has thus advanced from savage artlessness to the highest arts of civilisation, we have history, written or traditional, for at least two thousand years. But in the year 1492, a New World was discovered, peopled with its own millions, for the most part in no degree advanced beyond that primeval starting-point which lies far behind Europe's oldest traditions. To have found there beings strange as the inhabitants of Swift's Houyhnhnm's Land, or the monsters conjured up in the philosophic day-dreams of Sir Humphry Davy for the peopling of other planets, 1 would have seemed less wonder- ful to the men of that fifteenth century than what they did find : man in a state of savage infancy, with arts altogether rudimentary ; language without letters, tradition without history, everything as it were but in its beginning, and yet man himself looking back into a past even more vast and vague than their own. The significance of this state of things is worth inquiring into, if it be for nothing else than the light which the analogies of such a living present may throw on the infancy of Europe, and beyond that, on the primal infancy of the human race. Eecent discoveries of assumed traces of primeval art in the diluvial formations both of France and England, have tended to add a fresh interest to the investigation <>f that " primeval stone- period" which underlies the most ancient memorials of Europe's civilisation. We learn from the oldest of all written chronicles, that there existed a period of some duration in the history of the human race, during which man tilled the ground, pursued the chase, and made garments of its spoils, without any knowledge of the working in metals, on which the simplest of all known arts depend. Through such a primitive stage, it had already appeared to me probable that all civilized nations had passed ; ' 2 before dis- closures of a still older flint-period in the chroniclings of the drift added new significance to the term primeval, in its application to the non-metallurgic era of Europe's arts. The incredulity and even contempt with, wdiich the application of a system of archaeological periods to the antiquities of Britain was received, a few years ago, by a certain class of critics, was in- evitable, from the exclusive attention previously devoted to Boman and mediaeval remains. 3 But the attention of the antiquary, as 1 Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher. 2 Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, vol. i. p. 41. 3 Vide Palgrave's History of Normandy, vol. i. p. 469 ; Wright's Celt, Roman, and Saxon, pp. vi. vii., etc. 24 Oscillations of the Land. [chap. well as the geologist, is now being directed to conclusions forced on both by the discoveries of rudely fashioned flint hatchets and spear-heads in the stratified gravel of post-pliocene formations. The artificial origin of these is maintained on the authority of geologists and archaeologists of the highest standing in ability and experience ; and the circumstances attending their repeated dis- covery place their remote antiquity beyond question. The diffi- culty indeed is to bring the phenomena which their discovery illustrates, into any conceivable harmony with the limits of chro- nology as hitherto applied to man. The preceltic architects of the British long-barrow, and the allophylise of the European stone age, are but men of yesterday in comparison with the Flint-Folk of the Drift. They belong to a lost Atlantis, — another continent, now in part at least buried beneath the ocean ; and compared with which the Old World of history is as new as that found for it by Columbus. The disclosures of geology have familiarized us with the con- viction that the " stable land," the " perpetual hills," and the " ever- lasting mountains " are but figures of speech. But the idea forces itself on reluctant minds that man himself has witnessed the dis- appearance of Alpine chains and the submergence of continents. The Pacific archipelagos are but the mountain-crests of a southern continent, which in earlier ages may have facilitated the wanderings of the nations. The startling discoveries in the French and English drift are results of oscillations of the northern hemisphere, which, in times nearer to historic centuries, depressed the bed of the Baltic in the era of the Danish kjokkenmoddingr, and made dry land of the upper estuaries of the Forth and Clyde. It is doubtful, indeed, if the shallowing of Danish and Scottish seas by the rise of their ocean beds is altogether a work of prehistoric times. The rise still going on in parts of the Swedish coast is a phenomenon long familiar to geologists ; and the upheaval of the Scottish region embracing the valleys of the Forth and Clyde, it now appears probable has been protracted into historic times, and has even affected the relative levels of sea and land since the building of the Roman wall. The changes thus witnessed on a comparatively small scale, on familiar areas, help us in some degree to estimate the vast physical revolutions that have taken place throughout the northern hemi- sphere within that recent geological period which succeeded the formation of the pliocene strata. Throughout extensive reo-ions in.] The Flint-Folk of ih e Drift. 2 5 both in Europe and America, vast glacial formations of stratified drift have effected the latest modifications, prior to the recent superficial soil which overlies the fossiliferous strata. In a chro- nological point of view those glacial formations are separated by an immense interval from any conceivable historic epoch ; and every attempt to reconstruct the geographical features of Northern Europe in that era of the drift, and to repeople it with its fossil fauna, adds to the proof that, in climate, physical contour, and zoological characteristics, it differed little less widely from the condition of the same regions within any known period of the human epoch, than it is possible for imagination guided by the disclosures of science to conceive. Nevertheless it is to this period that the geologist assigns the advent of the Flint-Folk of the Drift : a race of hunters and fishers not greatly differing in their rude arts from the more immediate precursors of the Historic Eaces in Europe's Stone Age ; but who nevertheless were contemporaneous with the Siberian mammoth and other extinct elephants, the woolly rhinoceros, the musk ox, and the reindeer; and with numerous extinct carnivora of proportions corresponding to the gigantic her- bivora on which they preyed. The regions in which remains of the Flint-Folk have hitherto chiefly occurred embrace the pleasant valleys of Northern France and Southern England, where now the vine and the hop clothe the sunny slopes with their luxuriance. But as fresh evidence ac- cumulates, corresponding traces are found to extend to the shores and islands of the Mediterranean, where history and civilisation had their birth. We search in vain, however, for any connecting- link between the oldest of historic races and those belonging to an era which one distinguished geologist has designated as " The Second Elephantine Period;" 1 when, according to his reconstruc- tion of the physical geography of the region, the Thames was a tributary of the Ehine. The English channel therefore was not yet in being. Britain existed only as part of a continent which stretched away uninterruptedly northward towards the Arctic circle. The upheaval which made dry land of the bed of the present Ger- man Ocean, and of much of that of the neighbouring Atlantic, was accompanied with a corresponding elevation of the mountains of Scotland and Wales. Those accordingly constituted Alpine ranges on which the ice and snoAvs of a perpetual winter reigned ; and where the whole glacial phenomena, studied at the present day in 1 J. Trimmer : Jour. Oeol. Soc, vol. ix. 20 Advent of European Alan. [chap. Norway and Switzerland, were in active operation. The drift deposited by icebergs during a previous submergence was then excavated by the descending glaciers, which as they receded left to the hills and valleys their present contour. Rivers also, fed from the same source, bore along with them the transported mate- rial, in the same way as the Rhine and the Rhone are freighted with spoils from the Swiss Alps ; and redisposing those in their lower estuaries, they embedded in the new formation remains of contemporaneous fauna, and with them the flint-implements of a race of men who had already peopled the valleys and river- banks. It thus appears that the advent of man in Northern Europe is assignable to a period when the mastodon and the tichorine rhino- ceros still roamed its forests, and the Great Cave-tiger and other extinct carnivora haunted its caverns ; when the gigantic Irish elk, the reindeer, the musk-buffalo, and the wild horse were objects of the chase ; and the hippopotamus major was a summer visitor to the Seine and the Thames. Fourteen years ago, when describing- Scottish aboriginal traces, I remarked : " There is one certain point in this inquiry into primitive arts which the British antiquary possesses over all others, and from whence he can start without fear of error. From our insular position it is unquestionable that the first colonist of the British Isles must have been able to con- struct some kind of boat, and have possessed sufficient knowledge of navigation to steer his course through the open sea." 1 It seemed a postulate on which the most cautious adventurer into the great darkness which lies behind us might confidently take his stand. But the point was no certain one after all. The fauna of the later Elephantine period still roamed over a wide continent unbroken by the English Channel or the Irish Sea ; and the valley of the Rhine stretching northward through the still unsubmerged plain of the German Ocean, received as tributaries the Thames and the Huniber ; perhaps also the Tweed and the Forth. Measured therefore by the most moderate estimate of geological chronology, the historical period is, in relation to the interval since the first appearance of man, somewhat in a ratio with the superficial soil and vegetable mould, as compared with the whole deposits of the stratified drift : in other words, it is so insignificant as, in a geo- logical point of view, to be scarcely worth taking into account. Whatever be the consequences involved in such comprehen- sive inductions, proofs appear to accumulate with every renewed 1 Pr ('historic Annals of Scotland, 1st Ed. p. 29. iil] The Drift Implements. 27 search, of the wide diffusion throughout the bone-bearing drift of the Elephantine period, of symmetrically- formed flints, bearing indubitable traces of intelligence and primitive mechanical skill. It is the old argument of Paley, reproduced in a form undreamt of in his philosophy. " If," he might have said, " in digging into a bank of gravel we find a flint, we do not pause to ask whence it came ; but if our spade strike on a watch ?"- -In the age of the Mint-Folk mechanical ingenuity expended itself for other purposes than the manufacture of time- measurers ; but if the artificial origin of the implements of the drift be acknowledged, our greatest diffi- culty is the length of time they indicate. On this subject, then, I may say that, after an intimate familiarity for upwards of twenty years, with the flint and stone implements of Britain and the North of Europe ; and collecting in more recent years hundreds of speci- mens on the American continent : I had an opportunity for the first time, in 18G4, of examining both in France and England several large collections of Hint-implements from the drift. They differ for the most part in size, and also in type, from those found in early British or Danish grave- mounds ; but artificial origin and inventive design are as obvious in the one as in the other. That forgery of drift-implements has been systematically prac- tised latterly by the French workmen is indisputable, but this need not affect the question. The facts connected with their discovery had been on record for nearly a century and a half before their significance was perceived ; and specimens have lain unheeded in the British Museum and in the collections of the Society of Anti- quarians of London, with their human workmanship undisputed, so long as their origin was ascribed to Celtic art. 1 In reality the explorers of the drift have been perplexed by the very abundance of the traces of art which it discloses. Dr Bigollot states that in the pits of St. Acheul alone, between August and December 1854, upwards of four hundred specimens were obtained. The lowest estimate of the number recovered in the valley of the Somme is 3000 ; but this is exclusive of the more dubious flint-flakes, styled knives, estimated by Sir Charles Lyell at many thousands more. 2 In England flint implements of the same peculiar type have already rewarded research in many localities ; so that Mr. Evans justly re- marks : " The number found is almost beyond belief." 3 But the most interesting feature attendant on the later English discoveries 1 Archceologia, vol. xiii. p. 206 ; vol. xxxviii. p. 301. 2 Antiquity of Man, p. 144. 3 Archceologia, vol. xxxviii. p. 296. 28 Chronology of the French Drift. [chap. is, that the traces of man have there been successfully sought for on purely geological evidence. The archaeologist digs into the Celtic or Saxon barrow, and finds as his reward the implements and pottery of its builder. But English geologists, having deter- mined the character of the tool-bearing gravel of the French drift, have sought for the flint implements in corresponding English strata, as they would seek for the fossil shells of the same period, and with like success. They have now been obtained in Suffolk, Bedford, Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, and Surrey. 1 So entirely indeed has the man of the drift passed out of the province of the archaeologist, that Mr. Prestwick follows up his " notes on further discoveries of flint implements in beds of post-pliocene gravel and clay," in 1861, with a list of forty- one localities where gravel and clay-pits, or gravel-beds occur, as some of the places in the south of England where he thinks flint implements may also by diligent search possibly be found, and subsequent discoveries have con- firmed his anticipations. The only element which tends in any degree to detract from the incontrovertible force of this accumulated proof is that where- ever the wrought flints are discovered in situ, they appear to occur in beds of gravel and clay abounding in unwrought flints in every stage of accidental fracture, and including many which the most expe- rienced archaeologist would hesitate whether to classify as of natural or artificial origin. If, therefore, only a few widely scattered spear head and almond-shaped flints had been found, the theory of their accidental fracture into such regular shapes might be entertained, notwithstanding the absence of any natural tendency in the con- choidal fracture of the flint to develop such types. But the same artificial forms are repeated by thousands ; and so far as appears at present, they occur in the river valleys, where the experience of the archaeologist would lead him to look for the traces of rnde hunting and fishing tribes ; and in the same mammaliferous strata to which that of the geologist directs him when in search of re- mains illustrative of the extinct fauna of the post-pliocene age. Without, therefore, attempting to reduce this geological chronology to years, or even to centuries, it obviously points to an era lying en- tirely beyond the province of the historian. The relative chronology of the French drift is : 1st, superficially, tombs and other remains of the Roman period, scarcely perceptibly affected in their geological relations by nearly the whole interval 1 Jonru. Oeol. Sor. Land., vol. xvii. pp. 322, 368 ; vol. xviii. p. 113, etc. in.] Scottish Alluvium. 29 of the Christian era ; 2d, in the alluvium, seemingly embedded by natural accumulation, at an average depth of 15 feet, remains of the European stone-period, corresponding to those of the recently discovered pfahlbauten, or lacustrine villages of the Swiss Lakes ; and, 3d, the tool-bearing gravel, embedding works of the Flint- Folk, wrought seemingly when the rivers were but beginning the work of excavating the valleys which give their present contour to the landscapes of France and England. With such indications of the remoteness of the era of the Drift- Folk it scarcely calls for special notice, that their tools correspond to some of those found in the cave-deposits, as in Kent's Hole, Devonshire ; but that they are readily distinguishable from the smaller implements and weapons of the same material wrought by the primitive Barrow- Builders of Europe, or by modern savage tribes still ignorant of metallurgy. From whatever point we attempt to view the novel facts thus presented to our considera- tion, it becomes equally obvious that we are dealing with the traces of a period irreconcilable with any received system of historic chronology ; but within which, nevertheless, we are compelled to recognise many indications of the presence of man. By evidence of a like character, the intermediate but still remote periods of prehistoric centuries are peopled with similar races of men. Proofs of oscillation, upheaval, and derangement of the course of ancient rivers, had furnished indications of the enormous lapse of time embraced within the British stone-period before the discoveries of Abbeville and Amiens were heard of. 1 In the vear 1819 there was disclosed in the alluvium of the carse- land, where the river Forth winds its circuitous course through ancient historic scenes, the skeleton of a gigantic whale, with a perforated lance or harpoon of deer's horn beside it, They lay together near the base of Dunmyat, one of the Ochil Hills, twenty feet above the highest tide of the neighbouring estuary. Over this an accumulation of five feet of alluvial soil was covered with a thin bed of moss. The locality was examined at the time, and the levels noted, by scientific observers peculiarly competent to the task ; and at the same time sufficient traces of the old Soman causeway were observed, leading to one of the fords of the Forth, to prove that no important change had taken place on the bed of the river, or the general features of the strath, during the era of authentic history. 2 Nor was this example a solitary one. Kemains 1 Prthist. Annuls of Scotland, 1st Ed., p. 33. 2 Edin. Phil. Jour., i. 395. 30 Preceltic Races. [chap. of gigantic Balsense have been repeatedly found ; and one skeleton discovered in 1824, seven miles farther inland, was deposited in the Museum of Edinburgh University, along with the primitive harpoon of deer's horn found beside it, which in this instance retained some portion of the wooden shaft by which it had been wielded. Among antique spoils recovered at various depths in the same carse-land, the collection of the Scottish Antiquaries includes a primitive querne, or hand-mill, fashioned from the section of an oak, — such as is still in use by the Indians of America for pound- ing their grain ; — and a wooden wheel of ingenious construction, found with several flint arrow-heads alongside of it. With such well- authenticated and altogether indisputable evi- dence already in our possession, the additions made to our grounds for belief in the antiquity of the prehistoric dawn of Britain or Europe, do not materially affect the conclusions thereby involved, though they add to the apparent duration of the human era. Whatever difficulties may seem to arise from the discoveries at Abbeville and Amiens, or the older ones at Gray's Inn Lane, Hoxne, and elsewhere, in relation to the age of man : the chrono- logy which suffices to embrace the ancient Caledonian whaler within the period of human history will equally adapt itself to more recent disclosures. And lying, as the Scottish relics did, almost beneath the paving of the Roman causeway : they suffice to show that discoveries relative to the British Celt of Julius Caesar's time, or to the Eomanized Briton of Claudius or Nero, which have hitherto seemed to the antiquary to illuminate the primeval dawn, bear somewhat less relation to the period to which the Dunmyat and Blair-Druinmond Moss harpoons belong, than the American aborigines of the fifteenth century do to primeval centuries of the New World. The very question raised anew by such disclosures as the British drift, ossiferous caves, grave- mounds, and chance deposits reveal, is whether the ancient Celt, on whom Roman and Saxon intruded, was not himself an intruder on older allophylian occupants ? * If he was not, we are left to imagine for his race an antiquity and a history, compared with which the dreams of Merlin and the fables of Geoffrey of Mon- mouth are credible things. There is a certain remote epoch in most men's ideas of the past, 1 This question was first brought forward l>y the author in an "Inquiry into the Evidence of the Existence of Primitive Kaees in Scotland prior to the Celta>." — British Association Report, 1850. in.] Their Imitative Arts. 31 by no means uniformly defined, beyond which all becomes vague antiquity, and whatever it may disclose is assumed to have been contemporaneous. The Roman antiquary long dealt with the historic remains of Europe as exclusively his own ; just as the Indian of Central America is content to ascribe its ruins to the antiguos, and the geologist once referred all organic remains to the Deluge. But this, which was inevitable at an earlier stage of inquiry, wdien all means for recovery of a knowledge of the past seemed exhausted, resolves itself into a definite recognition of relative antiquity, in no degree calculated to preclude a just esti- mation of the researches of the Roman antiquary. With the advent of man antedated in geological eras, the Roman period becomes, in truth, a part of very modern history ; and the vast ages computed to have intervened between the two periods baffle the fancy in its efforts to comprehend the links by which they are connected. But crude as are the arts of that pri- meval age, they are not more so than were those of the New World of the fifteenth century. Recent explorations in the Dordogne Caverns, disclose ingeniously carved bone implements and engraved slates, revealing an imitative skill and aesthetic development akin to that which attracts the notice of the ethnologist in ancient and modern arts of the American man. If by the aid of those singu- larly interesting disclosures of the caverns of Central France, we do indeed recover traces of the Flint-Folk belonging to an era estimated by some scientific chronologists as antedating our own by 100,000 years, it is of no slight importance to perceive that the interval which has wrought such revolutions on the earth as are recorded in the mammaliferous drift, show man the same reason- ing, tentative, and inventive mechanician, as clearly distinguished then from the highest orders of contemporary life of the Elephan- tine or Cave periods, as he is now from the most intelligent of the brute creation. In truth, so far from arriving by such disclosures any nearer the assumed anthropoid link between man and the brutes, the oldest art-traces hitherto recovered unquestionably be- long to a being superior to many savage races of the present day. Much of the reasoning relative to the characteristics which archaeological discoveries assign to man in his primeval con- dition, originates in an illogical association of the concomitants of modern intellectual and social progress with the indispensable requisites of man's primary condition as created in the Divine image, a being of intellectual and moral purity. It is not neces- 32 Man Primeval. [chap. sary for the confirmation of a primeval stone or flint period, that we degrade man from that majestic genesis of our race, when he heard the voice of the Lord God amongst the trees of Paradise and was not afraid. Still less is it requisite that we make of him that " extinct species of anthropoid animal " hastily invented by over- sensitive Mosaic geologists to meet the problematic case of pleisto- cene products of art. In that primeval transition of the ethnologist in which geology draws to a close and archaeology has its beginning, when the old orders of organic life were disappearing to make way for a new and far higher order of beings : amid strange beasts of the earth, cattle, and creeping things, we discern " Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall, Godlike erect, with native honour clad In naked majesty, seem'd lords of all ; And worthy seem'd : for in their looks div T ine The image of their glorious Maker shone, Truth, wisdom, sanctitude, severe and pure, Severe, but in true filial freedom placed ; Whence true authority in men." But if our modern technological standards are to be the only received tests of intellectual nobility, " his fair large front and eye sublime," with all the grand suggestive picturings of Milton's primeval man, are vain. His arts, though ample enough for all his wants, by such modern standards declare him no better than " the ignoble creature that arrow-heads and flint knives would indicate." He needed no weapons for war or the chase ; imple- ments of husbandry were scarcely less superfluous, amid a profusion ampler than the luxuriant plenty of the islands of the Southern Ocean. The needle and the loom were as foreign to his wants as the printing-press or the electric telegraph. What did he want with the potter's wheel, or the sculptor's chisel, or the mason's tools ? And if his simple wants did suggest the need of some cutting implement, the flint knife, or " Such other gardening tools as art, yet rude, Giiiltless of fire, had formed," harmonize with the simplicity of that primeval life, and its easy toils, far more naturally than the most artistic Sheffield cutlery could do, with all its recpiisite preliminary processes of mining, smelting, forging, grinding, and hafting the needless tool. The idfii which associates man's intellectual elevation with the in.] His Intellectual Condition. 33 accompaniments of mechanical skill, as though they stood some- how in the relation of cause and effect ; and with the intellectual as the offspring, instead of the parent of the mechanical element : is the product of modern thought. The very element which begets the unintellectual condition of the ignoble savage is that his whole energies are expended, and all his thoughts are absorbed, in pro- viding daily food and clothing, and the requisite tools by which those are to be secured ; or where, as in the luxuriant islands of Polynesia, nature seems to provide all things to his hand, his degraded moral nature unparadises the Eden of the bread-fruit tree. A primeval " Stone period" appears to underlie the most remote traces of European civilisation ; and not only to carry back the evidence of man's presence to greatly more ancient times than any hitherto conceived of : but to confirm the idea that his earliest condition was one not only devoid of metallurgy, but characterized by mechanical arts of the very simplest kind. But that man was, therefore, of necessity, a savage, is very far from being a legitimate conclusion. The degradation of his moral nature, and not the absence of the arts which we associate with modern luxury and enterprise, made him a savage. The Arab sheikh, wandering with his flocks over the desert, is not greatly in advance of the Indian of the American forests, either in mechanical skill or artistic refinement ; yet the Idumean Job was just such a pastoral Arab, but, nevertheless, a philosopher and a poet, far above any who dwelt amid the wondrous developments of mechanical and artistic progress, in the cities of the Tigris or the Euphrates. It is not to be inferred, however, that the whole history of the human race, and each of its separate divisions, is affirmed by the archaeologist to disclose a regular succession of periods — Stone, Bronze, and Iron, or however otherwise designated, — akin to the organic dis- closures of geology ; or that where their traces are found, they necessarily imply such an order in their succession. The only true analogy between the geologist and the archaeologist is, that both find their evidence embedded in the earth's superficial crust, and deduce the chronicles of an otherwise obliterated past by legitimate induction therefrom. The radical difference between the palaeontologist and the ethnologist lies in this, that the one aims at recovering the history of unintelligent divisions of extinct life ; the other investigates all that pertains to a still existent, intelligent being, capable of advancing from his own past condition, c 34 Instinct [char or returning to it, under the most diverse external circumstances. Excepting, therefore, the nature of their evidence, and their mode • if using it, all is contrast rather than comparison. Amid that strangely diversified series of organic beings which pertains to the studies of the geologist, there appears at length one, " the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals," 1 made in the image of God ; a being capable of high moral and intellectual elevation, fertile in design, and with a capacity for transmitting experience, and working out comprehensive plans by the combined labours of many successive generations. In all this there is no analogy to any of the inferior orders of being. The works of the ant and the beaver, the coral zoophyte and the bee, display singular ingenuity and powers of combination ; and each feathered songster builds its nest with wondrous forethought, in nature's appointed season. But the instincts of the inferior orders of creation are in vain compared with the devices of man, even in his savage state. Their most ingenious works cost them no intellectual effort to acquire the craft, and experience adds no improvements in all the continuous labours of the wonderful mechanicians. The beaver constructs a dam more perfect than the best achievements of human ingenuity in the formation of breakwaters, and builds for itself a hut which the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire justly contrasts in architectural skill with the ruder dwelling of the Asiatic Tartar. The bee, in forming its cell, solves a mathe- matical problem which has tasked the labours of acutest analysts. But each ingenious artificer is practising a craft which no master taught, and to which it has nothing to add. The wondrous, in- stinctive, living machine creates for itself the highest pleasure it is capable of, in working out the art with which it is divinely endowed ; and accomplishes it with infallible accuracy, as all its untaught predecessors did, and as, without teaching, each new- born successor will do. To such architects and artists history does not pertain, for their arts knew no primeval condition of imperfection, and witness no progress. Of their works, as of their organic structure, one example is a sufficient type of the whole. The palaeontologist's relics of preadamite life have been designated by one popular geologist, " the Medals of Creation ;" and the term, though borrowed from the antiquary, has a signi- ficance which peculiarly marks the contrast now referred to be- tween the objects of study of the geologist and the archaeologist. 1 I fn ml' ■-/, Act ii. sc. 2. in.] Accumulated Knowledge. 35 Like medals struck in the same die, the multitude of examples of an extinct species, each exquisitely sculptured coral, and every cast of a symmetrical sigillaria, repeat the same typical charac- teristics ; and the poet's fancy may be accepted as literally true, in relation to the . most ingenious arts which engage the study of the naturalist : — " All the winged habitants of paradise, Whose songs once mingled with the songs of angels, Wove their first nests as curiously and well As the wood minstrel in our evil day After the labour of six thousand years." 1 But with the relics of human art, even in its most primitive and rudimentary forms, it is otherwise. Each example possesses an individuality of its own, for it is the product of an intelligent will, capable of development, and profiting by experience. Accumulated knowledge is the grand characteristic of man. Every age bequeaths some results of its experience ; and this constitutes the vantage ground of succeeding generations. The deterioration which follows in the wake of every impediment to such transmission and accumulation of knowledge, no less essen- tially distinguishes man from the ingenious spinners, weavers, and builders, who require no lesson from the past, and bequeath no experience to the future. Man alone can be conceived of as an intelligent mechanician, starting with the first rudiments of art, devising tools, initiating knowledge, and accumulating experience. Whatever, therefore, tends to disclose glimpses of such a primitive condition, and of his earliest acquisitions in mechanical arts and metallurgic knowledge, helps to a just conception of primeval man, and points to the beginning of the race. Let us then glance at the evidence we possess of such an initial stage of being. And first in seeming chronological order are those traces of human arts in the drift, or in ossiferous caves, among the bones of strange orders of beings hitherto supposed to have long preceded the existence of man. In the ancient alluvial deposits — most modern among the strata of the geologist, — lie abundant traces of extinct animal life, belonging to that recent transitional era of the globe in which man was introduced. In nearly all respects they present a contrast to everything we are familiar with in the history of our earth as the theatre of human action. In a zoological point of view they in- clude man and the existing races of animals, as well as extinct 1 Montgomery, Pelican Island. 30 Primeval Britain. [chap. races which appear to have been contemporaneous with indigenous species. To the archaeologist they are rich in records of that prim- eval transition in which the beginnings of history lie. How early in that closing geological epoch man appeared, or how late into that archaeological era the extinct fossil mammals survived, are the two independent propositions which the sister sciences have to establish and reconcile. The insular character of Great Britain renders it a peculiarly interesting epitome of archaeological study, a microcosm complete in itself, and little less ample in the variety of its records than the great continent, divorced from it by the ocean ; yet the question, as we have seen, is reopened : Was it already insular when its earliest nomade trod its unhistoric soil ? The Caledonian allophylian, as we now know, pursued the gigantic Balaena in an estuary which swept along the base of the far- inland Ocliils, and guided his tiny canoe, above an ocean bed, which had to be upheaved into the sun- shine of many centuries before it could become the arena of deeds that live associated on the historic page with the names of Agricola, Edward, Wallace and Bruce, of Montrose, Cromwell, and Mar. Its history dawns in an era of geological mutation ; yet not more so than such as is now at work in other and neighbouring historic lands. It is a type of the changes which were working elsewhere, and gradually transforming that strange post-tertiary microcosm into the familiar historic Britain of this nineteenth century. From an examination of its detritus and included fossils, and from the disclosures of peat-mosses, we learn that, at the period when the British Isles were taken possession of by their first colonists, the country must have been almost entirely covered with forests, and overrun by animals long since extinct. In the deposits of marl that underlie the accumulated peat-bogs of Scotland and Ireland, are found abundant remains of the fossil elk, an animal far exceeding in magnitude any existing species of deer. Its bones have been found — at Walton, in Essex, for example, — associated with skeletons of the mastodon, and in the diluvium at Folkstone, with numerous teeth, jaws, and detached bones of the extinct rhinoceros, hippopotamus, hyena, fossil ox, etc. ; yet little doubt is now entertained that the elk was con- temporaneous with man in the British Isles. Stone hatchets, flint arrow-heads, and fragments of pottery have been recovered along- side of the skeleton, under circumstances that satisfy geologists, as well as archaeologists, of their contemporaneous deposition; its in.] Its Fossil Fauna. 37 bones have been found with the tool marks of the flint chisel and saw ; and evidence of various kinds seems to exhibit this gigantic deer as an object of the chase, and a source of primitive food, clothing, and tools. Professor Jamieson and Dr. Mantell note the discovery, in the county of Cork, of a human body exhumed from a marshy soil, beneath a peat-bog eleven feet thick. The soft parts were converted into adipocire, and the body, thus preserved, was enveloped in a deer-skin of such large dimensions, as to lead them to the opinion that it belonged to the extinct elk. In 1863, Professor Beete Jukes exhibited to the geological sec- tion of the British Association, the left femur, with a portion of one of the tines of an antler, recently dug up in the vicinity of Edgeworthstown, lying in marl, under forty feet of bog. A transverse cut on the lower end of the femur corresponded with another on the antler, by which they appeared to have been adapted for junction. After carefully examining this bone, I entertain no doubt of its having been cut by a sharp tool, and purposely prepared as the haft of the horn Made which lay beside it. When the two were fastened together, they must have made a very formidable weapon. Other bones of this fossil deer have been repeatedly observed to bear marks of artificial cutting ; but one of the most interesting evidences of their use in comparatively recent times, was produced at a meeting of the Archaeological Institute, June 3, 1864. The Earl of Dunraven then exhibited an imperfect Irish lyre, found in the moat of Desmond Castle, Adare, the material of which was pronounced by Professor Owen to be bone of the Irish elk. Increasing evidence, therefore, appears to con- firm the belief that this now extinct species was coeval with the aborigines of the British Islands. In the same recent formations abundant traces of animals occur having a special interest in relation to our present subject, as not only adapted for the chase, but suitable for domestication. Of the ancient British Bovidce, the remains of the Bos pri?nigenius are of frequent occurrence, especially in the alluvial deposits of Scotland. One skull, in the British Museum, from Perthshire, measures a yard in length, and the span of the horns is forty -two inches. Sir Henry de la Beche refers, in the Geological Observer, to the discovery, in various submarine forests, of foot-prints mingling with smaller ones of the deer, which he conceives may have been those of the great fossil ox. Of its existence contemporaneously with man no 38 Bone Implements. [char doubt can be entertained, fur its bones are met with in great abundance both in the Danish shell-mounds and the Swiss lake- dwellings ; and have been found in British tumuli, and even mingling with Roman remains. The evidence supplied by the ossiferous caves of England, as of the continents of Europe and America, is full of interest from cor- responding revelations. Kirkdale Cave, Yorkshire, has acquired a special celebrity from the description and illustration of its contents, given by Dr Buckland in his Rcliquice Diluviance, in connexion with a diluvial theory subsequently abandoned ; and Kent's Hole, near Torbay, one of the richest depositories of British fossil carni- vora, yielded no less remarkable traces of primitive mechanical arts. \ '•»; iwa-: i k M V Fig. 1. — British Bone Implements. Intermingled with remains of the rhinoceros, cave-hyena, great cave-tiger, cave-bear, and other fossil mammalia in unusual abund- ance, lay numerous implements wrought from their bones ; and the investigation of the Brixham Cave, in the same vicinity, in 1858, by competent scientific explorers, guided by the accumulated know- ledge and experience of upwards of thirty years, gave precision to the ideas already entertained, of the coexistence of man with the extinct fauna of the caves. His tools of bone, like others found on many primitive British sites, exhibit the most infantile stage of rudimentary art. Fragments of sun-baked urns, and rounded slabs of slate of a plate-like form, were associated with the traces of rude culinary practices, illustrative of the habits and tastes of III.] Food. 39 the primeval savage. Broken pottery, calcined bones, charcoal, and ashes, showed where the hearth of the allophylian Briton had stood ; and along with these lay dispersed the flints, in all con- ditions, from the rounded mass as it came out of the chalk, through various stages of progress, on to finished arrow-heads and hatchets ; while small flint-chips, and partially used flint-blocks, thickly scattered through the soil, served to indicate that the British trog- lodyte had there his workshop, as well as his kitchen, and wrought the raw material of that primeval stone-period into the requisite tools and weapons of the chase. Nor were indications wanting of the specific food of man in the remote era thus recalled for us. Besides accumulated bones, some at least the spoils of the chase, there lay heaped together near the mouth of the cave a number of shells of the mussel, limpet, and oyster, with a palate of the scarus : indicating that the aborigines found their precarious subsistence from the alternate products of the chase and the spoils of the neighbouring sea. The same fact is further illustrated by similar relics of a more recent subterranean stone dwelling at Savrock, near Kirkwall, in Orkney, situated, like the natural Torbay cavern, close to the sea- shore. Accumulated remains of charcoal and peat ashes lay inter mingled with bones of the small northern sheep, the horse, ox, deer, and whale, and also with some rude implements illustrative of primitive Orcadian arts ; while a layer of shells of the oyster, escallop, and periwinkle, the common whelk, the purpura, and the limpet, covered the floor and the adjacent ground, in some places half a foot deep. In the interval since I first drew attention to such traces of Scot- land's prehistoric centuries, this class of remains has excited special interest ; and ancient shell-mounds, analogous to the Kjokenmood- ings of Denmark, have been discovered and explored on the coasts of Elgin and Inverness-shire, with similar results. But the additions thus made to our knowledge of primitive ages are slight, in compari- son with those recently derived from the exploration of caves in Central France. The Dordogne caverns show man contemporaneous with the reindeer, the fossil elk, and other extinct animals indica- tive of a totally different climatic condition ; devoid apparently of metals ; yet engraving representations of natural objects, such as figures of familiar cpiadrupeds, on plates of deer's-horn ; and otherwise furnishing remarkable proofs that the European man 6f that primeval era stood out with as clear a line of demarcation 40 American Drift. [chap. from the irrational brute, as the Red man of the New World does at the present time. 1 But the discoveries so replete with interest and value, which thus extend the resources of the European archaeo- logist and anthropologist, are only known to me through the ordi- nary channels of information ; and I turn therefore to another field of study and research, rendered valuable by the contrast which it presents in all ways to that of historic Europe, with its confusing elements pertaining to times when the ambition of Eome so over- rode all nationalities, and obliterated the memories of history, that even now it is hard to persuade some men there was a European world before that of the Caesars. The city of Toronto, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, is built on the drift clays which have accumulated above the rocks of the Lower Silurian formation to an average depth of upwards of thirty feet, and in some places to more than seventy feet. The construction of an esplanade along the lake shore of the city, dur- ing recent years, exposed a cutting of upwards of two miles in length, and laid bare the virgin soil of the most populous site now devoted to the civilizing processes of European colonization in Upper Canada. The same drift clay and gravel have been exposed in numerous other excavations, but hitherto without disclosures of interest to the archaeologist. In one case only, so far as I have been able to ascertain, did any trace of prior human presence appear. At the depth of nearly two feet from the surface, in front of the Parliament buildings, the bones and horn of a deer lay amid an accumulation of charcoal and wood ashes, and with them a rude stone chisel or hatchet. But the travelled fossils of the Toronto drift are of a very different era, and belong to the Hudson river group of the Lower Silurian, like the rocks on which it is super- imposed. With varying organic remains embedded in its clay and gravel, the same formation overlies the true fossiliferous rocks of Western Canada ; and seems to make of its long stretch of wooded levels and gentle undulations, a country fitted to slumber through untold centuries under the shadow of its pine-forests, a type of the earth of primeval man, until the new-born mechanical science of Europe provided for it the railway and the locomotive, and made its vast chain of rivers and lakes a highway for the steamboat. With such novel facilities added to the indomitable energy of the intruding occupants, the whole face of the continent is in rapid process of transformation ; and it is well, ere the change is com- 1 Compies Rendus, Feb. 29, 1864. hi.] Relics of Ancient Life. 41 pleted, that some note be made of every decipherable index of the characteristics of a past thus destined to speedy obliteration. From the uncleared wilds that still occupy the shores of Lake Superior, south-eastward through the great lakes and rivers to the valley of the St. Lawrence, those drift deposits reveal to the geolo- gist marvellous changes that have transpired in that extensive area of the North American continent, through a greatly prolonged period of what to him are recent times. Along the low shores stretching away from the rapids of Sault Ste. Marie to Lake Superior, huge granitic boulders lie strewed like the wreck of some Titanic Babel ; and wherever the waves of the St. Lawrence reopen the deposits along the lower portion of the valley in which they now lie, the sea-bottoms of an ancient ocean are revealed, fre- quently with littoral or deep-sea shells embedded at different levels in the stratified drift. But remote as is the antiquity, according to all human chronology, to which the fauna of these beds of marine detritus belong, the palaeontologist detects among their post-tertiary fossils the phoca, balaenae of more than one species, fishes, articulata, and the shells of many mollusca still inhabiting the neighbouring ocean along the northern Atlantic coasts. The period, therefore, which embraces those relics of ancient life is the same to which man belongs, and they mark for it one of the phases of that last transitional era during which the earth was being prepared for his entrance upon it. Since the natica, fusus, turritella, and other marine animals of the post-pliocene period, were the living occu- pants of the St. Lawrence valley, vast changes have been wrought on the physical geography of the continent. The relative levels of the sea and land have altered, so as to elevate old sea-margins to the slopes of lofty hills, and leave many hundred miles inland escarpments wrought by the waves of that ancient sea. The con- ditions of climate have undergone no less important changes, de- veloping in a corresponding degree the new character and conditions of life pertaining to this bed of an extinct ocean : covered with successive deposits of marine detritus, and then elevated into the regions of sun and rain, to be clothed with the umbrageous forest, and to become the dwelling-place through another dimly-measured period, of the wapiti, the beaver, and the bison ; and with them, of the Iroquois, the Huron, and the Chippewa : all alike the fauna of conditions of life belonging to a transitional period of the New World preparatory to our own. Marvellous as are those cosmical revolutions belonging to the 42 Extinct Fauna. [chap. period of emergence of the northern zone of America from the great Arctic Ocean : when we look on each completed whole the process appears to have been characterized by no abnormal violence. Slowly through long centuries the ocean shallowed. The deep sea organ- isms of a former generation were overlaid by the littoral shells of a newer marine life, and then the tidal waves retreated from the emerging sea-beach ; until now Ave seek far down in the gulf of the St. Lawrence and on the coast of Labrador for the living descend- ants of species gathered from the post-pliocene drift. Thus the closing epoch of geology in the New World, as in the Old, is brought into contact with that in which its archaeology begins ; and we look upon the North American continent as at length prepared for the presence of man. Such records are here noted among the disclosures of the great valley of the St. Lawrence, which drains well-nigh half a continent; for it is in the valleys by which the present drainage of historic areas takes place, that not only such deposits of recent shells and fossil relics of existing fauna occur : but also that the most ex- tensive remains of extinct mammalian fauna are disclosed, in asso- ciation with objects serving to link them with those of modern eras. In formations of this character have been found, in the lower valley of the Mississippi, the Ehplias primigenius, the Mastodon Ohioticus, the Mcgalonyx, Mcgalodon, Ereptodon, and the Equus curvidens, or extinct American horse ; with many other traces of an unfamiliar fauna, and also a flora, contemporaneous with those gigantic mam- mifers, but which also include both marine and terrestrial represen- tatives of existing species. Corresponding in its great geographical outlines very nearly to its present condition, the American con- tinent must have presented in nearly all other characteristics a striking contrast to its modern aspect : clothed though it seems to us in primeval forests, and scarcely modified by the presence of man. In the post-pliocene formations of South Carolina, exposed along the bed of the Ashley Eiver, remains of the megatherium, megalodon, and other gigantic extinct mammals occur, not only associated with existing species peculiar to the American continent, but also apparently with others, hitherto believed to have been domesticated and introduced for the first time by modern European colonists. But more interesting for our present purpose, as possibly indicating the contemporaneous existence of some of those strange mammals with man, are notices of remains of human art in the same formation. Professor Holmes, in exhibiting a collection of in.] Man and the Mastodon. 43 fossils from the post-pliocene of South Carolina, before the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, remarked : "Dr. Klipstein, who resides near Charleston, in digging a ditch for the purpose of reclaiming a large swamp, discovered and sent to me the tooth of a mastodon, with the request that I should go down and visit the place, as there were indications of the bones and teeth of the animal still remaining in the sands which underlie the peat-bed. Accord- ingly, with a small party of gentlemen, we visited the doctor, and succeeded not only in obtaining several other teeth and bones of this animal, but nearly one entire tusk, and immediately alongside of the tusk discovered the fragment of pottery which I hold in my hand, and which is similar to that manufactured at the present time by the American Indians." 1 It would not be wise to found hasty theories on such strange juxtaposition of relics, possibly of very widely separated periods. The Ashley Eiver has channeled for itself a course through the eocene and post-pliocene formations of South Carolina, and where these are exposed on its shores the fossils are washed from their beds, and become mingled with the remains of recent indigenous and domestic animals, and objects of human art. But the discovery of Dr. Klipstein was made in exca- vating an undisturbed, and geologically speaking, a comparatively recent formation. The tusk of the mastodon lay alongside of the fragment of pottery, in a deposit of the peat and sands of the post- pliocene beds. Immediately underneath lie marine deposits, rich with varied groups of mollusca, corresponding to species now living on the sea- coast of Carolina, but also including two fossil species no longer to be met with there, though common in the Gulf of Mexico and the West Indian seas. Here the palaeontology of the New World discloses to us types of a fauna pertaining to its latest transitional period, which serve to illustrate the marvellous contrast between its commencement and its close. Until the discovery of teeth of the megatherium in the post-pliocene bed of the Ashley Eiver, remains of that extinct mammal had been found only in the state of Georgia, in North America, while the Mastodon Oliioticns and Eleplias primigenius are among the well-known fauna of the Canadian drift. Of these, some North American localities have furnished remains in remarkable profusion, but none more so than the celebrated morass in Kentucky, known by its homely but ex- 1 Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, July 1859, pp. 178, 186. 44 Indian Traditions. [chap. pressive name of the Big-bone Lick. Embedded in the blue clay of this ancient bog, entire skeletons, or detached bones, of not less than one hundred mastodons and twenty mammoths, have been found, besides remains of the megalonyx and other extinct quad- rupeds. A magnificent skeleton of the Mastodon Ohioticus, now in the British Museum, was discovered, with teeth and bones of many others, near the banks of La Pomme de Terre, a tributary of the Osao-e Paver, Missouri ; and there once more we seem to come upon contemporaneous traces of man. " The bones," says Mantell, who examined them in the presence of Mr. Albert Koch, their discoverer, "were embedded in a brown sandy deposit full of vegetable matter, with recognisable remains of the cypress, tro- pical cane, and swamp-moss, stems of the palmetto, etc., and this was covered by beds of blue clay and gravel to a thickness of about fifteen feet. Mr. Koch states, and he personally assured me of the correctness of the statement, that an Indian flint arrow-head was found beneath the leg-bones of this skeleton, and four similar weapons were embedded in the same stratum." 1 Another, but more dubious account, preserved in the American Journal of Science, describes the discovery in Missouri of the bones of a mammoth, with considerable portions of the skin, associated with stone spear- heads, axes, and knives, under circumstances which suggest the idea that it had been entangled in a bog, and there stoned to death and partially consumed by fire. 2 Such contiguity of the works of man with those extinct mammals, warns us at least to be on our guard against any supercilious rejection of indications of his ancient presence in the New World as well as in the Old. Whether or not the mammoth and mastodon had been contem- porary with man, their remains were objects of sufficiently striking- magnitude to awaken the curiosity even of the unimpressible Indian ; and traditions were common among the aborigines relative to their existence and destruction. M. Fabri, a French officer, informed Buffon that they ascribed those bones to an animal which they named the Pere aux Bmwfs. Among the Shawnees, and other southern tribes, the belief was current that the mastodon once m-cupied the continent along with a race of giants of corresponding proportions, and that both perished together by the thunderbolts of the Great Spirit. Another Indian tradition of Virginia told that these monstrous quadrupeds had assembled together, and were 1 Mantell's Fossils of the British Museum, p. 473. 2 American Journ. of Science and Arts, vol. xxxvi. p. 199, First Series. in.] Giants. 45 destroying the herds of deer and bisons, with the other animals created by the Great Spirit for the nse of his red children ; when he slew them all with his thunderbolts, excepting the big bull, who defiantly presented his enormous forehead to the bolts, and shook them off as they fell ; until, being at length wounded, he fled to the region of the great lakes, where he is to this day. The first notice in an English scientific journal, of the fossil mammals of the American drift, furnishes such a counterpart to the Shawnee traditions of extinct giants of the New World, as might teach a lesson to modern speculators in science ; when it is borne in remembrance that the difficulty now is to reconcile the discovery of works of human art alongside of their remains. In 1712, certain gigantic bones, which would now most probably be referred to the mastodon, were found near Cluverack, in New Eng- land. The famous Dr. Increase Mather soon after communicated the discovery to the Royal Society of London ; and an abstract in the Philosophical Transactions didy sets forth his opinion of there having been men of prodigious stature in the antediluvian world, as proved by the bones and teeth, which he judges to be human, " particularly a tooth, which was a very large grinder, weighing four pounds and three-quarters, witli a thigh-bone seventeen feet long." 1 They were doubtless looked upon with no little satisfac- tion by Dr. Mather, as a striking confirmation of the Mosaic record, that " there were giants in those days." To have doubted the New England philosopher's conclusions might have been even more dangerous then, than to believe them now. Possibly, after the lapse of another century and a half, some of our own confused minglings of religious questions with scientific investigations will not seem less foolish than the antediluvian giants of the New England divine. In all that relates to the history of man in the New World, we have ever to reserve ourselves for further truths. There are languages of living tribes, of which we have neither vocabulary nor grammar. There are nations, of whose physical aspect we scarcely know anything ; and areas where it is a moot point even now, whether the ancient civilisation of central America may not be still a living thing. The ossiferous caves of England have only revealed their wonders during the present century, and the works of art in the French drift lay concealed till our own day. We cannot, therefore, even guess what America's disclosures will 1 Philosophical Transactions, vol. xxiv. p. 85. 46 Drift Disclosures. [chap. be. Discoveries in its ossiferous caverns have already pointed to the same conclusions as those of Europe. A cabinet of the British Museum is filled with fossil bones of mammalia, including those of the scelidotherium, glyptodon, and chlamydotherium, as well as of extinct carnivora, obtained by Dr. Lund and M. Claussen from certain limestone caverns in the Brazils, closely resembling the ossiferous caves of Europe. The relics were embedded in a reddish coloured loam, covered over with a thick stalagmitic flooring ; and along with them, in the same ossiferous bed, lay numerous bones of genera still inhabiting the continent, with shells of the large bulimus, a common terrestrial mollusc of South America. No clear line of demarcation can be traced here between the era of the extinct carnivora and edentata, and those of existing species ; and there is therefore no greater cause of wonder than in the analogous examples of Europe, to learn that in the same detritus of these Brazilian caves, Dr. Lund found relics of human skeletons, which, from their condition and the circumstances in which they were discovered, he was led to conclude belonged to a tribe coeval with some of the extinct mammalia. Nor have the first disclosures of works of art in the American drift still to be made. I have in my possession an imperfect flint knife, to all appearance as un- questionable a relic of human art as the most symmetrical of those assigned to a similar origin, by the explorers of the French and English drift-gravels. It was given me by P. A. Scott, an intelli- gent Canadian, who found it at a depth of upwards of fourteen feet, among the rolled gravel and gold-bearing quartz of the Grinell Leads, in Kansas Territory, while engaged in digging for gold. In an alluvial bottom, in the Blue Kange of the Bocky Mountains, distant several hundred feet from a small stream called Clear Creek, a shaft was sunk, passing through four feet of rich black soil, and below this, through upwards of ten feet of gravel, reddish clay, and rounded quartz. Here the flint implement was found, and its unmistakably artificial origin so impressed the finder, that he secured it, and carefully noted the depth at which it lay. Another implement of hornstone, now in the collection of the Scottish Antiquaries, was obtained by me from a dealer in Indian curiosities, at Lewiston, in the state of New York, where it was said to have been found, at a great depth, when sinking a well. It is of large size and rude workmanship ; and bears considerable resemblance to some of the almond-shaped flints from the European drift. But it also corresponds to a numerous class of implements in.] Antiquity of the American Man, 47 procured from the ancient mounds of the Mississippi valley ; and probably does not belong to a more remote period than that of those prehistoric monuments of the New "World, the characteristics of which are discussed in a later chapter. Such are some of the indications of the earliest appearance of man in that transitional era, during which the earth was under- going its final preparation for his presence, as a being endowed not only with the highest form of organic life, but with a rational soul. The evidences of his ancient presence on the American continent, accord with proofs furnished by the multitude of independent languages, and the diversity of types of race, ranging from the Arctic circle to the most southern cape of Tierra del Fuego. But it would be rash to assume from the partial evidence yet obtained, that the juxtaposition of flint arrow-heads with the mastodon of Missouri, the pottery with bones and tusk of the same animal in the post-pliocene of South Carolina, the human bones in the rich ossiferous caverns of the Brazils, or the flint implement recovered from the drift of the Eocky Mountains, are unquestionable evi- dences of man's existence on the American continent contem- poraneously with the extinct mastodon or megatherium. Other evidence, however, points with more or. less certainty in the same direction. Sir Charles Lyell looks with greater favour than he once did, on the possible coexistence of man with the mastodon, megalonyx, and other extinct species, among bones of which, in the yellow loam of the Mississippi valley, near Natchez, a human pelvic bone was recovered, and has been made the basis of very comprehensive theories. In the delta of the same river, near New Orleans, a complete human skeleton is reported to have been found, buried at a depth of sixteen feet, under the remains of four successive cypress forests ; and this discovery furnishes the data from which Dr. Bennet Dowler assigns to the human race an existence in the delta of the Mississippi 57,000 years ago. 1 But evidence of this exceptional nature requires to be used with modest caution. Antiquaries of Europe having found tobacco pipes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alongside of pottery and other undoubted remains of Boman art, have hastily antedated the use of tobacco to classic times. 2 On equally good evidence it might be carried back to those of the mastodon, as the discovery of a similar relic has been recorded, at a depth of many feet, in sinking 1 Types of Mankind, p. 272. 2 La Normandie Souterraine, p. 76. ,_j 48 Primitive Arts. [chap. a coal-pit at Misk, in Ayrshire. 1 Elaborate investigations on the geological character, and the depth, of the Nile deposits, carried on from 1851 to 1854, under the direction of Mr. Leonard Horner, have supplied data for similar speculations relative to the age of the pottery and burnt brick recovered from various depths. But, whatever value may finally attach to his estimate from such evi- dence, of the presence of man in the Nile valley from 12,000 to 30,000 years ago ; his researches were carried out on a compre- hensive scale, by observers well qualified for the task ; and the results in no degree invalidate the undisputed assumption that even the rudest traces of art can be referred to no other worker but man. But looking at the most ancient evidences of artistic invention and mechanical skill in either hemisphere, they all agree in indi- cating man's first arts to have been of the most primitive kind ; and thereby invite to a careful reconsideration of the question how far our modern standards of mechanical ingenuity supply an un- varying or trustworthy test of intellectual development. 1 Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 503. iv.] The Reasoning Faculty. 49 CHAPTER IV. SPEECH. THE REASONING FACULTY— LANGUAGE : ITS ORIGIN— ABSTRACT TERMS— NAMES OF ANIMALS — WILD MEN— BORROWED TERMS— THE MIMETIC ELEMENT— MULTIPLI- CATION OF WORDS— THE COPTIC VOCABULARY — MA, MAMMA— INDIAN LAN- GUAGES—THE WHIP-POOR-WILL— DESCRIPTIVE NAMES — INDIAN ONOMATOPOEIA — NAMES FOR NATURAL SOUNDS— EMOTIONAL UTTERANCES — PHONETIC TYPES — ELEMENTS OF LANGUAGE— AGASSIZ ON LANGUAGE— GROWTH OF ROOT-WORDS— NORMAN SPEECH— VOICE OF ANIMALS— VOWEL SOUNDS— LAURA BRIDGEMAN — ASSOCIATED SOUNDS— VOCAL SIGNS OF IDEAS— GRAMMATICAL FORMS— MUTE SIGNS— RUDIMENTS OF VOCAL LANGUAGE— SOUNDS OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS — PATOIS — WORDS, AND GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION". The reasoning by means of which the existence of man in geological periods has been inferred, proceeds mainly on the as- sumption that he was then, as now, a rational being, manifesting some of the most characteristic attributes by which lie is still distinguished from the whole irrational creation. It is consistent with later experience that the first evidences of his mechanical industry should be recovered amid traces of a rigorous climate. But the more favoured regions of the earth, — typified in the garden occupied by the first pair, — where nature spontaneously provided for the simple requirements of man, may nevertheless be regarded as the primeval habitat and true birthplace of the human race. There indications of his advent are still to be looked for. But to the occupant of such a genial climate, surrounded by the spon- taneous abundance of nature, and impelled by no external in- fluences to devise clothing, or construct dwellings : the arts and laborious industry of later generations were superfluous. But the reasoning faculty whereby man, in his most untutored stage of being, devises the tools and garments, the fire and archi- tecture, by means of which he adapts himself to every climate, is also capable of spontaneous activity ; and in regions involving no necessity for the arts or exhaustive toils of the hunter and fisher, D 50 Language. [chap. we may conceive of the first application of his virgin faculties to very different occupations from those which modern standards of civilisation suggest. Difficult as it is to define by specific characteristics, what nevertheless seems so obvious as the essential diversity between man and the brutes : a prominent place among his persistent attri- butes as the one rational animal, may be assigned to : 1st, Eeason, working by experience, and therefore tentative and progressive. 2d, The moral sense, which recognises responsibility to a law dis- tinct from self- interest. 3d, Language, by means of which organic sounds are made subservient to intelligent volition; and developed into a vocabulary coextensive with human thought and perception. The last of those, in so far as it is man's own work, and not a miraculous endowment, appears to be one of the occupations in which his virgin faculties must have found their earliest employ- ment. And modern as the oldest of living, or even of existing languages may be, the further the study of language is pursued, the more obvious does it become that relics of its primitive forms and phonetic types lie embedded in the structure of later languages. There must the root-germs of language be sought, like the relics of primeval art, buried in later formations of post-pliocene strata. The origin of language has already found its solution in hypo- theses ranging through, the widest extremes ; and the theories of one class of reasoners have so frequently supplied the theme of ridicule for others, that now, when the science of language is acquiring new favour, it is all the more difficult to deal freely with the questions which lie at its foundation. Nevertheless, looking on this question from the same novel point of view as is here proposed for the whole subject of primitive ethnology, it presents some aspects of suggestive significance. That the New World revealed to its first explorers, in the fifteenth century, no dumb anthropoid link between man and brute ; but nations as amply endowed with speech, and some of them even as far advanced in the maturity of an ideographic language, as many of those of the Old World : is in itself no unimportant fact. But it is with man in the condition furthest removed from that of lettered races that we chiefly seek to deal ; and of this the Indian of the New World is a highly characteristic type. Numerous tribes occupied its forests and prairies, in a condition as nearly akin to the fauna on which they preyed as seems compatible with the ineradicable instincts of humanity. Such unquestionably had been their condition for iv.] Its Origin. 51 many generations. Yet these savage tribes, devoid of letters, and of every trace of past or present civilisation, were found not only communicating their thoughts by means of intelligent speech ; but possessing languages of consistent grammatical structure, involving agglutinate processes of a complexity unknown before, and capable of being employed not only in effective native oratory, but as vehicles of the sacred and profane literature of the Ancient World. Language has been more frequently regarded as an attribute of man, than as in any respect his own work ; and its existence in mature development among nations otherwise at so infantile a stage, might seem to lend countenance to the idea. But no modern advocate for the instinctive or miraculous origin of language, as- signs more than certain radical elements of the vocabulary to such a source ; and philological analysis yields so much that is an aftergrowth, that the source of the residual elements is not be- yond the pale of legitimate discussion. Was language a divine gift to the first man, in the form of an instinctive association in the human mind of sounds with ideas, so that the relation between the phonetic sign and the corresponding thought was one of uni- versal recognition ? Or was man simply endued with reason and the organs of speech, and left to develop language for himself by the establishment of a recognised relation between specific ideas and articulate sounds ? It does not necessarily follow on the latter assumption, that there was no innate perception of relations be- tween certain specific ideas or objects and articulate sounds ; and if some roots can be shown to have such an origin, the fact that others now appear to be arbitrary, is no sufficient argument for affirming their miraculous origin. The first illustration of the use of human speech is furnished in the simple, yet suggestive narra- tive which immediately follows the genesis of man : " And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam, to see what he would call them : and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field ; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him." He was, there- fore, alone, without need of speech for the interchange of thoughts, and devoid as yet of a companion with whom he coidd hold intelligent converse. The sacred narrative fully accords with experience as to the indigenous or purely native portions of language. Among these 52 Abstract Terms. [chap. will certainly be found names for the most familiar fauna and flora pertaining to the habitat of the race. Abstract or generic terms, like the class of ideas they express, are of late growth in every language ; and even in our own are frequently borrowed from foreign tongues. The names of individual animals are needed before any want of the generic word, animal, is felt. Even the abstract idea of number is realized with difficulty by the un- cultured mind, apart from specific objects enumerated ; nor does the mind necessarily perceive any common relation between forms, colours, odours, or other qualities of objects, noted only for their diversity ; so that even the Anglo-Saxon, after providing an ample native vocabulary for the reds, blues, blacks, browns, and whites, familiar to the eye by their differences, borrows the Latin color, to express their common relation ; as it takes from the same foreign source that of crime as the generic term for the crimes with which its own vocabulary is replete. The paucity of abstract terms, common to all languages in a primitive stage, is as characteristic of the American Indian vocabularies, as of the immature and un- progressive Indian mind. But it is an interesting feature in some of the American languages, that abstract terms are frequently traceable as roots employed in the formation of compound words, though they have no recognised independent significance. Such is the Algonquin aubo, liquid, in shoiviminaubo, wine ; ishkoolai- ivaiibo, whisky ; ozhebiegunaubo, ink, etc. ; and the wahbik, stone, in the waubioahbik, white-stone, or tin ; ozahwalibik, yellow-stone, or copper, etc. The specific word for w^ater is nebee ; impure water, nebeesli ; and the term used by itself for rock or stone is ahsin. In this view of the natural order of development of different classes of words, the first recorded use of speech, in the naming of the living creatures, is full of significance, and strikingly contrasts with the Miltonic dialogues between Raphael and Adam : as in the example where the archangel describes the Satanic artillery, by the help of similes derived from modern architecture : " Which to our eyes discovered, new and strange, A trinle-monnted row of pillars, laid On wheels ; for like to pillars most they seemed." The j (oct's fancy of the invention of cannon, gunpowder, balls, and bombshells, by rebel hosts of angelic combatants, ere our ter- restrial planet was evoked from chaos, is not more extravagant than the idea that the speech of primeval man embraced in its vocabu- J v.] Names of Animals. 53 lary such words as wheels, pillars, and the like terms of mechanical, artistic, or scientific discovery and invention of later times. In the slow migrations of the human family from its central hives, language imperceptibly adapted itself to the novel acquire- ments of man. But with the discovery of America a neAv era began in the history of migration and all its attendant phenomena. Suddenly, in the maturity of Europe's fifteenth century, another world burst upon it, and the nations hastened to possess them- selves of the land. But in its novel scenes language was at fault. Beast, bird, and fish ; flower and tree ; art, nature, and man him- self, were all strange ; and it seemed as if language had its work to do anew, as when first framed amid the life of Eden. The same has been the experience of every new band of invading colonists ; and it can scarcely fail to strike the European naturalist on his first arrival in the New World, that its English settlers, after occupying the continent for upwards of three centuries, instead of originating root- words wherewith to designate plants and animals, as new to them as the nameless living creatures were to Adam in Paradise : apply in an irregular and unscientific manner, the old names of British and European fauna and flora. Thus the name of the English partridge {Per die idee) is applied to one American tetranoid, Tetrcio umhellus ; the pheasant (Vlinsianidce) to another, Tetrao evpido ; and that of our familiar British warbler, the robin, to the Turelus migratorius, a totally different American thrush. Where in a few instances anything like a distinct popular nomen- clature has been attempted, it illustrates another and necessarily later stage in the process of word-making, as in the designation of the cat-bird, the mocking-bird, the blue-bird, or the snow-bird. In a third class, the adoption of native Indian names shows the very same means at work there, which has been expanding the English vocabulary for the last thousand years, till the exotic terms greatly outnumber the whole native Anglo-Saxon element. This belongs, in part, to the condition of vitality manifested by languages at a late stage of development, when the power of origi- nating primary radicals has long been dormant. But it also leads to other inquiries, in reference to names of animals, to which 1 shall recur at a later stage. This much may be noted meanwhile, that looking to names of the most familiar animals and plants, as they occur in languages of the Aryan, or the Semitic stock, each nation appears to have native etymons for such only as were them- selves native to the original habitat of the race ; and thus there are, 54 Wild Men. [chap. to a certain extent, philological centres of creation, coincident with the supposed zoological ones. If man was primarily endowed not only with the faculty of giving articulate expression to thought, but with phonetic root- words which he instinctively applied to express certain ideas or attributes : he is still occasionally found in condi- tions in which such inherent instincts could scarcely fail to reassert their power. When cut off by privation of any of the senses ; or otherwise excluded, whether by organic defect or external circum- stances, from sharing in the fruits of artificial training and transmitted experience : man's inherent faculties invariably reassert their power and repair in some degree the loss. So far, therefore, as language is the product of an instinct of the mind, there are cases in which some of its primitive conditions may be expected to reappear. The illustrations of the faculties inherent in human nature which any well- authenticated case of man living solitary as a wild animal is calculated to supply, are so obvious, that they have been repeatedly sought for. Linnaeus when first directing his attention to ethnological classification, gave a prominent place to wild men, such as those occasionally found haunting the forests of Germany long after the desolating ravages of the French wars. Children orphaned and abandoned, had there occasionally survived to maturity, avoiding like any other wild animal, all subjection to human influence ; and though the stories told of such " wild men " have been grossly exaggerated, some well-established facts concerning them are significant and valuable. A curious illustration of the natural process of name-making, furnished from such a source, has a direct bearing on the present inquiry. A youth who had roamed as a wild denizen of the Ger- man forests, subsisting chiefly on eggs and birds, which he procured by his agility in climbing trees, was caught and received into the asylum established by Count von der Eecke, at Overdyke. He de- voured whatever food he obtained for himself raw ; and retained his preference for it in that condition, in spite of every effort to reclaim him from the savage tastes thus contracted during his wild life. He had lived in the forest till he had acquired an intimate famili- arity with the habits of the birds which furnished to him the chief means of subsistence ; and he had given " to every bird a distinc- tive and often very appropriate name of his own, which they appeared to recognise as he whistled after them." 1 Here the name recognised by the bird was obviously imitated from its own notes by 1 Vi