P R E H I S T O R I C M A N
[Illustration]
[Illustration: KASKATACHYUH.
A CHIMPSEYAN CHIEF.
Drawn by D. Wilson LL.D. from sketches by Paul Kane.
Cooper & Hodson Lith. 188, Strand, London, W.C.]
P R E H I S T O R I C M A N
Researches into the Origin of Civilisation
in the Old and the New World.
BY
DANIEL WILSON, LL.D., F.R.S.E.
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY & ENGLISH LITERATURE IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, TORONTO;
AUTHOR OF THE ‘PREHISTORIC ANNALS OF SCOTLAND,’ ETC.
THIRD EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED,
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.
LONDON:
M A C M I L L A N A N D C O .
1876.
[_The right of translation is reserved._]
Edinburgh University Press:
THOMAS AND ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY.
IN FOND MEMORIAL
OF A BROTHER’S LIFE-LONG SYMPATHY
IN MANY FAVOURITE RESEARCHES
THESE VOLUMES
DEPRIVED BY DEATH OF THEIR PURPOSED DEDICATION
ARE 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.
P R E F A C E .
THE subject primarily treated of in the following pages is the man of
that new hemisphere which was revealed to Europe in 1492. There through
all historic centuries he had lived apart, absolutely uninfluenced by
any reflex of the civilisation of the Ancient World; and yet, as it
appears, pursuing a course in many respects strikingly analogous to that
by means of which the civilisation of Europe originated. The recognition
of this is not only of value as an aid to the realisation of the
necessary conditions through which man passed in reaching the stage at
which he is found at the dawn of history; but it seems to point to the
significant conclusion that civilisation is the development of
capacities inherent in man.
The term used in the title was first employed, in 1851, in my
_Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, where evidence was adduced in proof of
man’s presence in Britain “long anterior to the earliest indications of
the Aryan nations passing into Europe.” It was purposely coined to
express the whole period disclosed to us by means of archæological
evidence, as distinguished from what is known through written records;
and in this sense the term was speedily adopted by the Archæologists of
Europe. But the subject thus defined is a comprehensive one; and in its
rapid growth, distinctive subdivisions have been introduced which tend
to narrow the application of the term. Nevertheless it is still a
legitimate definition of man, wherever his history is recoverable solely
by means of primitive arts.
The first edition of _Prehistoric Man_, published in 1862, was followed
in 1865 by another, carefully revised in accordance with later
disclosures. Since then I have availed myself of further opportunities
for study and research in reference both to existing races, and to the
arts and monumental remains of extinct nations of the New World. Within
the same period important additions have been contributed to our
knowledge not only of the arts, but of the physical characteristics of
primeval man in Europe. In the present edition, accordingly, much of the
original work has been rewritten. Several chapters have been replaced by
new matter. Others have been condensed, or recast, with considerable
modifications and a new arrangement of the whole.
The illustrations have been correspondingly augmented; and some of them
engraved anew from more accurate drawings. In the first edition they
numbered seventy-one. They now amount to one hundred and thirty-four,
including several for which I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. John
Evans, F.R.S., to the publishers of _Nature_, and to the Council of the
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
D. W.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, TORONTO,
_18th November 1875_.
C O N T E N T S
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
The Influence of the Discovery of America—The Old World and the
New—American Phases of Life—The Term Prehistoric—Influence of
Migrations—What is Civilisation?—Domestication—Indian
Philosophy—Aborigines—The Tartar; The Arab—Languages of
America—Wanderings of the Nations—Fossil Man—Occupation of the
New World, 1
CHAPTER II.
THE PRIMEVAL TRANSITION.
The Latest Migrations—Founding a Capital—Beginnings of
History—Prehistoric Phases—Non-Metallurgic Eras—Oscillations of
the Land—The Glacial Period—Conditions of Climate—Fossil
Mammalia—The Flint-Folk of the Drift—Advent of European Man—The
Drift Implements—Scottish Alluvium—Preceltic Races—Their
Imitative Arts—Man Primeval—His Intellectual
Condition—Instinct—Accumulated Knowledge—Primeval Britain—Its
Fossil Fauna—Ossiferous Caves—Brixham Cave—Food—Scottish
Reindeer—American Drift—Relics of Ancient Life—Extinct
Fauna—Man and the Mastodon—Indian Traditions—Giants—Drift
Disclosures—Large Ovoid Discs—Cave Disclosures—American Cranial
Type—Antiquity of the American Man, 17
CHAPTER III.
THE QUARRY.
The Quarry—Brixham Cave—Brixham Flint Implement—Flint Ridge,
Ohio—Flint Pits—Drift Quarry Deposits—Traces of Palæolithic
Art—Lanceolate Flints—Almond-shaped Flints—The Shawnees—The
Colorado Indians—Caches of Worked Flints—Sepulchral
Deposits—Cave Drift Disclosures—Illustrative
Analogies—Cincinnati Collections—Hornstone Spear-heads—American
Neolithic Art—Flint Drills—Modes of
Perforation—Flint-Knives—Razors and Scrapers—Arrow-head
Forms—Discoidal Stones—Sinkers and Lasso Stones—Cupped
Stones—Archæological Theories—Georgia Boulders—Hand
Cup-stones—Neolithic Grindstones—Archæological Enigmas—Ancient
Analogies, 64
CHAPTER IV.
BONE AND SHELL WORKERS.
Bone and Ivory Workers—Substitutes for Flint—Proofs of Relative
Age—Domestic Bone Implements—Rude Palæolithic Art—Whalebone
Workers—Primitive Working Tools—Fish-spears and
Harpoons—Artistic Ingenuity—Drawing of the Mammoth—The
Madelaine Etchings—Righthanded Workers—Deer-horn Quarry
Picks—Bonebracer or Guard—Birthtime of the Fine Arts—Innuit
Carvers of Alaska—Troglodytes of Central France—Post-Glacial
Man—Symmetrical Head-Form—Intellectual Vigour—Evidence of
Latent Powers—Tawatin Ivory Carving—Lake-Dwellers’
Implements—Cave Implements—Arts of the Pacific Islanders—Carib
Shell-Knives—Aborigines of the Antilles—Caribs of St.
Domingo—Cave Pictures and Carvings—Prized Tropical
Shells—Ancient Graves of Tennessee—Shell Manufactures—Huron and
Petun Graves—Sacred Shell-Vessels—Primitive Shell
Ornaments—American Shell Mounds—A Shell Currency—Ioqua Standard
of Value, 96
CHAPTER V.
FIRE.
The Fire-using Animal—Esquimaux use of Fire—Fuegian
Fire-making—Modes of producing Fire—Australian Fire-myth—Men of
the Mammoth Age—Hearths of the Cave-Men—Pacific Root-Word for
Fire—Great Cycle of the Aztecs—Rekindling the Sacred
Fire—Peruvian Sun-Worshippers—Sacrifice of the White Dog—Sacred
Fires of the Mound-Builders—Indian Fire-making—Sanctity of
Fire—Tierra del Fuego, 135
CHAPTER VI.
THE CANOE.
The use of Tools—Tool-using Instinct—Rudimentary stage of
Art—Primitive River-Craft—The Guanahanè Canoe—Ocean
Navigation—African Canoe-making—Oregon Cedar Canoes—Native
Whalers of the Pacific—Prehistoric Boat-Builders—Mawai’s
Canoes—The Polynesian Archipelago—The Terra Australis
Incognita—Canoe-Fleets of the Pacific—Primitive
Navigation—Portable Boats—The Coracle and Kaiak—The Peruvian
Balsa—Ocean Navigators, 151
CHAPTER VII.
TOOLS.
Man the Artificer—The Law of Reason—Indigenous Races—Man’s
Capacity for Deterioration—What is a Stone Period?—Materials of
Primitive Art—Succession of Races—Indications of Ancient
Trade—The Shoshone Indian—Texas Implements—Modes of
Hafting—Deer’s-horn Sockets—Stone Knives—Thlinkets of
Alaska—Metals of a Stone Period—Arts of the South
Pacific—Malayan Influence—Fijian Constructive Skill—Fijian
Pottery—Slow Maturity of Races—The Flint-edged Sword—The League
of the Five Nations—Iroquois Predominance—Work in Obsidian and
Flint—Honduras Flint Implements—Sources of the
Material—Collision of Races—Fate of Inferior Races, 170
CHAPTER VIII.
THE METALS.
Dawn of a Metallurgic Era—Primitive Copper-Working—Copper Region
of Lake Superior—The Pictured Rocks—Jackson Iron Mountain—The
Cliff Mine—Copper Tools—Ancient Mining Trenches—Great extent of
Works—Mines of Isle Royale—Their estimated Age—Ancient Mining
Implements—Stone Mauls and Axes—Ontonagon Mining Relics—Sites
of Copper Manufactories—Native Copper and Silver—Brockville
Copper Implements—Lost Metallurgic Arts—Chemical
Analyses—Native Terra-Cottas—Ancient British Mining Tools—The
Race of the Copper Mines—Chippewa Superstitions—Earliest
notices of the Copper Region—Ontonagon Mass of Copper—Ancient
Native Traffic—Native use of Metals—Condition of the
Mound-Builders—Mineral Resources—Antiquity of Copper
Workings—Desertion of the Mines, 198
CHAPTER IX.
ALLOYS.
The Age of Bronze—An intermediate Copper Age—European Copper
Implements—Native Silver and Copper—Tin and Copper Ores—The
Cassiterides—Ancient Sources of Tin—Arts of Yucatan—Alloyed
Copper Axe-Blades—Bronze Silver-Mining Tool—Peruvian
Bronzes—Primitive Mining Tools—Native Metallurgic
Processes—Metallic Treasures of the Incas—Traces of an Older
Race—Peruvian History—The Toltecs and Mexicans—Adjustment of
Calendar—Barbarian Excesses—Native Goldsmith’s Work—Panama Gold
Relics—Mexican Metallic Currency—Experimental Processes—Ancient
European Bronzes—Tests of Civilisation—Ancient American
Bronzes—The Native Metallurgist, 229
CHAPTER X.
THE MOUND-BUILDERS.
Earth Pyramids—Monuments of the Mound-Builders—Seats of Ancient
Population—Different Classes of Works—Ancient
Strongholds—Natural Sites—Fort Hill, Ohio—Iroquois
Strongholds—Analogous Strongholds—Fortified Civic Sites—Sacred
Enclosures—Newark Eagle Mound—Geometrical Earthworks—Plan of
Newark Earthworks, Ohio—A Standard of Measurement—Diversity of
Works—Evidence of Skill—The Cincinnati Tablet—Scales of
Measurement—Traces of Extinct Rites, 256
CHAPTER XI.
SEPULCHRAL MOUNDS.
Sources of Information—Hill Mounds—The Scioto Mound—The Taylor
Mound—The Issaquina Mound—The Elliot Mound—The Lockport
Mound—Black Bird’s Grave—Scioto Valley Mounds—Symbolical
Rites—Human Sacrifices—The Grave Creek Mound—Common
Sepulchres—Cremation—Scioto Mound Cranium—Sacred Festivals, 277
CHAPTER XII.
SACRIFICIAL MOUNDS.
Mound Altars—Altar Deposits—Quenching the Altar Fires—Mound
Hearths—Mound City—Military Altar Mounds—Their Structure and
Contents—Significance of their Deposits—Analogous Indian
Rites—Transitional Civilisation, 293
CHAPTER XIII.
SYMBOLIC MOUNDS.
The Wisconsin Region—Animal Mounds—Symbolic Mounds—Big Elephant
Mound—Dade County Mounds—Magnitude of Earthworks—Enclosed Works
of Art—Rock River Works—The Northern Aztalan—Ancient Garden
Beds—The Wisconsin Plains—A Sacred Neutral Land—The Alligator
Mound—The Great Serpent, Ohio—Serpent Symbols—Intaglio
Earthworks—Suggestive Inferences—The Ancient Race—A Sacerdotal
Caste—Antiquity of the Race—Inferiority of the Indian Tribes, 303
CHAPTER XIV.
NATIVE AMERICAN CIVILISATION.
The Toltecs—Ixtlilxochitl—The Aztecs—American
Architecture—Aztalan—The Valley of Mexico—Montezuma’s
Capital—Its Vanished Splendour—Mexican Calendar—The Calendar
Stone—Mexican Deities—Toltec Civilisation—Race Elements—The
Toltec Capital—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—The Llama—Woven
Textures—Science and Art—Native Institutions—Metallurgy—Origin
of the Mexicans—Mingling of Races, 324
CHAPTER XV.
ART CHRONICLINGS.
Imitative Skill—Archaic European Art—Conventional
Ornamentation—Imitative Design—Analogies in Rites and
Customs—Altar Records—Smelting the Ores—Wisconsin Prairie
Lands—The Race of the Mounds—Mound Carvings—Portrait
Sculptures—American Iconography—Deductions—Non-Indian
Type—Other Examples—Antique Iconographic Art—Peculiar Imitative
Skill—Animals represented—Extensive Geographical
Relations—Knowledge of Tropical Fauna—Deductions—The Toucan and
Manatee—Traces of Migration—Assumed Indications—Analogous
Sculptures—Peruvian Imitative Skill—Carved Stone
Mortars—Nicotian Religious Rites—Indian Legends—The Red
Pipe-stone Quarry—The Leaping Rock—Mandan Traditions—Sioux
Legend of the Peace Pipe—The Sacred Coca Plant—Knisteneaux
Legend of the Deluge—Indications of Former Migrations—Favourite
Material—Pwahguneka—Chimpseyan Customs—Chimpseyan Art—Babcen
Carving—The Medicine Pipe-stem—Indian Expiatory
Sacrifices—Nicotian Rites of Divination, 355
I L L U S T R A T I O N S
FIG.
Portrait of Kaskatachyuh, A CHIMPSEYAH CHIEF.
1. Flint-Knife, Grinell Leads,
2. Lewiston Flint Implement,
3. Flint Disc, Kent’s Cavern,
4. Brixham Cave Flint Implement,
5. Lanceolate Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio,
6. Almond-shaped Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio,
7. Leaf-shaped Flint, Sharon Valley, Ohio,
8. Flint Implement, Licking County, Ohio,
9. Flint Hoe, Kentucky,
10. Flint Spear-head, Indiana,
11. Flint Awl, Mayville, Kentucky,
12. Flint Drill, Cincinnati,
13. Stone Drill, Cincinnati,
14. Flint-Knife, Cincinnati,
15. Flint Razor, Kentucky,
16. 17.Flint Scrapers, Ohio,
18. Foliated Arrow-head,
19. Lasso Stone, Kentucky,
20. Cupped-stone, Ohio,
21. Cupped Boulder, Tronton, Ohio,
22. Bone Spatula, Keiss,
23. Bone Comb, Burghar,
24. Bone Comb, Burghar,
25. Whale’s Vertebra Cup,
26. to 30. Fish-spears and Harpoons,
31. Harpoon, Kent’s Cavern,
32. Bone Spear-head, Dordogne Caves,
33. Fuegian Harpoon,
34. Fish-spear, Kent’s Cavern,
35. Fish-spear with bilateral barbs, La Madelaine,
36. Fish-spear with unilateral barbs, La Madelaine,
37. Carved Baton, or Mace, Dordogne Caves,
38. The Mammoth, engraved on ivory, La Madelaine,
39. Scottish Stone Bracer,
40. Hunter’s Tally, Deer’s-horn, Cro-Magnon,
41. Skull of Old Man of Cro-Magnon—Profile,
42. Skull of Old Man of Cro-Magnon—Front View,
43. Skull of Old Man of Cro-Magnon—Vertical View,
44. Tawatin Ivory Carving of Whale,
45. Tawatin Ivory Carving,
46. Hog’s Tooth Chisel, Concise,
47. British Bone Implements,
48. Carib Shell-Knives,
49. Tennessee Idol,
50. Clyde Stone Axe,
51. Clalam Stone Adze,
52. Grangemouth Skull,
53. Texas Stone Axe, hafted,
54. Texas Flint Implement,
55. Chisel and deer’s-horn socket, Concise,
56. Stone Knife, Concise,
57. South Pacific Stone Implements,
58. Stone Adze, New Caledonia,
59. Fijian Pottery,
60. Honduras serrated Flint Implement,
61. Honduras State Halberd, flint,
62. Honduras Flint Implement,
63. Miners’ Shovels, Lake Superior,
64. Miners’ Stone Mauls,
65. Ontonagon Copper Implement,
66. 67. Brockville Copper Dagger and Gouge,
68. Brockville Copper Spear,
69. Terra-cotta Mask,
70. Newark Earthworks, Ohio,
71. Cincinnati Tablet,
72. Stone Pipe, Elliot Mound, Ohio,
73. Lake Washington Disk,
74. Mask, Mexican Calendar Stone,
75. Ticul Hieroglyphic Vase,
76. Peruvian Web,
77. Portrait Mound Pipe, full face,
78. Portrait Mound Pipe, profile,
79. Portrait Mound Pipe,
80. Manatee, Pipe-Sculpture,
81. Toucan, Pipe-Sculpture,
82. Peruvian Black Ware,
83. Peruvian Stone Mortars,
84. Chippewa Pipe,
85. Babeen Pipe,
86. Babeen Pipe-Sculpture.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA—THE OLD WORLD AND THE
NEW—AMERICAN PHASES OF LIFE—THE TERM PREHISTORIC—INFLUENCE OF
MIGRATIONS—WHAT IS CIVILISATION?—DOMESTICATION—INDIAN
PHILOSOPHY—ABORIGINES—THE TARTAR—THE ARAB—LANGUAGES OF
AMERICA—WANDERINGS OF THE NATIONS—FOSSIL MAN—OCCUPATION OF
THE NEW WORLD.
The recent development of archæology as a science is due in no slight
degree to the simplicity which characterises the prehistoric disclosures
of Scandinavia, Ireland, and other regions of Europe lying beyond the
range of Greek and Roman influence. But the same element presents itself
on a far more comprehensive scale alike in the archæology and the
ethnology of the western hemisphere. America may be assumed with little
hesitation to have begun its human period subsequent to that of the old
world, and to have started later in the race of civilisation. At any
rate it admits of no question that its most civilised nations had made a
very partial advancement when, in the fifteenth century, they were
abruptly brought into contact with the matured civilisation of Europe.
Hence the earlier stages of human progress can be tested there freed
from many obscuring elements inevitable from the intermingling of
essentially diverse phases of civilisation on old historic areas. In the
days of Herodotus, Transalpine Europe was a greater mystery to the
nations on the shores of the Mediterranean than Central Africa is to us.
To the Romans 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 Cæsars were speedily to emerge, was so
entirely unknown to them, that, as Dr. Arnold remarks, “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 of the historic centres around the Mediterranean 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 German oceans, and the islands of the British
seas, had long before yielded tribute to the Phœnician mariner; and as
the archæologist and the ethnologist pursue their researches, and
restore to light memorials of Europe’s early youth, they are startled
with affinities to the ancient historic nations, in language, arts, and
rites, no less than by the recovered traces of an unfamiliar past.
But it is altogether different with the New World which Columbus
revealed. Superficial students of its monuments have indeed
misinterpreted 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 with
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 independent development.
No reflex light of Grecian or Roman civilisation has guided him on his
way. The great sources of religious and moral suasion which have given
form to medieval and modern Europe, and so largely influenced the polity
and culture of Asia, and even of Africa, were effectually excluded; and
however prolonged the period of occupation of the western hemisphere by
its own American nations may have been, man is still 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
palæography, 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 discovery of America was itself one of the great events in the most
memorable era of the world’s progress. It wrought a marvellous change in
the ideas and opinions of mankind 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. Nevertheless no
great research is needed to show that it also has 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
unhistoric races of America is replete with promise of novel truths in
reference to primeval man. Some of the oldest problems in relation to
him find their solution there; and, amid the novel inquiries which now
perplex the student of science, answers of unexpected value are rendered
from the same source.
The study of man’s condition and progress in Europe’s prehistoric
centuries reveals him as a savage hunter, armed solely with weapons of
flint and bone, frequenting the lake and river margins of a continent
clothed in primeval forests and haunted by enormous beasts of prey.
Displaced by intrusive migrations, this rude pioneer disappears, and his
traces are overlaid or erased by the improved arts of his supplanters.
The infancy of the historic nations begins. Metallurgy, architecture,
science, and letters follow, effacing the faint records of Europe’s
nomadic pioneers; and the first traces of late intruders acquire so
primitive an aspect, that the existence of older European nations than
the Celtæ seemed till recently too extravagant an idea for serious
consideration.
After devoting considerable research to the recovery of the traces of
early arts in Britain, and realising from many primitive disclosures
some clear conception of the barbarian of Europe’s prehistoric 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
civilised 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 conviction that many of the ethnological phenomena of Europe’s
prehistoric centuries are here reproduced on the grandest scale. Man is
seen subject to influences similar to those which have affected him in
all great migrations and collisions of diverse races. Here 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 simplified to my own mind; and opinions
relative to Europe’s prehistoric races, based on inference or induction,
have received striking confirmation. Encouraged by this experience, I
venture to set forth the results of an inquiry into the essential
characteristics of man, based chiefly on a comparison of the theoretical
ethnology of primitive Europe, with such disclosures of the New World.
Man may be assumed to be prehistoric wherever his chroniclings of
himself are undesigned, and his history is wholly recoverable by
induction. The term has, strictly speaking, no chronological
significance; but, in its relative application, corresponds to other
archæological, in contradistinction 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
growing 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
kingdom, 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 seen unaffected by native or intruded civilisation;
while the most civilised 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 transplanting of seemingly indigenous races to
more favouring localities; 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 whatever tendencies lay dormant in the artificial
European man.
Here then are materials full of promise for the ethnical student:—the
Red-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 until very recent years
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 thousand
external circumstances. The arts, born at the very dawn of history, give
form to its modern social life. The faith and morals nurtured among the
hills of Judah, the intellect of Greece, the jurisprudence and military
prowess of Rome, and the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of
medieval 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 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 of countless generations. The very serf of the Russian steppes
cannot grow freely, as his nomad brother of Asia does; but must don the
unfamiliar 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 problem reopened
by Lamarck, Agassiz, Darwin, Huxley, and others. Whence is man? What are
his antecedents? What—within the compass 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 civilisation? He
who has seen the Euromerican and the Indian side by side can be at no
loss as to the difference between civilised and uncivilised man. But is
he therefore at liberty to conclude that the element which so markedly
distinguishes the White- from the Red- man of the New World is an
attribute peculiar to the former, rather than the development of innate
powers common to both, and in the possession of which man differs from
all other animals? DOMESTICATION is, for the lower animals, the
subjection of them to artificial conditions 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 faculties natural
to him, and is progressive and seemingly ineradicable. Of both
postulates the social life alike of the forest and of the clearings of
the New World seems to offer proofs; and to other 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 novel conditions. The race to which this is
chiefly due had been isolated during 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 for 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 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 American 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 having
striven to resuscitate the 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 civilised 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 civilisation 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
civilisation 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, told him the following tradition of the tribe. One of the
Crees became a Christian. He was 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 discerns 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 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 complained of
having been neglected: viz., the natural relations between different
types of man and the animals and plants inhabiting the same regions. Yet
the Indian of the American wilds is no more primeval than his forests.
Beneath the roots of their oldest giants lie 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 endurance the inheritors of
the soil. 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 table-land of Central Asia, stretching away northward,
and pouring its waters into inland seas, or directing their uncivilising
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 pastoral tribes, unaffected by any
intrusion of civilising arts or settled social habits; until, impelled
by unknown causes, they have poured southward over the seats of
primitive Asiatic civilisation, or westward into the younger continent
of Europe.
From the wandering hordes of the great Asiatic steppes have come the
Huns, the Magyars, and the Turks, as well as a considerable portion of
the Bulgarians of modern Europe; while the sterile peninsula of Arabia
has given birth to moral revolutions of the most enduring influence. Yet
the capacity for civilisation of the Magyar or the 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 property 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 in the wild nomad, though we trace
him back 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 progressive 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 nomads of
the Asiatic steppe. The Red-Man 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 buffaloes, for
countless centuries since the continent rose from its ocean-bed. That he
is no recent intruder is indisputably proved alike by physical and
intellectual evidence. On any theory of human origin, the blended
gradations 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 hundred 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 a multiplication of tongues. But the
languages of the American continents have been estimated to exceed
twelve hundred and sixty, including agglutinate languages of peculiarly
elaborate structure, and inflectional forms of complex development. Of
the grammar of the Lenni-Lenapé 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; occasionally 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.”[3]
At the same time it is no less important to note the limited range of
vocabulary in many of the American languages. Those characteristics,
taken along with their peculiar holophrastic power of inflecting complex
word-sentences, and expressing 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 intellectual development of the Indian: incapable of
abstract idealism, realising few generic relations, and multiplying
words by comparisons 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 philology. Assuming for our present
argument the unity of the human race, not in the ambiguous sense of a
common typical structure, but literally, as 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 Red-Man, it thus appears, is among the ancients of the earth. How
old he may be it is impossible to determine; but with 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 revealed. The island of Guadaloupe,
one of the lesser Antilles, discovered by Columbus in 1493, furnished
the first examples of fossil man, and of works of art imbedded 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 history;
though supplying a curious link in the palæontological treasures both of
the British Museum and the Jardin des Plantes. Dr. Lund, the Danish
naturalist, has described human bones, bearing, 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 not less than 10,000 years old;[4]
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.[5]
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 of archæology and
ethnology. According to geological reckoning, 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_,
_Balœna_, and other existing marine mammals and fishes along with the
_Elephas primigenius_, the _Mastodon Ohioticus_, and other long-extinct
species. 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 fossil state,—the gradation in form between him and other animals
presents no very important contrast to the uninstructed eye. Modern
though those rock-imbedded skeletons are, they accord with older traces
of human remains mingling with those of extinct mammals, to which more
recent speculations have given so novel an interest in relation to the
question of the antiquity of man. The origin and duration of the
American type still remain in obscurity. Man entered on the occupation
of the New World in centuries which there, as elsewhere, stretch
backward as we strive to explore them. His early history is lost, for it
is not yet four centuries since its discovery; and he still survives
there, as he then did, a being apart from all that specially
distinguishes either the cultivated 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
civilised man and the savage have been brought face to face to determine
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 destinies 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 dominant, a savage, and a
servile race. In all ways: in its recoverable past, in its
comprehensible present, in its conceivable future, the New World invites
our study, with the promise of disclosures replete with interest in
their bearing on secrets of the elder world.
-----
[1] Vide _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_.
[2] Morton: _Crania Americana_; Nott: _Indigenous Races_, etc.
[3] _American Philosophical Transactions_, N. S. vol. iii. p. 248.
[4] _Types of Mankind._ P. 352.
[5] _Proceed. Acad. Nat. Sc. Philad._ Oct. 1846. P. 107.