The title of ‘Prehistoric Man’ in Mr Wilson’s book applies not only to
those races who lived and expired before any history whatever was
written, but to all races, even those who are contemporary with us, who
are incapable of delivering a history of themselves to other nations or
their own posterity. They are rather the _un_-historic, the speechless
people—speechless so far as their posterity is concerned, on whom his
inquiries are directed. In fact, that portion of the development of
mankind which pertains to savage life, or to the very earliest stages of
civilisation, is the subject of Mr Wilson’s book. The subject is far
from being new, but far from being exhausted; and our author’s
archæological knowledge has enabled him to invest it with a novel
interest. His position is somewhat singular in its advantages. A
European archæologist and antiquarian, he finds himself in that new
world where forms of human life are still lingering akin to those which
he has been hitherto studying by the light only of such remains as have
been preserved for ages buried in the earth. His _stone_, his _bronze_,
his _iron_ periods are all found living about him. The flint weapon dug
up in London or Glasgow from the lowest strata of human remains, has, in
this new world, hardly fallen from the hand of the native. The men of
the _stone period_ are still alive, though half a century more may see
them either absorbed in the more civilised races, or altogether
extinguished.
This combination of the knowledge of the antiquarian with the
observations of the traveller has a singular charm for us: but there is
another combination which is still more attractive; it is where the
philosophical historian, familiar with the myths of antiquity, traces in
the living barbarians around him the same play of fancy, or the same
curious development of thought, that he has been accustomed to study in
the obscure records of a dead language. Mr Wilson is an historian as
well as an archæologist, and is in both capacities an enlightened
student of such _living antiquity_ as may still exist in that continent,
where the earliest and the latest forms of civilisation were destined to
meet and to recognise each other.
Our author might, we think, have put his materials together in a more
compact form, and arranged them more carefully. The headings of the
several chapters lead us to expect a more definite arrangement than we
find in the book itself: and this must be partly our excuse if our own
observations should seem to be of a miscellaneous character. It must be
confessed, also, that there is sometimes a want of precision and
accuracy of language on just those occasions where precision is most
needed, and that this is not compensated by a rather too lavish display
of a florid species of eloquence, better fitted for the lecture-room
than the written composition. It is good of its kind, but there is too
much of it. We presume that a large portion of the book was written
originally for the lecture-room. But notwithstanding these minor
defects, we confidently recommend these volumes as replete with
information on a variety of interesting topics, and suggestive of many
trains of reflection. They will assuredly repay an attentive perusal.
Mr Wilson commences with a glance at that problem of the “antiquity of
man” which Sir Charles Lyell has still more lately and more fully
treated. Perhaps, if he had written after the publication of Sir Charles
Lyell’s work, he would have expressed himself with more distinctness on
the subject; yet he seems substantially to have arrived at whatever safe
conclusions the evidence hitherto collected enables us to rest in. He
has said all that can really be said at present on the matter. He
observes that “the closing epoch of geology must be turned to for the
initial chapters of archæology and ethnology.” It is plain that man
could not make his appearance upon the earth till the earth was fitted
for his habitation; and it is a reasonable conjecture that it would not
long be so prepared for him before, in some part of the world, he made
his appearance. Mr Wilson is not disposed to be incredulous as “to the
traces of fossil human bones mingling with those of the extinct mammals
of the drift;” but we gather from his work that he would be slow to rest
his belief on the great antiquity of man solely on the discovery of such
flint implements as have been dug out of the valley of the Somme and
elsewhere. We think that, notwithstanding the confidence of certain
_experts_ who have pronounced that these flints have received their form
from the hand of man, there is a well-founded suspicion that, after all,
they may have been broken into their present shape by natural or
physical forces. They are not ground to a point, it must be remembered,
nor sharpened to an edge, only chipped into a wedge-like form. When we
read of great numbers of these flints being discovered in a certain
spot, and that a _selection_ is made of such as seem to have been
chipped by the hand of man, _and that this selection is a matter of
acknowledged difficulty_, we may be excused for suspending our judgment
as to the fact whether any one of them was ever the tool or implement of
a human being. We may be excused if, in the present state of the
evidence, we require that this testimony of the flints be _confirmed_ by
other testimony,—by the presence of human bones, or of indisputable
works of human art in the same post-pliocene formation.[2] We do not
presumptuously reject their evidence altogether; we do not take it upon
ourselves to say that not one of the stones collected from the valley of
the Somme has been fashioned by man; we have little trust in our own
judgment upon such a matter; but it is not evidence which can _stand
alone_. This Sir Charles Lyell admits himself, though in some passages
of his work he seems to forget his own admission. But such antiquity as
we can assign to man on other evidence—by the discovery in certain
positions of human remains or indisputable relics of human art—is very
great, and sufficient for all the purposes of the ethnologist. The
elaborate, and, to the geologist, highly interesting work of Sir Charles
Lyell demands a separate and careful examination; we here merely content
ourselves with remarking that the _very_ great antiquity of man—that
which would compel us to believe that he existed for some almost
immeasurable period in the condition of the savage—rests hitherto on
unsatisfactory grounds.
The ethnologist who believes, as Mr Wilson does, in the unity of the
human race, requires a long period of time for the development of those
varieties which had become permanent prior to the epoch of the building
of the Egyptian Pyramids. Mr Wilson takes what he requires, but does
not, as matters stand at present, contest for more. To those who, on the
grounds of the sacred text, would dispute his right to even this modest
inroad upon the illimitable Past, he answers,—that the chronology
popularly supposed to be that of the Bible is in fact the chronology
only of certain learned interpreters, and that there is nothing in the
sacred text to exclude the supposition that a much longer interval may
have passed than is generally supposed between the creation of Adam and,
let us say, the appearance of Abraham. Interpreting the Noachian Deluge
as partial—as not, in the literal sense of the term, universal—he finds
scope enough within the limits of the sacred text for that slow and
gradual development of civilised man which his archæology has taught him
to believe in. Nor does he find any difficulty whatever in reconciling
this slow progress from the savage to the civilised man with what is
recorded of the creation of Adam, or the attributes of our first
parents. Their superior excellence, he considers, consisted in their
perfect morality, in the predominance of the benevolent affections, and
in that reason which is one with self-knowledge: it could not have
consisted, he argues, in knowledge of the arts and sciences; certainly
not in the knowledge of arts quite needless in the warmth, abundance,
and security of the garden of Paradise. When, therefore, their
descendants, deprived of this high moral excellence, found themselves
scattered abroad upon the earth, what could they, in fact, have become
but ignorant savages? They would have to evolve from their own natural
sagacity those arts of life which their new relation to the external
world rendered necessary. They would have to commence that long and
toilsome ascent to civilisation which the speculative historian has so
often attempted to describe.
We feel persuaded that our author would be unwilling that, in any notice
of his work, these explanations should be omitted, and therefore it is
that we give them here so prominent a place. For ourselves, so confident
are we that scientific truth and religious truth will be found in the
end to be inextricably combined, and to be reciprocally sustaining each
other, that we are not very solicitous to patch up hasty and perhaps
needless reconciliations. At present we have to settle our science; when
this is done, it will be time to ask ourselves _what_ it is that needs
reconcilement.
Although the archæologist can point with triumph to the evidence of
successive tombs, or cromlechs, as proving the sequence of his three
ages of stone and bronze and iron, he can nowhere carry us back _to the
first stone period_, and from this to the first development of the
_bronze_ and the _iron_. He can show us that on a certain spot—say the
soil on which London stands—there have been generations of men
distinguished by the kind of tools they had framed for themselves. But
it is the history of men _on that spot_ which his materials enable him
to write; they do not enable him to write the history of _the progress
of man_ from his earliest condition of existence. For the first men who
lived on the banks of the Thames had come, we presume, from other
countries; they had had a history, and were the products of some kind of
human society before they settled there; and the generations that
followed might have received their arts, as in one case we know they
did, from foreign nations. It is, after all, therefore, from _a priori_
speculation—from what we infer must have been the course of things—that
we describe mankind as proceeding from the rudest modes of existence to
the more civilised. The testimony which the archæologist appeals to
confirms these speculations; it can do no more. It never brings us to
the real history of human art. We have still to guess how men lived at
first, whether on the fruits of the earth or by the chase; we have still
to guess how men discovered the use of fire, how they elaborated mere
vocal signs into a grammatical language; we have still to conjecture
when or where the first canoe or the first house was built. We make this
remark not to detract from the labours of the archæologist, but simply
to put the subject on its right basis. We have nowhere that kind of
evidence which takes us back to the first developments of the human
intellect; the nature of these must still be matter of inference. We
still argue, to a great extent, in a purely speculative manner; we
conclude that a progress like that which history and historical
monuments enable us to trace, was the kind of progress which the first
families of the earth passed through; but we know nothing historically
of that early progress.
In the old European or Asiatic continent we had been accustomed to
regard the earliest generations of mankind as entirely lost in the mists
of antiquity; but, till lately, we looked on the continent of America as
being, in respect of its population, far more recent, and as affording a
more simple subject for ethnological speculation. The civilisation of
Mexico and Peru, destroyed by the Spaniards, was traced to Egypt, or to
some other portion of the Old World. The vagrant tribes of savages that
lived upon the chase were the still more degenerate children of Europe.
But this new continent is now found to have been the habitation of man
at so remote a period, that the civilisations of Mexico and Peru,
however they originated (and they were probably native), must rank
amongst its modern events. Ruins of more ancient cities are found buried
in its forest, and monuments of some forgotten worship are traced upon
the banks of its rivers. The remains of man himself—parts of the human
skeleton—have been found in positions which suggest an antiquity far
beyond that of the cities of the Nile or the Euphrates. Some of these
cases are well known, and well known on account of the disputes and
discussions they have given occasion to; others, from which
(geologically speaking) only a modest antiquity has been inferred, seem
to our author to be worthy of credit. He says:—
“In the post-pliocene formations of South Carolina, exposed along the
bed of the Ashley River, 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, still
more interesting for our present purpose, as possibly indicating the
contemporaneous existence of some of those strange extinct mammals
with man, are notices of the remains of human art in the same
formation. Professor Holmes, in exhibiting a collection of fossils
from the post-pliocene of South Carolina before the Academy of Natural
Science at 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. Accordingly, 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.’
“It would not be wise,” continues Mr Wilson, “to found hasty theories
on such strange juxtaposition of relics, possibly of very widely
separated periods. The Ashley River 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 excavating an undisturbed, and, geologically
speaking, a comparatively recent formation.”
After alluding to the magnificent skeleton of the _Mastodon Ohioticus_
which is now in the British Museum, and in companionship with which an
Indian flint arrow-head was found, he adds:—
“Another remarkable account, preserved in the ‘American Journal of
Science,’ describes the bones of a mastodon, with considerable
portions of the skin, found in Missouri, 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. Such contiguity of the works of man
with those extinct diluvial giants warns us at least to be upon our
guard against any supercilious rejection of indications of man’s
ancient presence in the New World as well as the Old. If the evidence
is inconsequential or untruthful, future discoveries will not fail to
bring it to nought; if, on the contrary, it involves glimpses of an
unseen truth, no organised scepticism will prevent the ultimate
disclosure of its amplest revelations.”
Had man, during the whole of this early prehistoric epoch, whatever its
duration may have been, lived like the savage, in what we call the
_stone period_? Or had the use of metals and other arts been discovered
and lost again—lost, perhaps, because human societies had not attained
that coherence and stability necessary to the preservation of the arts?
However this may be, it cannot be doubted that the use of the metal tool
forms an important era in the progress of civilisation. And Mr Wilson
mentions a fact which enables us to understand very readily the
transition from the use of stone to the use of metal. Copper is still
found in the New World, and probably was at first found in the Old
World, in a pure state—in _nuggets_, as an Australian gold-digger would
call them—and these could at once be beaten into the shape of an axe by
stone hammers without the application of fire. The fragment of copper
was to the Indian a new kind of stone, which had the fortunate property
of malleability.
“In the veins of the copper region of Lake Superior, the native metal
occurs in enormous masses weighing hundreds of tons; and many loose
blocks of considerable size have been found on the lake shore, or
lying detached on the surface, besides smaller pieces exposed on and
mingled with the superficial soil in sufficient quantities to supply
all the wants of the nomade hunter. This, accordingly, he wrought into
chisels and axes, armlets and personal ornaments of various kinds,
without the use of the crucible and any knowledge of metallurgic arts;
and, indeed, without recognising any precise distinction between the
copper which he mechanically separated from the mass, and the
unmalleable stone or flint out of which he had been accustomed to
fashion his spear and arrow heads.”
Whilst applauding the metal tool, copper or iron, and acknowledging what
we owe to it, let us not pass over the _stone_—that handful of rock or
flint by the aid of which the metal, in the first instance, was wrought
and fashioned—without its meed of gratitude. It seems a slight
unnoticeable fact that there should be these manageable fragments of
hard substance ready to the hand of man; that the whole earth was not
divided between the bed of rock and the bed of sand or clay; that there
should have been there mere stones (mere litter, you would say), of
which the floor of the earth had better have been swept clean. Yet those
nodules of flint formed slowly in the chalk—yet those rolled stones upon
the deserted beach, that the sea has fashioned for the human palm, and
left high and dry upon the land—seem to have entered as much into the
_preparation_ for man as the _fauna_ or the _flora_ amongst which he was
to live.
Who first applied fire to the metal, and thus made it plastic as the
clay and sharper than the stone? who first discovered fire itself? No
one knows; nor is the question worth asking. But there is one thing well
worth noticing: it is the answer given to the question, and that in the
rudest of times and amongst many various nations. Some god bestowed it.
This tendency to look for a supernatural giver is very soon and very
widely developed. And what is more, the idea of a giver has called forth
amongst rude selfish people struggling for existence, the desire to
manifest their gratitude by some act of worship which should also be
some act of self-denial. On a certain day of the year all lights shall
be extinguished, and one man amongst them (endowed for the very purpose
with imaginary sanctity) shall rekindle the flame, thus acknowledging by
this symbol its reception from the divine Giver. The ancient Peruvians
drew their fire on this solemn occasion at once from the sun; they
collected its rays into a focus by a concave mirror of polished metal,
and thus ignited some dried cotton, or bark, or fungus. Nothing could be
more expressive and appropriate than such a symbolic act. It is a pity
that the historian has to record that other symbolic acts (if such they
are to be considered) were of a cruel and hideous description. The
savage is not accustomed only to _thank_ God; he has, he thinks, to
propitiate His favour; and as he has nothing to _give_, he _destroys_ in
honour of the universal Bestower. The worship of the American Indian is
tainted more than any other we read of with the rite of human sacrifice.
Various methods for obtaining fire have been invented, but the earliest
seems to have been by the friction of two dry pieces of wood. It was a
progressive step, we presume, when the bark of a certain tree or a dried
fungus was used for tinder. However produced, it was to the savage, in
the first instance, itself a tool, the immediate instrument he employed
to cut down the tree which would have resisted a long while his flint
hatchet. We thought that all known people had made discovery of fire and
converted it to their own purposes; but the inhabitants of the Ladrones,
when discovered by the Spaniards, are said to have shrunk from fire as
from a thing they simply feared: “they called it a devil, a god that bit
fiercely when it was touched, and lived on wood, which they saw it
devour.”
Mr Wilson entitles the chapter which treats on this subject ‘The
Promethean Instinct: Fire.’ The next chapter is headed ‘The Maritime
Instinct: the Canoe.’ Then we have ‘The Technological Instinct,’ and so
on. Why this ostentatious use of the term Instinct? Did men hunt after
fire even before they had seen it, as an animal might be supposed to
hunt after food even before it had eaten? Do men build canoes as birds
their nests or beavers their dams? What is the leading idea of Mr Wilson
when he thus liberally applies to us the term Instinct? We have desires
and we have intelligence suggesting means to an end. Is it the desire
that is instinctive, or the apprehension of the means whereby the desire
can be gratified? Men have a desire to pass from one side of the river
to the other; perhaps the animal they were in chase of has swam the
stream; they have observed that wood will float, that a large piece of
wood will float with a man on it; they procure such piece of wood, and
paddle themselves across. The knowledge which the man displays in all
this follows from his previous perceptions. Perception, memory,
judgment, are all exercised in a quite normal manner, and the desire to
float across the stream has arisen from the peculiar circumstances in
which the man was placed. What element of mystery is there in this
transaction which calls for the name of Instinct? For the word Instinct
is applied to certain actions of animals because the ordinary laws of
psychology are, or seem, inadequate to explain them—because a certain
mystery hangs over the event which we mark by the name Instinct. When we
see animals acting, without the teaching of experience, in the same sort
of way in which we act after that teaching of experience, we, perplexed
to explain this anomaly, pronounce the action instinctive. The bee and
the bird build in this inexplicable manner. Probably a more minute
investigation may enable us to resolve whatever we call Instinct into
some delicacy of the senses, or some rapidity of the judgment, peculiar
to the animal. Meanwhile the term is serviceable as marking a class of
unexplained phenomena. But how is it applicable to man in his capacity
of boat-builder? The sort of canoe he will build, the materials he will
use, the tools he will work with, are all determined for him by existing
circumstances, and the actual amount of his knowledge. Or is it the
vague desire to put to sea, prompting some manner of boat-building, that
Mr Wilson calls our “maritime instinct?” Are we driven to sea like ducks
to a pond? The peasantry of an inland country are not conscious of any
such instinct, and would be very unfortunate if they possessed it.
We have no wish to expel the terms instinct and instinctive from our
popular diction, even when applied to human actions. There are cases
when men act with a suddenness and decision which remind us of the
animal in his promptest moods, and we naturally apply to these the term
instinctive; and sometimes we apply the term to a tendency or desire
which we cannot at the time trace to our senses, or to the usual
operations of the mind. But when an author formally—in the very titles
of his chapters—supplies us with “Promethean and maritime instincts,” we
may be excused if we ask for some precise definition of the term.
“_Speech_ is one of the instincts of man, but it is by the voluntary
exercise of his intellectual faculties, as we conceive, that he is
enabled to develop it into _language_.” This sounds oracular, but, like
most oracles, it is very obscure. What does Mr Wilson mean by speech as
contrasted with language? Is speech the mere giving of names to things,
and language the formation of a grammar? But grammar is only a naming of
a more complex kind, a naming of things and events in their more
complicated relations. And what speech was ever formed that had not some
grammar, that was not also a language? If by speech, in contrast to
language, is meant the mere utterance of articulate sounds which have no
meaning attached to them, then what proof have we that men ever passed
through a stage of unmeaning gibberish? or could anything so purposeless
be dignified with the name of an instinct? The _desire_ to speak, or to
communicate our thoughts or our wants, is sometimes spoken of as an
instinct. But the need man has of co-operation, and the ability he has
to co-operate, and those general sympathies and affections which render
him a social being, are sufficient to explain this desire. Such a desire
may be contemplated as existing apart and prior to the possession of
language, but there can be no reason for applying the term instinct to
it, unless we apply that term to all our desires. So strong and
inevitable is this desire to express our thoughts, that we have not the
least doubt that, if the human larynx had not been fitted for speech,
man would have invented a language of signs. His hands and feet would
have talked, if his tongue and palate did not. His larynx being mute and
all other faculties remaining the same, he would have talked with his
fingers and written as the Chinese write, whose characters are signs for
things, not for words.
The maritime or boat-building instinct has, at all events, been very
much under the control of circumstances. Sometimes the tree was felled
and hollowed, sometimes the bark was stretched over wicker-work, or
skins of beasts were employed, or planks were made into a raft. The
Egyptian bound some of his water-jugs together and made a raft of them.
Some tribes have limited themselves to the paddle or the oar; some have
spread the sail, and spread it very boldly. The Malay hoists his large
sail over a couple of planks of wood sewed together with bark, and
balances this fragile craft by means of two long spars fastened athwart
and projecting to windward. In such a vessel as this he will scud
fearlessly through tempestuous seas from one island to another. We may
boast, and very justly, of our steam-engines, our electric telegraphs,
and of other triumphant employments of the powers of nature; but even to
this day there is not a more pleasing or thrilling spectacle, or a more
glorious instance of the powers of nature turned to the service of man,
than when some solitary boatman sits, at the helm with sail outspread,
borne by the wind along the surface of the sea. The water floats him,
the wind speeds him; he is for the moment master of the two great
elements. Verily the savage has his joy, his hour of pride and
exultation.
It is curious that the natives of North America limited themselves to
the oar or the paddle. The Peruvians appear to have been the only people
of this continent who, at the time of its discovery by Columbus,
employed the sail. This is a striking instance of the very general fact,
almost amounting to a law, that when a people have attained to a certain
proficiency in the arts, sufficient to render life tolerable, there
ensues a long pause in the career of progress. It requires the stimulus
of an urgent want to set at work the inventive faculties of the savage;
and when his invention has secured to him an agreeable existence, or
what he considers such, there intervenes the force of habit and the
attachment to familiar customs. Fortunately the differences of climate,
or other external circumstances, require or suggest different
inventions, even in this early stage of society, and thus one barbarian
may be able to teach another. A people who had brought the canoe
propelled by oars to perfection, would probably rest contented with it;
they could not have invented the sail themselves; they might receive it
from another people with whom it had been, from the commencement, their
favourite mode of traversing the sea. Our “technological instincts,” as
Mr Wilson calls them, go to sleep in the savage when he is no longer
pinched by hunger or cold, or other pressing inconvenience. They awake
again in the civilised man, with whom invention itself has become an
agreeable effort or an intellectual triumph. Some sort of culinary
vessels are wanted, and if these have been once shaped out of clay, the
same kind of pottery will content a people for ages. If nature has
thrown them the calabash, a ready-made vessel, their _instinct of
pottery_ will not be developed at all; they will content themselves with
the calabash.
Mr Wilson brings together in a very pictorial manner the two extremes of
this human art of boat-building:—
“On the banks of the Scottish Clyde the modern voyager from the New
World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those
huge steamers, with ribs of steel, and planks, not of oak, but of
iron, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier
to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and
pleasure to us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the
forehammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel
appliances of iron shipbuilding, tell of the modern era of steam; but
meanwhile, underneath these very shipbuilders’ yards, lie the
memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back up the
stream of human industry far into prehistoric times. The earliest
recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of
twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt
designation of St Enoch’s Croft. This primitive canoe, hewn out of a
single oak, rested in a horizontal position on its keel; and within
it, near the prow, there lay a curiously suggestive memorial of the
mechanical arts of the remote era to which the ancient ship of the
Clyde must be assigned. This was a beautifully finished stone axe or
celt, doubtless one of the simple implements of the allophylian
Caledonian to whom the canoe belonged, if not, indeed, the tool with
which it had been fashioned into shape.”
From the hollowed trunk of a tree, hewn with a stone axe by this
“allophylian,” as Mr Wilson delights in calling him, to the iron
steam-vessel that would have carried him and all his tribe across the
Atlantic, the advance is great indeed. And a very curious sentiment must
arise in the man who has seen this canoe dug up from under the busy
streets of Glasgow, and then afterwards in another continent, on some
lake or river not yet quite appropriated by the white man, has watched
some prowling Indian paddling about in a canoe not much unlike it. The
past and the present seem to live together before him: it is not the
ends of the earth only that are brought together for him; he appears to
embrace the first and the last of the generations of mankind.
We turn from the rude arts of men to their still ruder thinking—to
customs springing from some sentiment or some strange imagination. Of
these the most universal and the most significant are customs connected
with the burial of the dead. To the habit of interring with the dead man
the implements he most valued in life—his tools or weapons—we owe the
little knowledge we possess of our very primitive ancestors. It is
generally said that these articles were buried with the man, that he
might have them ready for use in another world; and, no doubt, some
vague idea of this kind has extensively prevailed: but if we may
speculate on a subject so obscure as the imaginations of the savage, we
should say that this idea grew out of the custom of burying with the
dead man his own previous possessions, and that the custom itself at
first originated in simple regret and respect for the dead. We cannot
have any strong sentiment without feeling the desire in some way to
manifest it. The dead man was loudly lamented—wept and wailed over—and
the mourners often cut and wounded themselves as an exhibition of their
grief. Well, at such a moment, instead of appropriating to themselves
the possessions of the deceased, the survivors threw them into the grave
with him. They were still in a manner his property. It would manifest a
disrespect to the dead if at once, as soon as the hand of his chief was
cold, another man had seized upon his spear and carried it to his own
hut. Thus this one passionate desire to manifest grief and respect to a
late friend or chief would sufficiently account for the act of interring
with the body the instruments or weapons he had been in the habit of
using. The custom once adopted, superstition would step in and enforce
it, and the imagination would invest it with a new significance. Some
poet of the land would first suggest that, if the dead man rose from his
tomb, he would find himself equipped for the chase or for war. Sometimes
the buried arms, vessels, or other implements, were broken before they
were deposited in the grave, which does not seem to accord with the idea
that they were laid there for any future use. It looks like the
interpretation of a subsequent generation when it is said that the
savage expected the broken tool or perforated vessel, like the decayed
human body, to be restored again and made fit for his use. Here is an
Indian, a Chinook, buried in his canoe. Within the canoe a broken sword
is deposited. Am I to gather that the Chinook expected a maritime life
hereafter, and even to revive floating upon the waters? Does not the
whole act seem, at least in its initiation, to be symbolical? All was at
an end. The man would float no more—would fight no more. The canoe was
buried, the sword was broken.
But whether we are right or not in our supposition as to the origin of
this idea—namely, that the articles buried in the tomb with the deceased
would be useful to him in an after life—it is plain that such an idea
has been entertained, and certainly all our learned writers upon these
ancient customs of burial attribute this motive to our imaginative
forefathers. When, in the old pagan burrows of the wold of Yorkshire or
elsewhere, some British or Saxon charioteer has been exhumed, with the
iron wheel-tires and bronzed horse-furniture (the wreck of the decayed
war-chariot), and the skeletons of the horses, eloquent antiquarians
have not failed to say (as Mr Wilson does) that the dead chief was
buried thus “that he might enter the Valhalla of his gods, proudly borne
in the chariot in which he had been wont to charge amid the ranks of his
foes.” We presume they find themselves justified in this interpretation.
Here, again, we find that the new continent sets almost before the eyes
of our traveller scenes similar to those which, as a European
archæologist, he had been laboriously endeavouring to reconstruct in
some remote antiquity.
“Upwards of forty years since, Black Bird, a famous chief of the
Omahaws, visited the city of Washington, and on his return was seized
with smallpox, of which he died on the way. When the chief found
himself dying, he called his warriors around him, and, like Jacob of
old, gave commands concerning his burial, which were as literally
fulfilled. The dead warrior was dressed in his most sumptuous robes,
fully equipped with his scalps and war-eagle’s plumes, and borne about
sixty miles below the Omahaw village to a lofty bluff on the Missouri,
which towers far above all the neighbouring heights, and commands a
magnificent extent of landscape. To the summit of this bluff a
beautiful white steed, the favourite war-horse of Black Bird, was led;
and there, in presence of the whole nation, the dead chief was placed
with great ceremony on its back, looking towards the river, where, as
he had said, he could see the canoes of the white men as they
traversed the broad waters of the Missouri. His bow was placed in his
hand, his shield and quiver, with his pipe and medicine-bag, hung by
his side. His store of pemmican and his well-filled tobacco-pouch were
supplied, to sustain him on the long journey to the hunting-grounds of
the great Manitou, where the spirits of his fathers awaited his
coming. The medicine-men of the tribe performed their most mystic
charms to secure a happy passage to the land of the great departed;
and all else being completed, each warrior of the chiefs own band
covered the palm of his right hand with vermilion, and stamped its
impress on the white sides of the devoted war-steed. This done, the
Indians gathered turfs and soil, and placed them around the feet and
the legs of the horse. Gradually the pile arose under the combined
labour of many willing hands, _until the living steed and its dead
rider were buried together under the memorial mound_; and high over
the crest of the lofty tumulus which covered the warrior’s eagle
plumes a cedar post was reared, to mark more clearly to the voyagers
on the Missouri the last resting-place of Black Bird, the great chief
of the Omahaws.”
But there is one passage in Mr Wilson’s book which, we think, to the
student of the ancient myth or religious legend must be replete with
interest. It occurs in the chapter which treats on the use of tobacco
and that custom of smoking which we have imported from the savage, much
to the delectation, no doubt, of those who inhale the fumes of what they
are pleased to call the fragrant weed, and much, assuredly, to the
disgust and suffering of those who are involved, most unwillingly, in
the smoke which others are _ex_haling around them. Never were two
parties more sharply divided than the smokers and the non-smokers. The
first will doubtless agree with the Indian in the belief that tobacco
was of divine origin. Did not two hunters of the Susquehannas share
their venison with a lovely squaw who mysteriously appeared before them
in the forest? and did they not, “on returning to the scene of their
feast thirteen moons after, find the tobacco-plant growing where she had
sat?” and do not Indians tell us that the Great Spirit freely indulges
in the intoxicating fumes which they themselves love so well? The
non-smokers hold a different faith. They see no celestial gift in this
black, fuliginous amusement; and if they do not ascribe to it a devilish
origin, they assert that it is enjoyed with a devilish indifference to
those to whom their beloved smoke is but stench and sickness. Into this
custom of tobacco-smoking Mr Wilson enters at large, and bestows much
learning on the inquiry; but it is especially to the institution of the
pipe of peace amongst the Indians that we would now direct the attention
of the reader.
We have, as Mr Wilson tells the story, the complete _dissection_ of a
myth; we see how a legend arises, or may arise, partly from the most
trivial causes, and partly from generous impulses and high imaginations.
Between the Minnesota and the Missouri rivers there stands a bold
perpendicular cliff, “beautifully marked with distinct horizontal layers
of light grey and rose or _flesh-coloured_ quartz.” Near this a famous
red pipe-stone is procured; a material, we presume, better fitted than
any other for making pipes. Traces of both ancient and modern excavation
prove that it has been the resort, during many generations, of Indian
tribes, seeking this famous red pipe-stone. A spot to which independent
tribes came for this purpose, and for this only, became neutral ground;
became a spot on which they might meet in peace—perhaps to discuss their
points of difference. But in process of time it became a sacred spot,
and the peace between hostile tribes was preserved by a religious
sanction. There are marks on the rock resembling the track of a large
bird. These were converted into the footsteps of the Great Spirit. The
Great Spirit, therefore, at one time descended upon the rock and
taught—what else could he be supposed to teach?—the sacred neutrality of
the spot, and the privilege and duty of all tribes to renew their pipes
there, and especially the calumet, or pipe of peace. The last version of
the tradition runs thus:—
“Many ages,” say the Sioux, “after the red men were made, when all the
different tribes were at war, the Great Spirit called them all
together at the Red Rocks. He stood on the top of the rocks, and the
red nations were assembled in infinite numbers in the plain below. He
took out of the rock a piece of the red stone, and made a large pipe.
He smoked it over them all; told them that it was part of their flesh;
that though they were at war they must meet at this place as friends;
that it belonged to them all; that they must make their calumets from
it, and smoke them to him whenever they wished to appease him or get
his goodwill. The smoke from his big pipe rolled over them all, and he
disappeared in the cloud.”
The Sioux, notwithstanding this good teaching of the very tradition
which they still repeat to the stranger, have, by the right of the
strongest, taken possession of the sacred neutral ground; and they, and
all other tribes of the red race, are either being absorbed into the
white population or exterminated by it. The development of the myth and
the people of the myth has been therefrom alike arrested. But how
clearly we see its growth and formation! To what a mystical faith that
flesh-coloured quartz was conducting! And what mingling of the divine
and human would have been suggested by the act recorded of the Great
Spirit! If these Indian tribes had finally coalesced in one nation, the
myth would have been exalted, and the Great Spirit would have taught
them an eternal bond of peace and brotherhood. If civilisation and
culture had still further advanced, this peace and brotherhood would
have embraced all mankind, and assumed the form of the highest moral
teaching.
A considerable portion of Mr Wilson’s book is occupied with those
ancient remains, whether in the valley of the Mississippi or in the
forests of Central America, which speak of a civilisation, or at least
of nations and of cities that had existed and left their ruins behind
them, anterior to what we call the discovery of the New World. The
subject is highly interesting, and it loses none of its interest in the
hands of our author. He speaks very decidedly on the great antiquity of
the mounds and the earthworks of the valley of the Mississippi; less
decidedly on the antiquity of the monumental pillars and other
architectural remains which were first brought to the knowledge of the
English public through the travels of Mr Stephens in Central America.
The work of Mr Squiers still contains, we believe, the fullest account
we possess of those vast circular mounds, and other extraordinary
earthworks, discovered within the territory of the United States. Both
these writers, Mr Stephens and Mr Squiers, produced at the time of the
publication of their several works a very vivid impression on the
reading public of England. Both of them broke ground into quite new
fields of inquiry, but both of them left the mind rather excited than
informed. This was to be expected when the subject was of so novel and
surprising a character. Mr Squiers saw evidences of serpent-worship and
of other religious rites which his study of the antiquities of the Old
World had made familiar to his imagination, in the circular mounds which
he traced in the open field: and Mr Stephens, as he broke his way
through the forests, saw the ruins of another Egypt stand before him.
That no tradition should exist amongst the present race of Indians with
respect to these primitive “mound-builders,” is not surprising; nor
would this alone indicate any very great antiquity. Mr Wilson thinks the
state in which the skeletons were found within the tumuli—crumbling to
dust on being touched—is sufficient proof of their great age. One must
know all the circumstances of the burial, all the influences to which
the skeleton has been exposed, before any safe conclusion can be drawn
from this fact. But, leaving undetermined the antiquity of these
remains, we think it plain that the first discoverers of them, whether
of the mounds or of the ruined cities, have, with the natural enthusiasm
pertaining to all discoverers, exaggerated the evidence they display of
civilisation, or progress in the arts. After all, the soundest opinion
seems to be that the “mound-builders” and the builders of the deserted
cities were but the intellectual progenitors of those half-civilised
Mexicans and Peruvians whom the Spaniards encountered and destroyed. It
is not likely that any higher or equal state of civilisation had been
attained and lost before the arrival of the Spaniards.
The quite circular form of an extensive mound or earthwork is thought to
imply a knowledge of geometry or trigonometry, because a modern surveyor
would proceed in a certain scientific manner to lay out such a circle.
But the slow process of measuring a number of radii from a given centre,
and connecting their terminal points, would probably have sufficed for
all that these early geometers executed. Or they might have drawn a
smaller circle, in the first instance, by a movable radius, and then
traced a larger and a larger one outside of this, till they had obtained
one of the requisite magnitude. Time and labour will accomplish much,
and with very little help from art or science. But where imagination
seems to play the subtlest tricks with our antiquarians is in their
appreciation of the beautiful in such relics of the fine arts as are
discovered in these mounds and cities. We have prints given us here of
carved pipes found in the tombs, which we are told are very beautiful.
To our eye they do not look beautiful at all, and very little in advance
of other prints which represent pipes carved by the present race of Red
Indians. But it is when the antiquarian critic finds himself amongst the
remains of the rude sculptures of Central America that he shows himself
most under the influence of this _glamour_. If we had not the pictures
or engravings by which to check the text, we should think that Thebes
and Memphis had been long ago outrivalled on the other side of the
Atlantic.
Our readers, we are sure, have not forgotten Mr Stephens’s book of
travels; they will remember how he entered with his guide into what
seemed an untrodden forest at Copan, apparently undisturbed from its
very creation; and how, as he made his way with his axe through the
brushwood, he found himself face to face with an upright column of stone
elaborately carved. In the centre of this a human face of gigantic
proportions stared out upon him. Some of these monuments had been
overpowered by the vigorous growth of the surrounding trees, and
displaced from their upright position by huge branches that half
encircled them; others lay upon the ground, as if bound down by the
vines and other great creepers of the American forest. Nothing disturbed
the solitude of the scene except a grimacing procession of monkeys, who
from the branches of the trees were looking alternately at the
traveller, and at the mysterious objects which had attracted the
traveller’s attention. As he proceeded he came upon a truncated pyramid,
with a flight of steps leading to a broad surface, on which evidently
some other structure had been raised; and then again he entered a square
enclosure with steps, which might have been intended for seats, running
up on all sides, reminding him of a Roman amphitheatre. No books had
told him of the existence even of this ruined city. Who had built it,
who had lived in it, no one could say. The people of the country could
only answer him with their “_Quien sabe?_” who knows?—an answer always
sufficient for themselves. There was not even a tradition, not even a
palpable lie, to be heard. Men were as silent about these cities as the
forest itself.
What wonder that the enthusiasm of the traveller should be excited, and
that he should see more than the eye—as a simple optical
instrument—disclosed to him? Assuredly his enthusiasm as to the beauty
of the sculpture is not supported by the drawings he has given us. He
commends to us these drawings of the artist as being, “next to the
stones themselves,” the most perfect materials on which to form our
judgment. And of one thing we may be certain, that a modern artist,
trained to the correct representation of the human figure, would err, if
he erred at all, by _improving the drawing_ in these grotesque
sculptures. It would require a distinct effort in the modern artist to
depart from the true outline and proportions of the human form; and
whenever his attention relaxed, he would infallibly become more correct
than his original. Well, we see in the delineation here given us a mere
pillar, in the centre of which is carved a human face, and lower down
two fat arms, which the imagination is to connect with the unmeaning
face above them; and we are told in the text “that the character of this
image is grand, and it would be difficult to exceed the richness of the
ornament.” We turn the page and see another gigantic head, with huge
saucer eyes, such as a child would draw, and we are told that “the style
is good,” and that “the great expansion of the eyes seems intended to
inspire awe.” So are the masks sold in our toy-shops to mischief-loving
boys. But very silly savages must those have been in whom such absurd
figures could have inspired awe. Mr Stephens is constantly being
“arrested by the beauty of the sculpture.” The bas-reliefs at Palenque
are indeed superior to anything he met with at Copan, and some drawings
from these exhibit an unexpected grace, and an outline _perhaps_
unconsciously improved by the hand of the artist. But here also we are
startled at the discrepancy between the description of the enraptured
traveller and the representation in the engravings. We have, in one of
them, a figure sitting cross-legged upon a narrow bench; his legs are
tucked up under him painfully tight, and his balance must be preserved
with great difficulty; his large nose is in manifest danger of breaking
itself upon the floor. We are told that this figure sits “on a couch,
ornamented with two leopards’ heads,” and that “the _attitude is easy_,
and the expression calm and benevolent.” The first discoverer must
evidently have looked with something of a lover’s eye.
The learned antiquarian has been nowhere more exposed to delusion than
in this New World. Mr Wilson gives us an amusing account of the
inscription on the Dighton Rock, which has received so many various
interpretations. It stands in New England; and at a time when it was a
favourite speculation of its theologians, that the Phœnicians had been
the earliest colonists of America, and that the accursed race of Canaan
had been banished there, this inscription was decided to be Punic. Dr
Stiles, President of Yale College, when preaching in 1783 before the
Governor and State of Connecticut, appealed to the Dighton Rock, graven,
as he believed, in the old Punic or Phœnician character and language, in
proof that the Indians were of the cursed seed of Canaan, and were to be
displaced and rooted out by the European descendants of Japhet! “The
Phœnicians,” says Dr Stiles, “charged the Dighton and other rocks in
Narraganset Bay with Punic inscriptions remaining to this day, which
last I myself have repeatedly seen and taken off at large, as did
Professor Sewell. He has lately transmitted a copy of this inscription
to M. Gebelin of the Parisian Academy of Sciences, who, comparing them
with the Punic palæography, judges them to be Punic, and has interpreted
them as denoting that the ancient Carthaginians once visited these
distant regions.”
Various copies, all professing to be most carefully executed, of this
inscription, were sent to antiquarian societies, to museums, to
colleges, as well in Europe as in America. A learned Colonel Vallency,
of the London Antiquarian Society, undertook to prove that the
inscription was neither Phœnician nor Punic, but Siberian. Then it
became the fashion to look upon the Danes and the Northmen as the first
discoverers of America, or its first colonists, and the _Punic_ was
changed into a _Runic_ inscription. The names of Thorfinn and other
Norse heroes were plainly read in this wild scrawl upon the Dighton
Rock. Learned Danes themselves found no difficulty in deciphering the
name at least of the chief hero who conducted the expedition of which
this is a memorial, though they confess that the names of his associates
are not quite so legible.
“Surely no inscription,” continues Mr Wilson, “ancient or modern, not
even the Behistun cuneatics or the trilingual Rosetta Stone, ever
received more faithful study. But the most curious matter relating to
this written rock is, that after being thus put to the question by
learned inquisitors for a hundred and fifty years, it did at length
yield a most surprising response. Mr Schoolcraft tested the origin and
significance of the Dighton Rock inscription, by submitting a copy of
it to Chingwauk, an intelligent Indian chief, familiar with the native
system of picture-writing. The result was an interpretation of the
whole as the record of an Indian triumph over some rival native tribe,
and the conviction on Mr Schoolcraft’s part that the graven rock is
simply an example of Indian rock-writing, attributable to the
Wabenakies of New England.... And such is the conviction reluctantly
formed in the mind of the most enthusiastic believer in the discovery
and colonisation of New England by the Northmen.”
We are in danger of losing our way entirely amongst the multitude of
interesting subjects which Mr Wilson’s two thick volumes present to
us—and present, it must be confessed, in a somewhat confused array. A
rather pleasant effect is produced by the bringing together the
knowledge of the European archæologist with the observations of the
modern traveller; but this leads to a discursive style. In spite of the
distinct titles of the several chapters, we never know precisely what we
are discussing, and where to look for anything a second time which we
may remember to have read. We are now engaged with the wild Indians, and
are reminded of such human curiosities as the “Flatheads,” who glory in
producing a deformed skull by a distressing pressure on the infant’s
head, of which process we have a gilded picture strangely ornamenting
our learned volumes. These Flatheads are plainly uninjured in their
intellects by this distortion of the skull; so as there is room left for
the development of the cerebrum, all seems right; and even when nature
keeps the formation of the skull in her own hands, we apprehend this is
all that is wanted. These Flatheads contrive to make slaves of the
neighbouring round-headed Indians,—who, by the way, are not permitted to
flatten the heads of _their_ children, this being jealously guarded as a
sign of freedom and aristocratic privileges. They are said to look with
contempt on the whites, as bearing in the shape of their heads the
hereditary mark of slaves. After contemplating for a time these
unprogressive natives, some railroad car comes whizzing past, or the
posts of the electric telegraph remind the author of the go-ahead
American who is gradually appropriating all the soil to himself. We have
a highly characteristic trait mentioned of the new race. Not only does
he cut down forests and break up the prairie, but he trades in
_water-lots_—in land still covered with water; appropriates and sells
half the soil of a lake which has yet to be reduced to the economical
proportion he intends to allow it.
The two races cannot plainly long reside on the same continent; but Mr
Wilson brings before us a fact which will probably be new to most
English readers. It is almost as much an absorption into the white race
as a process of extinction that is now going on amongst the Red Indians.
Wherever the whites, whether they are French, or English, or Scotch,
have been long settled in the neighbourhood of Indian tribes, there has
grown up a mixed race or half-breed. This half-breed, in some instances,
remains in the settlement of the whites, but in others it still follows
the mode of life of its Indian parent, and a race grows up that is
neither European nor Indian. Whole tribes seem now to be constituted of
this half-breed, and they are distinguished for their power of endurance
and their greater faculty for social organisation. But in proportion as
they approximate to the European, the less likelihood is there that they
will long remain distinct and separated from the European by their mode
of life.
“The idea,” says Mr Wilson, “of the absorption of the Indian into the
Anglo-American race will not, I am aware, meet with a ready
acceptance, even from those who dwell where its traces are most
perceptible; but fully to appreciate its extent, we must endeavour to
follow down the course of events by which the continent has been
transferred to the descendants of its European colonists. At every
fresh stage of colonisation or pioneering into the wild west, the work
has necessarily been accomplished by the hardy youths, or the hunters
and trappers of the clearing. Rarely indeed did they carry with them
their wives or daughters; but where they found a home amongst
savage-haunted wilds, they took to themselves wives of the daughters
of the soil. To this mingling of blood, even in its least favourable
aspects, the prejudices of the Indian presented little obstacle.
Henry, in his narrative of travel among the Cristineaux, says, ‘One of
the chiefs assured me that the children borne by their women to
Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.’
The fact is unquestionable that all along the widening outskirts of
the newer clearings, and wherever an outlying trading or hunting post
is established, we find a fringe of half-breed population, marking the
transitional border-land which is passing away from its aboriginal
claimants.... At all the white settlements near those of the Indians
the evidence of admixture is abundant, from the pure half-breed to the
slightly-marked remoter descendant of Indian maternity, discoverable
only by the straight black hair, and a singular watery glaze in the
eye, not unlike that of the English gypsy. There they are to be seen,
not only as fishers, trappers, and lumberers, but engaged on equal
terms with the whites in the trade and business of the place. In this
condition the population of all the frontier settlements exists; if,
as new settlers come in, the mixed element disappears, it does so
purely by absorption.
“Nor are such traces confined to the frontier settlements. I have
recognised the semi-Indian features in the gay assemblies at a
Canadian Governor-General’s receptions, in the halls of the
Legislature, among the undergraduates of Canadian universities, and
mingling in the selectest social circles. And this is what has been
going on in every new American settlement for upwards of three
centuries, under every diversity of circumstance.”
This is a far more agreeable idea than that the Indians are being
everywhere _starved_ out of existence by the encroachments of the
European. But that portion of the mixed offspring which adhered to the
Indian tribe, and became Indian in its habits, affords a still more
interesting subject of speculation. On the Red River there is a
settlement of half-breeds, numbering about six thousand. A marked
difference, we are told, “is observable, according to their white
paternity. The French half-breeds are more lively and frank in their
bearing, but also less prone to settle down to drudgery of farming, or
other routine duties of civilised life, than those chiefly of Scottish
descent.” If in both cases the half-breed has been entirely educated by
its Indian parent, this would be a good instance of the influence of
_race_ as separable from the influence of education. These half-breeds
are generally superior in physical as well as mental qualities, and have
greater powers of endurance than any of the native tribes exhibit. Mr
Wilson assures us “that the last traces of the Red blood will disappear,
not by the extinction of the Indian tribes, but by the absorption of the
half-breed minority into the new generations of the predominant race.”
Of the warlike tribes of native Indians some have been induced to settle
down as agriculturists. Some are Roman Catholics, some Protestants. But
we believe it may be stated that all signal amendments or progressive
changes have been accompanied by a mixture of European blood. To this
very day the full-blooded Indian despises the civilisation of the white
man, or at least thinks it something that may be good for the white man,
but by no means good for him. The fierce tribes that constituted the
famous confederacy of the Iroquois, and who have settled in Canada, have
been all more or less tamed, but they have all lost the purity of their
race; and when we hear of the hunter of the prairies taking upon himself
the mode of life of European colonists, we may be sure that this change
has been facilitated by an intermixture of the two races. Some of these
tribes have forgotten their own language, and speak only a French
_patois_.
We do not imply by this observation that the native Indian would have
been incapable of advancing by a slow and natural progression of their
own on the road of civilisation: on the contrary, we believe that the
civilisation of the Aztecs and the Peruvians may be seen in its earliest
stage amongst the Iroquois. But when the European encounters the savage,
there is a gap between them which the latter cannot suddenly traverse.
The intermediate steps are not presented to him. The time is not given
him by which slow-changing habits can be formed and transmitted. He is
required to proceed at a faster pace than his savage nature can
accomplish. Now, as every generation that has advanced upon its
predecessors, transmits, together with its knowledge, some increasing
aptitude for the acquisition of such knowledge, there is no difficulty
in believing that the savage would be expedited in his career of
civilisation as well by an intermixture of race as by a participation of
knowledge.
The whole chapter of Mr Wilson on the Red Race is well worthy of
perusal. The reader will find in it many interesting details, which, of
course, our space will not permit us to allude to. We shall conclude our
notice by some reference to a topic especially interesting when we speak
of the progress of civilisation—namely, the mode of transmitting ideas,
the art of writing, or letters. Our author, according to his favourite
phraseology, entitles his chapter on this subject ‘The Intellectual
Instinct: Letters.’
The origin of language may be open to discussion. Its gradual growth
from the wants, the social passions, the organisation, the mimetic and
reasoning powers of man, may to many persons seem an unsatisfactory
account. But no one disputes that _writing_ is an invention of man. Even
if the steps of this invention had not been traced, we should have been
unable to frame any other hypothesis with regard to an art possessed by
one people and not possessed by another. We may define writing to be the
transmission of ideas by visible and permanent signs, instead of by
momentary sounds and gestures. The art of writing, it must be
remembered, is not complete till the characters upon the paper, or the
parchment, or the plaster of the wall, or the graven rock, _interpret
themselves_ to one who knows the conventional value of the several
signs. So long as any picture-writing or symbolic figures act merely as
aids to the memory, in retaining a history of events which is, in fact,
transmitted by oral tradition, writing is not yet invented. The picture,
however faithful, gives its meaning only to those who know many other
facts which are not in the picture itself. When a system of signs has
been invented, _by which alone_ the ideas of one person, or one
generation, can be communicated to another person or another generation,
then the art has been attained, whether those signs are hieroglyphics or
alphabetical, whether they are signs of things or signs of words.
This is necessary to be borne in mind, because there is a certain use of
pictorial and symbolic signs which is in danger of being confounded with
the perfect hieroglyph; and we are inclined to think this confusion has
been made with regard to some of the sculptured remains discovered in
Central America. We doubt if these “hieroglyphics,” which scholars are
invited to study and to interpret, are hieroglyphics as the word is
understood by the Egyptologist. Granting that they always have a
meaning, and are not introduced, in some cases, as mere ornaments (just
as we introduce the heads of stags or the figures of little children on
any vase we desire to ornament), still it may be a meaning of that kind
which could be only intelligible to one who from other sources knew the
history or the fable it was intended to bring to remembrance. A
representation of this kind, half pictorial and half symbolic, would
help to keep alive the memory of an event; but, the memory of it once
extinct, it could not revive the knowledge of the event to us. We should
waste our ingenuity in vain attempts to _read_ what was not, in fact,
any kind of _writing_.
The Peruvians had manifestly not advanced beyond a system of mnemonics,
a kind of _memoria technica_. With certain knots in strings of different
colours they had associated certain ideas. A Peruvian woman could show
you a bundle of knotted strings and tell you her whole life “was there.”
To her it was, but to no one else. If all the Peruvians agreed to
associate the history of Peru with other bundles of knotted cords, their
_quipus_ would still be only an aid to memory; the history itself must
be conveyed from one mind to another by oral communication. Some of the
North American Indians had their _wampum_, their many-coloured belt,
into which _they talked their treaty_, or any other matter it was
desirable to remember. The Mexicans had mingled symbols with their
picture-writing, but they had not wrought the hieroglyphic into a
system, by means of which alone ideas could be conveyed from one
generation to another. With them it could not be said that the art of
writing was known. But antiquarians have formed, it seems, a different
opinion of the mixture of symbol and picture discovered in the ruins of
Copan and Palenque; and, partly on this ground, they arrived at the
conclusion that these cities were built and inhabited by a people in
advance of the Mexicans or Aztecs discovered by the Spaniards. Mr Wilson
says very distinctly of those mysterious sculptures: “They are no rude
abbreviations, like the symbols either of Indian or Aztec
picture-writing; but rather suggest the idea of a matured system of
ideography in its last transitional stage, before becoming a
word-alphabet like that of the Chinese at the present day.”
We should be open to the charge of great presumption, if, with nothing
before us but a few engravings by which to guide our judgment, we
ventured to offer an opinion opposed to that of Mr Wilson, or of others
who have made the subject one of especial study. But opposite to the
very page (p. 140, vol. ii.) from which we take this last sentence we
have quoted, Mr Wilson gives us an engraving of what are denominated
“hieroglyphics.” It appears to us as if the pillar here represented had
been divided into compartments, and each compartment had been filled by
the artist with some appropriate subject, generally some human figure
whose action and attitude are unintelligible to us; but the whole
conveys the idea, not of a series of hieroglyphics, but of individual
representations, each of which has its own independent meaning. Other
engravings, indeed, approximate more nearly to the hieroglyphic; the
arbitrary sign is more conspicuous, and there is a more frequent
repetition of the same subject; but when we consider the poverty of
invention that even in later times afflicts the arts, and the tendency
to repeat and to copy which is very noticeable in rude times, we are not
surprised that the same subject is often found on the same monument, or
that it has spread from Copan to Palenque. There is nothing in the
engravings before us, or in the account given of them, which proves that
a really hieroglyphic system had been invented; and we cannot but
suspect that those who undertake the task of deciphering them will
inevitably fail, not because the key cannot be found, but because no key
ever existed.
Suppose a monument erected or a medal struck in honour of one of our own
excellent missionaries; suppose it represented the missionary-standing
with one foot on a broken image, or idol, and that by his side knelt
some half-naked savage with a cross in his hands—this mixture of picture
and of symbol would tell its tale very intelligibly to us, for we have
heard before of the labours of the missionary. But suppose this and
other pictures of the same kind were handed down to a remote posterity,
who had no information except what the pictures themselves conveyed by
which to understand them, what hopeless perplexities would they for ever
remain! And the use of the repeated symbol might lead to the persuasion
that they were composed on some hieroglyphic system. We might imagine
learned men toiling for ever over such representation, and never coming
to any satisfactory result.
What different impressions the same pictorial representation may convey
to two different persons, we have many an amusing instance of in the
history of our Egyptian discoveries, or efforts at discovery. We borrow
an example from the pages before us. On the wall of the temple at Philæ,
at the first cataract of the Nile, a figure is seen seated at work on
what seems a potter’s wheel, and there is a group of hieroglyphics over
its head. One learned translator reads and explains thus:—“Kaum the
Creator, on his wheel, moulds the divine members of Osiris (the type of
man) in the shining house of life, or the solar disk.” Another learned
man, Mr Birch of the British Museum, soars, if possible, still higher
for a meaning:—“Phtah Totonem, the father of beginnings, is setting in
motion the egg of the sun and moon, director of the gods of the upper
world.” Mr Wilson, we presume, in accordance with a still later
interpretation, calls this figure simply the “ram-headed god Kneph,”
without explaining what he is doing with his wheel. If the picture and
the hieroglyphic together lead to such various results, we may easily
conceive what wild work would be made by an attempt to interpret a
pictorial representation alone.
We hesitate to assign to the inscriptions discovered in these ruined
cities the true character of hieroglyphics; that is, of a system of
symbols by means of which, independently of oral tradition, the ideas of
one generation could be conveyed to another. But our readers would
probably prefer to have Mr Wilson’s matured judgment to our own
conjectures. He says:—
“On the sculptured tablets of Copan, Quirigua, and Palenque, as well
as on the colossal statues at Copan and other ancient sites in Central
America, groups of hieroglyphic devices occur arranged in
perpendicular or horizontal rows, as regularly as the letters of any
ancient or modern inscription. The analogies to Egyptian hieroglyphics
are great, for all the figures embody, more or less clearly defined,
representations of objects in nature or art. But the differences are
no less essential, and leave no room to doubt that in these columns of
sculptured symbols we witness the highest development to which
picture-writing attained, in the progress of that indigenous American
civilisation so singularly illustrative of the intellectual unity
which binds together the divers races of man. A portion of the
hieroglyphic inscription which accompanies the remarkable Palenque
sculpture of a figure offering what has been assumed to represent an
infant before a cross, will best suffice to illustrate the
characteristics of this form of writing.”
What is the antiquity of these ruined cities? The first tendency was to
carry them back into some very remote period, far beyond the memory or
knowledge of the Mexicans and Peruvians. This was the first impression
of Mr Stephens; afterwards he was disposed to bring them nearer the
epoch of the Spanish conquest. He had lent a credulous ear to the story
of some good _padre_, who had assured him that a native Indian city,
greater than Copan could have ever been, still existed in a flourishing
and populous condition, in some district untrodden by the European
traveller. And this faith, that a Copan still existed, naturally induced
him to believe that the ruined Copan, not belonging to an extinct
civilisation, might not be so old as he first presumed it to be. He
seems to have thought it possible that some of these cities might have
been inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest, and that others at
that period were already a heap of ruins. War appears to have been
incessant amongst almost all the tribes of the native Americans. On this
account it appears to us very probable that many cities may have been
built and destroyed, and a partial civilisation won and lost in them,
prior to the epoch of the Spanish conquest. Such _oscillations_, very
likely, occurred in the progress of American civilisation. And in some
of these oscillatory movements a nearer approach might have been made to
the art of writing than in that one phase of this civilisation in which
the European discovered and destroyed it for ever. But our impression
is, that, viewing the history of this continent as a whole, there has
been a slow irregular progress, which had reached its highest point in
the epoch of Montezuma and the Incas of Peru.
The earliest stages of human progress are very slow, and much
interrupted by wars of conquest and extermination. We find no
difficulty, therefore, in assigning a great antiquity to some of these
ruined cities, and a still greater antiquity to the curious mounds and
earthworks in the valley of the Mississippi, without necessarily
inferring that these are the remains of any civilisation superior to
what history has made known to us. And before these mounds were
constructed, there might have passed a long epoch in which man wandered
wild by the rivers and in the forests of this continent. This
last-mentioned epoch of mere savage existence, some of our speculative
philosophers would extend to an enormous duration. We are not disposed,
by any evidence yet submitted to us, to expand this period to what we
must not call a _disproportionate_ length, because we have not the whole
life of the human race before us; but which, arguing on those
progressive tendencies which, notwithstanding the impediments and checks
they receive, constitute the main characteristic of the species, seems
an _improbable_ length. Let the geologist, however, to whom this part of
the problem must be handed over, pursue his researches, and we need not
say we shall be happy to receive whatever knowledge of the now forgotten
past he can bring to light.
CAXTONIANA:
A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.
By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’