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—FOSSIL MAMMALIA—THE FLINT-FOLK OF THE

DRIFT—ADVENT OF EUROPEAN MAN—THE DRIFT IMPLEMENTS—CHRONOLOGY

OF THE FRENCH DRIFT—SCOTTISH ALLUVIUM—PRECELTIC RACES—THEIR

IMITATIVE ARTS—MAN PRIMEVAL—HIS INTELLECTUAL CONDITION—

INSTINCT—ACCUMULATED KNOWLEDGE—PRIMEVAL BRITAIN—ITS FOSSIL

FAUNA—OSSIFEROUS CAVES—BRIXHAM CAVE—SCOTTISH REINDEER—

AMERICAN DRIFT—RELICS OF ANCIENT LIFE—EXTINCT FAUNA—MAN AND

THE MASTODON—INDIAN TRADITIONS—GIANTS—DRIFT DISCLOSURES—

AMERICAN CRANIAL TYPE—ANTIQUITY OF THE AMERICAN MAN—PRIMITIVE

ARTS.

The striking contrasts which the New World presents, in nearly every

respect, to the Old, are full of significance in relation to the origin

of civilisation, and its influence on the progress of man. Viewed merely

as the latest scene of migration of European races on a great scale,

America has much to disclose in illustration of primitive history. There

we see the land cleared of its virgin forest, the soil prepared for its

first tillage, the site of the future city chosen, and the birth of the

world’s historic capitals epitomised in those of the youngest American

commonwealths. Taking our stand on one of the newest of these civic

sites, let us trace the brief history of the political and commercial

capital of Upper Canada.

Built along the margin of a bay, enclosed by a peninsular spit of land

running out from the north shore of Lake Ontario, the city of Toronto

rests on a drift formation of sand and clay, only disturbed in its

nearly level uniformity by the rain-gullies and ravines which mark the

courses of the rivulets that drain its surface. This the original

projectors of the city mapped off into parallelograms, by streets

uniformly intersecting each other at right angles; and in carrying out

their plan, every ravine and undulation is smoothed and levelled, as

with the indiscriminating precision of the mower’s scythe. The country

rises to the north for about twenty miles, by a gradual slope to the

water-shed between Ontario and Lake Simcoe, and then descends to the

level of the northern lake and the old hunting-grounds of the Hurons. It

is a nearly unvarying expanse of partially cleared forest: a blank, with

its Indian traditions effaced, its colonial traditions uncreated. The

cities of the old world have their mythic founders and quaint legends

still commemorated in heraldic blazonry. But there is no mystery about

the beginnings of Toronto. Upper Canada was erected into a distinct

province in 1791, only eight years after France finally renounced all

claim on the province of Quebec; and a few months thereafter General

Simcoe, the first governor of the new province, arrived at the old

French fort, at the mouth of the Niagara river, and in May 1793 selected

the Bay of Toronto as the site of the future capital. The chosen spot

presented a dreary aspect of swamp and uncleared pine forest; but amid

these his sagacious eye saw in anticipation the city rise, which already

numbers upwards of 60,000 inhabitants; and rejecting the old Indian

name, since restored, he gave to his embryo capital that of York.

Colonel Bouchette, Surveyor-General of Lower Canada, was selected to lay

out the projected city and harbour; and he thus describes the locality

as it then existed: “I still distinctly recollect the untamed aspect

which the country exhibited when first I entered the beautiful basin.

Dense and trackless forests lined the margin of the lake, and reflected

their inverted images in its glassy surface. The wandering savage had

constructed his ephemeral habitation beneath their luxuriant foliage,

the group then consisting of two families of Mississagas; and the bay

and neighbouring marshes were the hitherto uninvaded haunts of immense

coveys of wild-fowl; indeed, they were so abundant as in some measure to

annoy us during the night.”[6]

The vicissitudes attending the progress of the Canadian city have been

minutely chronicled by local historians, who record how many dwellings

of round logs, squared timber, or more ambitious frame-houses exceeding

a single story, were in existence at various dates. The first vessel

which belonged to the town, and turned its harbour to account; the first

brick house, the earliest stone one; and even the first gig of an

ambitious citizen, subsequent to 1812, are all duly chronicled. Could we

learn with equal truthfulness of the first years of the city built by

Romulus on the Palatine Hill, its annals would tell no less homely

truths, even now dimly hinted at in the legend of the scornful Remus

leaping over its infant ramparts. Tiber’s hill was once the site only of

the solitary herdsman’s hut; and an old citizen has described to me his

youthful recollections of Toronto as consisting of a few log-huts in the

clearing, and an Indian village of birch-bark wigwams, near the Don,

with a mere trail through the woods to the old French fort, on the line

where now upwards of two miles of costly stores, hotels, and public

buildings mark the principal street of the busy city.

M. Theodore Pavi describes Toronto, in his _Souvenirs Atlantiques_,

published at Paris in 1833, as still in the woods, a mere advanced post

of civilisation on the outskirts of a boundless waste. “To the houses

succeed immediately the forests, and how profound must be those immense

forests, when we reflect that they continue without interruption till

they lose themselves in the icy regions of Hudson’s Bay near the Arctic

Pole.” Upwards of forty years have since elapsed, and that for New-World

cities is an æon. Every year has witnessed more rapid strides, alike in

the progress of Toronto, and in the clearing and settling of the

surrounding country. Railways have opened up new avenues of trade and

commerce, and borne troops of sturdy pioneers into the wilderness

behind. So rapid has been the clearing of the forest, and so great the

rise in the price of labour, that fuel, brought from the distant

coal-fields of Pennsylvania, already undersells the cord-wood hewn in

Canadian forests; and even Newcastle coal warms many a luxurious winter

hearth. All is rife with progress. The new past is despised; the old

past is unheeded; and for antiquity there is neither reverence nor

faith. These are beginnings of history; and are full of significance to

those who have wrought out some of the curious problems of an ancient

past, amid historic scenes contrasting in all respects with this

unhistoric but vigorous youth of the New World. The contrast between the

new and the old is here sufficiently striking. Yet the old also was once

new; had even such beginnings as this; and was as devoid of history as

the rawest clearing of the Far West.

There are other aspects also in which a New World, thus entering on its

historic life, is calculated to throw light on the origin of

civilisation. Though neither its forests nor its aborigines are

primeval, they realise for us just such a primitive condition as that in

which human history appears to begin. In all the most characteristic

aspects of the Indian, as well as in the traces of native American

metallurgy, architecture, letters, and science, we find reproduced the

same phases through which man passed in oldest prehistoric times; and

when, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we witness the mineral

wealth of the Andes tempting European colonisation beyond the Atlantic,

we only see the expeditions of new Argonauts; and realise incidents of

the first voyage to the Cassiterides; or the planting of the infant

colonies of Gadir, Massala, and Carthage by Phocian and Punic

adventurers of the historic dawn. But the speculations of modern science

carry us far beyond any dawn of definite history, even when research is

directed to the evidence of man’s primitive arts, and the origin of his

civilisation.

The investigation of the underlying chronicles of Europe’s most ancient

human history has placed beyond question that its historic period was

preceded by an unhistoric one of long duration, marked by a slow

progression from arts of the rudest kind to others which involved the

germs of all later development. From Europe, and the historic lands of

Asia and Africa, we derive our ideas of man; and of the youngest of

these continents, on which he has thus advanced from savage artlessness

to the highest arts of civilisation, we have history, written or

traditional, for at least two thousand years. But in the year 1492 a New

World was discovered, peopled with its own millions, for the most part

in no degree advanced beyond that primeval starting-point which lies far

behind Europe’s oldest traditions. To have found there beings strange as

the inhabitants of Swift’s Houyhnhnm’s Land, or the monsters conjured up

in the philosophic day-dreams of Sir Humphry Davy for the peopling of

other planets,[7] would have seemed less wonderful to the men of that

fifteenth century than what they did find: man in a state of savage

infancy, with arts altogether rudimentary; language without letters,

tradition without history, everything as it were but in its beginning,

and yet himself looking back into a past even more vast and vague than

their own. The significance of this state of things is worth inquiring

into, if it be for nothing else than the light which the analogies of

such a living present may throw on the infancy of Europe, and beyond

that, on the primal infancy of the human race.

Recent discoveries of primitive art in the diluvial formations both of

France and England have tended to add a fresh interest to the

investigation of that “primeval stone-period” which underlies the most

ancient memorials of Europe’s civilisation. The oldest of all written

chronicles assigns a period of some duration in the history of the human

race, during which man tilled the ground, pursued the chase, and made

garments of its spoils, without any knowledge of the working in metals,

on which the simplest of all known arts depend. Through such a primitive

stage it had already appeared to me probable that all civilised nations

had passed,[8] before disclosures of a still older flint-period in the

chroniclings of the drift added new significance to the term _primeval_,

in its application to the non-metallurgic era of Europe’s arts.

The incredulity and even contempt with which the application of a system

of archæological periods to the antiquities of Britain was received, in

recent years, by a certain class of critics, was inevitable, from the

exclusive attention previously devoted to Roman and medieval remains.

But the attention of the antiquary, as well as the geologist, is now

being directed to conclusions forced on both by the traces of man in the

stratified gravel of post-pleiocene formations. The circumstances

attending their repeated discovery place their remote antiquity beyond

question. The difficulty indeed is to bring the phenomena illustrated by

palæolithic relics of the quaternary period into any conceivable harmony

with the limits of chronology as hitherto applied to man. The pre-Celtic

architects of the British long-barrow, and the allophyliæ of the

European stone age, are but men of yesterday in comparison with the

=Flint-Folk of the Drift=. They belong to a lost

Atlantis,—another continent, now in part at least buried beneath the

ocean; and compared with which the Old World of history is as new as

that found for it by Columbus.

The disclosures of geology have familiarised us with the conviction that

the “stable land,” the “perpetual hills,” and the “everlasting

mountains” are but figures of speech. But the idea forces itself on

reluctant minds that man himself has witnessed the disappearance of

Alpine chains and the submergence of continents. The Pacific

archipelagos are but the mountain-crests of a southern continent, which

in earlier ages may have facilitated the wanderings of the nations. The

startling discoveries in the French and English drift are results of

oscillations of the northern hemisphere, which, in times nearer to

historic centuries, depressed the bed of the Baltic in the era of the

Danish kjökkenmöddingr, and made dry land of the upper estuaries of the

Forth and Clyde. It is doubtful, indeed, if the shallowing of Danish and

Scottish seas by the rise of their ocean-beds is altogether a work of

prehistoric times. The rise still going on in parts of the Swedish coast

is a phenomenon long familiar to geologists; and the upheaval of the

Scottish region, embracing the valleys of the Forth and Clyde, it now

appears probable, has been protracted into historic times, and has even

affected the relative levels of sea and land since the building of the

Roman wall.

The changes thus witnessed on a comparatively small scale, on familiar

areas, help us in some degree to estimate the vast physical revolutions

that have taken place throughout the northern hemisphere within that

recent geological period which succeeded the formation of the pleiocene

strata. One of the most remarkable phenomena now recognised as affecting

the conditions of life in recent geological epochs is the prolonged

existence, throughout the whole northern hemisphere, of a temperature

resembling that of the Arctic regions at the present time. After a

period more nearly assimilating in climatic character to the tropics,

though otherwise under varying conditions, the temperature of the whole

northern hemisphere gradually diminished towards the end of the tertiary

epoch, until the highlands of Scotland and Wales—then at a much higher

elevation,—resembled Greenland at the present time, and an Arctic

temperature extended southward to the Pyrenees and the Alps. Glaciers

formed under the influence of perpetual frost and snow descended into

the valleys and plains over the greater portion of Central Europe and

Northern Asia, and an Arctic winter reigned throughout.

This condition of things, pertaining to what is known as the glacial

period, was unquestionably of long duration. But after some partial

variations of temperature, and a consequent advance and retrocession of

the glacial influences along what was then the border lines of a north

temperate zone, the first period of extreme cold drew to a close.

Between the Alps and the mountain ranges of Scotland and Wales, the

winter resembled that which even now prevails on the North American

continent, in latitudes in which the moose, the wapiti, and the grizzly

bear, freely range over the same areas where during a brief summer of

intense heat enormous herds of buffalo annually migrate from the south.

A similar alternation of seasons within the European glacial period can

alone account for the presence, alongside of an Arctic fauna, of animals

such as the hippopotamus and the hyæna, known only throughout the

historical period as natives of the tropics. The range of temperature of

Canadian seasons admits of the Arctic skua-gull, the snow-goose, the

Lapland bunting, and the like Arctic visitors, meeting the king-bird,

the humming-bird, and other wanderers from the gulf of Mexico.

Such conditions of climate may account for the recovery of the remains

of the reindeer and the hippopotamus in the same drift and cave-deposits

of Europe’s glacial period. The woolly mammoth and rhinoceros, the

musk-ox, reindeer, and other Arctic fauna, may be presumed to have

annually retreated from the summer heats, and given place to those

animals, the living representatives of which are now found only in

tropical Africa. A period of depression followed, during which,

throughout an extensive area, all but the highest levels was submerged

beneath an Arctic ocean, and the drift and boulders of the highlands of

Norway and Scotland were dispersed by means of icebergs over the low

levels of what was then an archipelago, in which only the higher peaks

of Britain rose out of the sea. Far to the south of the Thames and the

Seine, the drift of this Arctic ocean was then accumulating the evidence

which now reveals to us the fauna and the arts of quaternary Europe;

just as the overlying boulders of the American drift far south in the

Ohio valleys show their derivation from the Laurentian mountains of

Canada. With the elevation of the old ocean-bed there appears to have

been a renewal of an Arctic temperature indicated by the traces of local

glaciers in the mountains of Scotland, Cumberland, and Wales; and so the

glacial period drew to a close. A gradual rise of temperature carried

the lines of ice and perpetual snow further and further northward,

excepting in regions of great elevation, as in the Swiss Alps. This was

necessarily accompanied with the melting of the glaciers accumulated in

the mountain valleys throughout the protracted period of cold. The

broken rocks and soil of the highlands were swept into the valleys by

torrents of melted ice and snow; the lower valleys were hollowed out and

reformed under this novel agency; and the landscape assumed its latest

contour of valley, estuary, and river-beds.

This is what the elder geologists, including Dean Buckland, accepted for

a time as the evidence of the Mosaic deluge. It is now universally

recognised as the product of no sudden cataclysm, but the result of

operations carried on continuously throughout periods of vast duration,

during which the memorials of animal and vegetable life of the pleiocene

and pleistocene epochs were slowly imbedded in the accumulated débris of

this diluvian reconstruction. The characteristics of the fossil mammals

of the post-glacial period differ in many respects so widely from all

that we are accustomed to associate with the presence of man, that they

help to suggest even an exaggerated idea of antiquity. Nevertheless,

there is no break of continuity. Animals still living have their fossil

representatives alongside of the pleiocene mastodon, cave-lion, and

bear: if indeed the latter be not itself the _ursus ferox_, or grizzly

bear of North America, the claws of which are still worn as the proudest

trophy of the Red Indian hunter.

Of twenty-one species of post-glacial mammals identified in the deposits

of Brixham Cavern, only four are regarded as extinct species, and these

include the _ursus spelæus_ and _hyæna spelæa_. But their habitats have

been widely changed in the climatic and geographical revolutions which

have intervened. Some have to be sought for within the Arctic circle;

others in low latitudes, and on continents lying wholly outside of that

world which was alone known to Aristotle and Pliny. Every thing

indicates a revolution slowly wrought through unnumbered ages, during

which the ancient fauna was being supplanted by novel species, including

those which belong to the historical period of temperate Europe. So far

as appears from present evidence, man himself has to be included among

the new additions to the European fauna. To this post-glacial period

must, at any rate, be assigned the advent of the Flint-Folk of the

Drift: a race of hunters and fishers not greatly differing in their rude

arts from the more immediate precursors of the Historic races in

Europe’s Stone Age; but who were contemporaneous with the Siberian

mammoth and other extinct elephants, the woolly rhinoceros, the musk-ox,

and the reindeer of France; and with numerous extinct carnivora of

proportions corresponding to the gigantic herbivora on which they

preyed.

The regions in which remains of the Flint-Folk have hitherto chiefly

occurred embrace the valleys of Northern France and Southern England,

where now the vine and the hop clothe the sunny slopes with their

luxuriance. But as fresh evidence accumulates, corresponding indications

are found to extend to the shores and islands of the Mediterranean.

Traces of Europe’s neolithic artificers have been found in the caves of

Gibraltar; and among a singularly interesting accumulation of

flint-flakes, polished stone axes, rude pottery, etc., lying beside the

skeletons of their owners, in the same caves of Andalusia from one of

which a golden tiara of primitive workmanship has been recovered.[9]

Among remoter traces in the Maccagnone, Sicilian cave, Dr. Falconer

could discover nothing suggestive of a different period for the rude

flint implements and the numerous bones of the hippopotamus, mammoth,

cave-lion, and other fossil mammals with which they were conjoined;

while far eastward, near Beyrout, the Rev. H. B. Tristram reports the

occurrence, in the stalagmitic flooring of a limestone cave, of bones

and teeth assigned to a fossil ox, the red-deer, and the reindeer,

alongside of the flint-knives or flakes which the prehistoric cave-men

of Lebanon had used when feasting on such prey.[10] But though such

traces occur on ancient historic sites, we search in vain for any

connecting link between the oldest historic races and those belonging to

an era which one distinguished geologist has designated as “The Second

Elephantine Period”;[11] when, according to his reconstruction of the

physical geography of the region, the Thames was a tributary of the

Rhine; the English Channel was not yet in being, and Britain existed

only as part of a continent which stretched away uninterruptedly

northward towards the Arctic circle.

It thus appears that the advent of man in Northern Europe is assignable

to a period when the mammoth and the tichorine rhinoceros still roamed

its forests, and the great cave-tiger and other extinct carnivora

haunted its caverns; when the gigantic Irish elk, the reindeer, the

musk-ox, and the wild horse were objects of the chase; and the

hippopotamus major was a summer visitor to the Seine and the Thames.

When first employing the term _prehistoric_ which has since obtained

such universal acceptance, I remarked, in reference to Scottish

aboriginal traces: “There is one certain point in this inquiry into

primitive arts which the British antiquary possesses over all others,

and from whence he can start without fear of error. From our insular

position it is unquestionable that the first colonist of the British

Isles must have been able to construct some kind of boat, and have

possessed sufficient knowledge of navigation to steer his course through

the open sea.”[12] It then seemed a postulate on which the most cautious

adventurer into the great darkness which lies behind us might

confidently take his stand. But the point was no certain one after all.

The fauna of the later Elephantine period still roamed over a wide

continent unbroken by the English Channel or the Irish Sea; and the

valley of the Rhine stretching northward through the still unsubmerged

plain of the German Ocean, received as tributaries the Thames and the

Humber, perhaps also the Tweed and the Forth. Measured therefore by the

most moderate estimate of geological chronology, the historical period

is, in relation to the interval since the first appearance of man,

somewhat in a ratio with the superficial soil and vegetable mould, as

compared with the whole deposits of the stratified drift: in other

words, it is so insignificant as, in a geological point of view, to be

scarcely worth taking into account.

Whatever be the consequences involved in such comprehensive inductions,

proofs appear to accumulate, with every renewed search, of the wide

diffusion throughout the bone-bearing drift of the post-glacial period,

of symmetrically-formed flints, bearing indubitable traces of

intelligence and primitive mechanical skill.

It is the old argument of Paley, reproduced in a form undreamt of in his

philosophy. “If,” he might have said, “in digging into a bank of gravel

we find a flint, we do not pause to ask whence it came; but if our spade

strike on a watch?”——In the age of the Flint-Folk mechanical ingenuity

expended itself for other purposes than the manufacture of

time-measurers; but if the artificial origin of the implements of the

drift, and their consequent indications of the presence of man, be

acknowledged, our greatest difficulty is the remoteness of the period

which they seem to indicate. Worked flints and other assumed human

industrial remains have now been recovered from caverns, in various

countries of Europe, as in the caves of Engis and Chokier, near Liége;

at Mont Salève, Geneva; in the south of France, in Belgium, and in

England: in every case so mingled with remains of the mammoth,

rhinoceros, hyæna, and other extinct mammals, as to lead to the

conviction of their contemporaneous deposition. Recent carefully

conducted explorations in the Devonshire caves have resulted in

seemingly indisputable proof that English flint-implements of the Amiens

type are coeval with the extinct fauna; and that consequently the

presence of their manufacturers must be assigned to periods prior to the

successive inundations and depositions by which Brixham cave was

gradually filled with layers of water-worn gravel, silt, or cave-earth,

bone breccia, and solid floorings of carbonate of lime.

The rudeness of many of the worked flints has suggested the idea of

their accidental origin; but the most diligent search in the heaps of

chalk-flints broken for the roads, in France or England, or crushed _in

situ_ by subterranean movements, as in the Isle of Wight, has failed to

recover a single specimen resembling even the rudest implements of the

drift; whereas, in the ancient flint pits of the Shawnees, and probably

of the Mound-Builders of Ohio,—to which I shall again refer,—I have

collected fractured flints of precisely the same types as those familiar

to us among the rudest drift implements. They differ for the most part

in size, and also in type, from those found in early British or Danish

grave-mounds; but artificial origin and inventive design are as obvious

in the one as in the other.

That forgery of drift implements has been practised latterly, especially

by the French workmen, is indisputable, but this need not affect the

question. The facts connected with their discovery had been on record

for nearly a century and a half before their significance was perceived;

and specimens lay unheeded in the British Museum and in the collection

of the Society of Antiquaries of London, with their human workmanship

undisputed, so long as their origin was ascribed to Celtic art.[13] In

reality the explorers of the drift have been perplexed by the very

abundance of the traces of art which it discloses. Dr. Rigollot states

that in the pits of St. Acheul alone, between August and December 1854,

upwards of four hundred specimens were obtained. The lowest estimate of

the number recovered in the valley of the Somme is 3000; but this is

exclusive of the more dubious flint-flakes, styled knives, estimated by

Sir Charles Lyell at many thousands more.[14] In England flint

implements of the same peculiar type have already rewarded research in

many localities; so that Mr. Evans justly remarks: “The number found is

almost beyond belief.”[15] Some reasons tending to account for their

accumulation in such localities are discussed in the following chapter,

in the light of analogous discoveries in the New World. But while it is

no longer possible to question their artificial origin, and the

consequent evidence of the presence of man in those localities where

they abound, the haunts of those primeval hunters and fishers were the

river-valleys of an elder world; and any attempt at estimating the time

required for changes of climate, extinction of fauna, the succession of

races implied in the phases of palæolithic and neolithic arts, and the

gradual introduction and development of metallurgy, involves so many

unknown quantities, that at present it must suffice to recognise as no

longer disputable that the whole historic period of Northern Europe is

insignificant when compared with the time requisite to account for all

the phenomena in question. The relative chronology of the French drift

is: _1st_, superficially, tombs and other remains of the Roman period,

scarcely perceptibly affected in their geological relations by nearly

the whole interval of the Christian era; _2d_, in the alluvium,

seemingly imbedded by natural accumulation, at an average depth of 15

feet, remains of a European stone-period, corresponding to those of the

recently discovered pfahlbauten, or lacustrine villages of the Swiss

Lakes; and, _3d_, the tool-bearing gravel, imbedding works of the

Flint-Folk, wrought seemingly when the rivers were but beginning the

work of excavating the valleys which give their present contour to the

landscapes of France and England.

With such indications of the remoteness of the era of the Drift-Folk it

scarcely calls for special notice, that their tools correspond to some

of those found in cave-deposits, as in Kent’s Hole, Devonshire; but that

they are readily distinguishable from the smaller implements and weapons

of the same material wrought by the primitive Barrow-Builders of Europe,

or by modern savage tribes still ignorant of metallurgy. From whatever

point we attempt to view the facts thus presented to our consideration,

it becomes equally obvious that we are dealing with the traces of a

period irreconcilable with any received system of historic chronology;

but within which, nevertheless, we are compelled to recognise many

indications of the presence of man.

By evidence of a like character, the intermediate but still remote

periods of prehistoric centuries are peopled with successive races of

men. Proofs of oscillation, upheaval, and derangement of the course of

ancient rivers, had furnished indications of the enormous lapse of time

embraced within the British stone-period before the discoveries of

Abbeville and Amiens were heard of.[16] In the year 1819 there was

disclosed in the alluvium of the carse-land, where the river Forth winds

its circuitous course through ancient historic scenes, the skeleton of a

gigantic whale, with a perforated lance or harpoon of deer’s-horn beside

it. They lay together near the base of Dunmyat, one of the Ochil Hills,

twenty feet above the highest tide of the neighbouring estuary. Over

this an accumulation of five feet of alluvial soil was covered with a

thin bed of moss. The locality was examined by scientific observers

peculiarly competent to the task; and at the same time sufficient traces

of the old Roman causeway were observed, leading to one of the fords of

the Forth, to prove that no important change had taken place on the bed

of the river, or the general features of the strath, during the era of

authentic history.[17] Nor was this example a solitary one. Remains of

gigantic Balænæ have been repeatedly found; and one skeleton discovered

in 1824, seven miles further inland, was deposited in the Museum of

Edinburgh University, along with the primitive harpoon of deer’s-horn

found beside it, which in this instance retained some portion of the

wooden shaft by which it had been wielded. Among antique spoils

recovered at various depths in the same carse-land, the collection of

the Scottish Antiquaries includes a primitive quern, or hand-mill,

fashioned from the section of an oak,—such as is still in use by the

Indians of America for pounding their grain,—and a wooden wheel of

ingenious construction, found with several flint arrow-heads alongside

of it.

With such well-authenticated and altogether indisputable evidence

already in our possession, the additions made to our grounds for belief

in the antiquity of the prehistoric dawn of Britain or Europe do not

materially affect the conclusions thereby involved, though they add to

the apparent duration of the human era. Whatever difficulties may seem

to arise from the discoveries at Abbeville and Amiens, or the older ones

at Gray’s Inn Lane, Hoxne, and elsewhere, in relation to the age of man,

the chronology which suffices to embrace the ancient Caledonian whaler

within the period of human history will equally adapt itself to more

recent disclosures. And lying, as the Scottish relics did, almost

beneath the paving of the Roman causeway, they suffice to show that

discoveries relative to the British Celt of Julius Cæsar’s time, or to

the Romanised Briton of Claudius or Nero, which have hitherto seemed to

the antiquary to illuminate the primeval dawn, bear somewhat less

relation to the period to which the Dunmyat and Blair-Drummond Moss

harpoons belong, than the American aborigines of the fifteenth century

do to primeval generations of the New World. The very question raised

anew by such disclosures as the British drift, ossiferous caves,

grave-mounds, and chance deposits reveal, is whether the ancient Celt,

on whom Roman and Saxon intruded, was not himself a very recent intruder

on older allophylian occupants?[18] If he was not, we are left to

imagine for his race an antiquity and a history, compared with which the

dreams of Merlin and the fables of Geoffrey of Monmouth are credible

things.

With the advent of man antedated in geological eras, the Roman period

becomes, in truth, a part of very modern history; and the vast ages

computed to have intervened between the two periods baffle the fancy in

its efforts to comprehend the links by which they are connected. But

crude as are the arts of that primeval age, it will be seen that they

compare favourably with those of uncultured man at any later period.

Recent explorations, and especially those of the Dordogne caves of

Central France, disclose carvings in bone, and engravings on ivory and

slate, hereafter referred to, revealing an imitative skill, and powers

of observation in the delineation of characteristic details of form and

action, such as have rarely, if ever, been equalled in the art of modern

uncultured races. If by the aid of those singularly interesting

disclosures, we do indeed recover traces of the Flint-Folk belonging to

an era estimated by some scientific chronologists as antedating our own

by hundreds of thousands of years, it is of no slight importance to

perceive that the interval which has wrought such revolutions on the

earth as are recorded in the mammaliferous drift, show man the same

reasoning, tentative, and inventive mechanician, as clearly

distinguished then from the highest orders of contemporary life of the

Elephantine or cave periods, as he is now from the most intelligent of

the brute creation. In truth, so far from arriving by such disclosures

any nearer an anthropoid link between man and the brute, the oldest

art-traces of the palæotechnic men of Central France not only surpass

those of many savage races, but they indicate an intellectual aptitude

in no degree inferior to the average Frenchman of the nineteenth

century.

Much of the reasoning relative to the characteristics which

archæological discoveries assign to man in his primeval stage originates

in an illogical association of the concomitants of modern intellectual

and social progress with the indispensable requisites implied in man’s

primary condition as a rational being. It is not necessary for the

confirmation of a primeval Stone or Flint Period, that we degrade man

from that majestic genesis of our race, when he heard the voice of the

Lord God amongst the trees of Paradise and was not afraid. Still less is

it requisite that we make of him that “extinct species of anthropoid

animal” hastily invented by over-sensitive Mosaic geologists to meet the

problematic case of pleistocene products of art. In that primeval

transition of the ethnologist in which geology draws to a close, and

archæology has its beginning, amid all the rudeness of palæolithic art,

we may still recognise the rational lord of creation, the being endowed,

not with physical but moral supremacy; in whom intelligence and

accumulated experience were to prove more than a match for all the brute

force of those gigantic mammalia so familiar to us now in fossil

disclosures of the drift-gravels and cave-earth. Even if no more is

claimed for primeval man than a condition akin to that of many modern

uncivilised races, we can still discern the new and higher order of

beings for which all others were to make way.

But if our modern technological standards are to be the only received

tests of intellectual nobility, “his fair large front and eye sublime,”

with all the suggestive picturings of Milton’s primeval man, are vain.

His arts, though ample enough for all his wants, if tested by such

standards, declare him no better than “the ignoble creature that

arrow-heads and flint-knives would indicate.” He needed no weapons for

war or the chase; implements of husbandry were scarcely less

superfluous, amid a profusion ampler than the luxuriant plenty of the

islands of the Southern Ocean. The needle and the loom were as foreign

to his requirements as the printing-press or the electric telegraph.

What use had he for the potter’s wheel, or the sculptor’s chisel, or the

mason’s tools? And if his simple wants did suggest the need of some

cutting implement, the flint-knife, or

“Such other gardening tools as art, yet rude,

Guiltless of fire, had formed,”

harmonise with the simplicity of that primeval life, and its easy toils,

far more naturally than the most artistic Sheffield cutlery could do,

with all its requisite preliminary processes of mining, smelting,

forging, grinding, and hafting the needless tool.

The idea which associates man’s intellectual elevation with the

accompaniments of mechanical skill, as though they stood somehow in the

relation of cause and effect, and with the intellectual as the

offspring, instead of the parent, of the mechanical element, is the

product of modern thought. The very element which begets the

unintellectual condition of the savage is that his whole energies are

expended, and all his thoughts are absorbed, in providing daily food and

clothing, and the requisite tools by which those are to be secured; or

where, as in the luxuriant islands of Polynesia, nature seems to provide

all things to his hand, his degraded moral nature unparadises the Eden

of the bread-fruit tree.

A primeval “Stone period” appears to underlie the most remote traces of

European civilisation; and not only to carry back the evidence of man’s

presence to times greatly more remote than any hitherto conceived of,

but to confirm the idea that his earliest condition was one not only

devoid of metallurgy, but characterised by mechanical arts of the very

simplest kind. But it does not necessarily follow that he was in a

condition of intellectual dormancy. The degradation of his moral nature,

and not the absence of the arts which we associate with modern luxury

and enterprise, made him a savage. The Arab sheikh, wandering with his

flocks over the desert, is not greatly in advance of the Indian of the

American forests, either in mechanical skill or artistic refinement; yet

the Idumean Job was just such a pastoral Arab, but, nevertheless, a

philosopher and a poet, far above any who dwelt amid the wondrous

developments of mechanical and artistic progress in the cities of the

Tigris or the Euphrates. It is not to be inferred, however, that the

whole history of the human race is affirmed by the archæologist to

disclose a regular succession of periods—Stone, Bronze, and Iron, or

however otherwise designated,—akin to the organic disclosures of

geology; or that where their traces are found they necessarily imply

such an order in their succession. The only true analogy between the

geologist and the archæologist is, that both find their evidence

imbedded in the earth’s superficial crust, and deduce the chronicles of

an otherwise obliterated past by legitimate induction therefrom. The

radical difference between the palæontologist and the ethnologist lies

in this, that the one aims at recovering the history of unintelligent

divisions of extinct life; the other investigates all that pertains to a

still existing, intelligent being, capable of advancing from his own

past condition, or returning to it, under the most diverse external

circumstances.

Amid that strangely diversified series of organic beings which pertains

to the studies of the geologist, there appears at length one, “the

beauty of the world, the paragon of animals”;[19] a being capable of

high moral and intellectual elevation, fertile in design, and with a

capacity for transmitting experience, and working out comprehensive

plans by the combined labours of many successive generations. In all

this there is no analogy to any of the inferior orders of being. The

works of the ant and the beaver, the coral zoophyte and the bee, display

singular ingenuity and powers of combination; and each feathered

songster builds its nest with wondrous forethought, in nature’s

appointed season. But the instincts of the inferior orders of creation

are in vain compared with the devices of man, even in his savage state.

Their most ingenious works cost them no intellectual effort to acquire

the craft, and experience adds no improvements in all the continuous

labours of the wonderful mechanicians. The beaver constructs a dam more

perfect than the best achievements of human ingenuity in the formation

of breakwaters, and builds for itself a hut which the author of the

_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ justly contrasts in architectural

skill with the ruder dwelling of the Asiatic Tartar. The bee, in forming

its cell, solves a mathematical problem which has tasked the labours of

acutest analysts. But each ingenious artificer is practising a craft

which no master taught, and to which it has nothing to add. The

wondrous, instinctive, living machine creates for itself the highest

pleasure it is capable of in working out the art with which it is

endowed; and accomplishes it with infallible accuracy, as all its

untaught predecessors did, and as, without teaching, each new-born

successor will do. To such architects and artists history does not

pertain, for their arts knew no primeval condition of imperfection, and

witness no progress. Of their works, as of their organic structure, one

example is a sufficient type of the whole. The palæontologist’s

materials have been designated by one popular geologist, “the Medals of

Creation”; and the term, though borrowed from the antiquary, has a

significance which peculiarly marks the contrast now referred to between

geology and archæology. Like medals struck in the same die, the

multitude of examples of an extinct species, each exquisitely modelled

coral, and every cast of a symmetrical sigillaria, repeat the same

typical characteristics; and the poet’s fancy may be accepted as

literally true, in relation to the most ingenious arts which engage the

study of the naturalist:—

“All the winged habitants of paradise,

Whose songs once mingled with the songs of angels,

Wove their first nests as curiously and well

As the wood minstrel in our evil day

After the labour of six thousand years.”[20]

But with the relics of human art, even in its most primitive stage, it

is otherwise. Each example possesses an individuality of its own, for it

is the product of an intelligent will, capable of development, and

profiting by experience.

Accumulated knowledge is the grand characteristic of man. Every age

bequeaths some results of its experience; and this constitutes the

vantage-ground of succeeding generations. The deterioration which

follows in the wake of every impediment to such transmission and

accumulation of knowledge no less essentially distinguishes man from the

ingenious spinners, weavers, and builders, who require no lesson from

the past, and bequeath no experience to the future. Man alone can be

conceived of as an intelligent mechanician, starting with the first

rudiments of art, devising tools, initiating knowledge, and accumulating

experience. Whatever, therefore, tends to disclose glimpses of such a

primitive condition, and of his earliest acquisitions in mechanical arts

and metallurgic knowledge, helps to a just conception of primeval man.

Let us then glance at the evidence we possess of such an initial stage

of being. And first in seeming chronological order are those traces of

human arts in the drift, or in ossiferous caves among the bones of

strange orders of beings hitherto supposed to have long preceded the

existence of man. In the ancient alluvial deposits—most modern among

the strata of the geologist,—lie abundant traces of extinct animal

life, belonging to that recent transitional era of the globe in which

man first appears. In nearly all respects they present a contrast to

everything we are familiar with in the history of our earth as the

theatre of human action. In a zoological point of view they include man

and the existing races of animals, as well as extinct races which appear

to have been contemporaneous with indigenous species. To the

archæologist they are rich in records of that primeval transition in

which the beginnings of history lie. How early in that closing

geological epoch man appeared, or how late into that archæological era

the extinct fossil mammals survived, are the two independent

propositions which the sister sciences have to establish and reconcile.

The insular character of Great Britain renders it a peculiarly

interesting epitome of archæological study, a microcosm complete in

itself, and little less ample in the variety of its records than the

great continent, divorced from it by the ocean; yet the question, as we

have seen, is reopened: Was it already insular when its earliest nomad

trod its unhistoric soil? The Caledonian allophylian, as we now know,

pursued the gigantic whale in an estuary which swept along the base of

the far-inland Ochils; and guided his tiny canoe, above an ocean-bed,

which had to be upheaved into the sunshine of many centuries before it

could become the arena of deeds that live associated on the historic

page with the names of Agricola, Edward, Wallace and Bruce, of Montrose,

Cromwell, and Mar. Its history dawns in an era of geological mutation;

yet not more so than is now at work in other and neighbouring historic

lands. It is a type of the changes which were gradually transforming

that strange post-tertiary microcosm into the familiar historic Britain

of this nineteenth century.

From an examination of the detritus and included fossils, and the

disclosures of peat-mosses, we learn that, when the British Isles were

in possession of their first colonists, the country must have been

almost entirely covered with forests, and overrun by animals long since

extinct. In the deposits of marl that underlie the accumulated peat-bogs

of Scotland and Ireland occur abundant remains of the fossil elk, an

animal far exceeding in magnitude any existing species of deer. Its

bones have been found associated with skeletons of the mammoth and other

proboscidians, and with numerous teeth, jaws, and detached bones of the

extinct rhinoceros, hippopotamus, hyæna, fossil ox, etc.; yet no doubt

is now entertained that the elk was contemporaneous with man in the

British Isles. Stone hatchets, flint arrow-heads, and fragments of

pottery have been recovered alongside of its skeleton, under

circumstances that satisfy geologists, as well as archæologists, of

their contemporaneous deposition; its bones have been found with the

tool-marks of the flint chisel and saw; and evidence of various kinds

seems to exhibit this gigantic deer as an object of the chase, and a

source of primitive food, clothing, and tools.

Professor Jamieson and Dr. Mantell note the discovery, in the county of

Cork, of a human body exhumed from a marshy soil, beneath a peat-bog

eleven feet thick. The soft parts were converted into adipocere, and the

body, thus preserved, was enveloped in a deer-skin of such large

dimensions, as to lead them to the opinion that it belonged to the

extinct elk. In 1863, Professor Beete Jukes exhibited to the geological

section of the British Association the left femur, with a portion of one

of the tines of an antler, recently dug up in the vicinity of

Edgeworthstown, lying in marl, under forty feet of bog. A transverse cut

on the lower end of the femur corresponded with another on the antler,

by which they appeared to have been adapted for junction. After

carefully examining this bone, I entertain no doubt of its having been

cut by a sharp tool, and purposely prepared as the haft of the horn

blade which lay beside it. When the two were fastened together, they

must have made a formidable weapon. Other bones of this fossil deer have

been observed to bear marks of artificial cutting; but one of the most

interesting evidences of their use was produced at a meeting of the

Archæological Institute, June 3, 1864, when the Earl of Dunraven

exhibited an imperfect Irish lyre, found in the moat of Desmond Castle,

Adare, the material of which was pronounced by Professor Owen to be bone

of the Irish elk. The improbability of the recovery of a musical

instrument coeval with the Irish elk has been greatly lessened by more

recent discoveries. Among the carved bone and graven ivory relics of the

Troglodytes of the Dordogne valley was a reindeer bone pierced at one

end by an oblique hole, reaching to the medullary canal. By blowing upon

this, as on a hollow key, a shrill sound is produced; and to this

instrument accordingly M. Paul Broca applies the name of the rallying

whistle. But a later discovery furnishes more definite evidence of

ancient musical art. In 1871 M. E. Piette explored the cavern of Gourdan

(Haute-Garonne), and there in a layer of charcoal and cinders,

intermingled with flint implements, he found what he describes as a

neolithic flute. It also is formed of bone, but pierced with holes at

the side: an undoubted example of the art of one of Jubal’s primitive

disciples.

The evidence supplied by the ossiferous caves of England, as of the

continents of Europe and America, is full of interest from corresponding

revelations. Kirkdale Cave, Yorkshire, has acquired a special celebrity

from the description and illustration of its contents, given by Dr.

Buckland in his _Reliquiæ Diluvianæ_, in connection with a diluvial

theory subsequently abandoned; and Kent’s Hole, Devonshire, one of the

richest depositories of British fossil carnivora, yielded no less

remarkable traces of primitive mechanical arts. Intermingled with

remains of the rhinoceros, cave-hyæna, great cave-tiger, cave-bear, and

other extinct mammalia in unusual abundance, lay not only worked flints

and the like traces of human art, but also numerous implements wrought

from their bones; and subsequent investigations of ossiferous caves in

various localities, by competent scientific explorers, guided by the

accumulated knowledge and experience of upwards of thirty years, have

given precision to the ideas already entertained of the coexistence of

man with the extinct fauna of the caves.

In those instances, as well as in similar disclosures in Belgium and

Southern France, where the remains of man himself, as well as his

handiwork, have been found associated with the fossil mammalia, the

facts were for a time discredited, or explained away, as irreconcilable

with long-accepted conclusions relative to the age and early condition

of man. But in 1858 another ossiferous limestone cave was accidentally

discovered at Brixham, in the vicinity of the famous Kent’s Hole, and

negotiations were soon after entered into with a view to its thorough

exploration for purposes of science. Unlike Kent’s Hole Cavern, after a

succession of prolonged alternations of occupation by the carnivora of a

late quaternary epoch; of submergence by local floods, with the

deposition of their detrital accumulations in beds of varying character

and contents; and the formation over all, at favourable points, of a

flooring of carbonate of lime upwards of a foot thick: the falling in of

a portion of the roof closed up the entrance of Brixham Cave, except to

the smaller rodents and burrowing animals. Its history as the resort of

the older mammalia, and of man himself, was thus abruptly closed, and it

thenceforth remained intact, until its recent exploration. Thus, though

in its indications of the presence of man, its evidence is meagre when

compared with Kent’s Hole, it is wholly free from any confusing elements

such as in that remarkable cavern manifestly pertain to Celtic, Roman,

and even Saxon times.

Brixham Cave appears to have long been the resort of hyænas, who dragged

their prey into its main passages, and left there the gnawed bones of

the rhinoceros, the fossil horse and ox, the reindeer, roebuck, great

red-deer, etc. It included unmistakable traces of the mammoth, or other

huge proboscidian, was visited by the cave-tiger (_Felis spelæa_), and

finally became a favourite haunt of the great cave-bear (_Ursus

spelæus_), as well as of two other species of bears, one of which seems

to correspond to the _Ursus arctos_, or brown bear, and another has been

supposed to be identical with the _Ursus ferox_, or grizzly bear. From

time to time it was also visited, and some of its remote recesses

explored by man. Thirty-six flints in all have been recovered in the

different strata of the cave beds. A few of those are simply unworked

flints; but twenty-three of them betray traces of human workmanship and

use; and include knives and oval and lanceolate blades, closely

analogous to implements found in the Cavern of Aurignac, in the

Pyrenees, and in that of Le Moustier, in the Dordogne. Others, though

mere flint-flakes, bear decided marks of use as scraping tools. Another

implement is a round pebble of siliceous sandstone, weighing 1 lb. 3

oz., which must have been brought from a distance, and shows on the side

opposite to that by which it is most readily grasped by the hand

distinct evidence of its use as a hammer stone. One, and only one,

object wrought from animal substance, a small cylindrical pin, or rod of

ivory, accompanied the more durable flints. Some of those indications of

the presence of man were found in the bottom, or shingle-bed, overlaid

by undisturbed cave-earth rich in mammalian remains; and the entire

succession of beds was overlaid by a layer of stalagmite in which bones

of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and other fossil mammals occurred.

It does not appear that Brixham Cave had at any time been inhabited by

man. It has no accumulation of split bones or broken tools, nor any

traces of the hearth, as in Kent’s Hole, or in the Caves of Dordogne and

the Pyrenees. But the men of the mammoth period had resorted thither

occasionally,—for hiding, it may be, or in pursuit of their prey; and

thus dropped the worked flints which now reveal the evidence of their

presence. There is no trace of human bones, or any indication that man

fell a prey to the powerful wild animals which chiefly haunted the cave.

But he explored its recesses, in one case at least, to a distance of

seventy-four feet from the entrance; and unless we suppose him to have

groped his way thither, when in search of a more effectual hiding-place

from some human foe, it seems no unfair surmise that he carried with him

the illuminating torch. The extinguished hearths of the French Caves, as

at Aurignac and the Vezère, leave no room to question man’s early

acquaintance with fire. Nor does it seem to me probable that, under the

rigorous climate to which he was exposed in that remote post-glacial

period, he could fail, as man, to employ the art of fire-making to

alleviate his necessities, even as is now done under corresponding

exigencies by the Arctic Esquimaux. Nevertheless it is to be noted that

the flint implements found in Brixham Cave are of the rudest character;

and like other specimens of the worked-flints of the men of the Drift or

Cave periods, indicate a very slight development of constructive skill:

unless, as hereafter shown from analogous American examples, there may

be reason to regard many of them as merely in the first stage of

manufacture into weapons or tools.

Kent’s Cavern yielded a greatly more varied illustration of primitive

arts, such as barbed harpoon heads, bodkins, awls, and needles of bone.

Like others found in the French Caves, they suggest comparison with the

ingenious arts of the Esquimaux: and may also justify the inference that

in milder regions, and under other favouring circumstances, contemporary

man, then as now, manifested a higher intellectual vigour when free from

the exhausting strain involved in the battle for life, either of the

modern hyperborean, or of the post-glacial artificer of the cave period.

At an epoch which, though still prehistoric, is modern when compared

with the latest traces of post-glacial or cave periods, the worked

flints and implements of bone, found in many European primitive

deposits, in caverns, chambered cairns, barrows, and among the chance

disclosures of the agriculturist, continue to exhibit the most infantile

stage of rudimentary art. Fragments of sun-baked urns, and rounded slabs

of slate of a plate-like form, are associated with indications of rude

culinary practices, illustrative of the habits and tastes of savage man.

Broken pottery, calcined bones, charcoal ashes, and other traces of

cooking operations, have been noted under similar circumstances, alike

in England and on the continent of Europe; showing where the hearth of

the Allophylian had stood. Along with those, in Kent’s cavern

especially, the flints lay dispersed in all conditions, from the rounded

mass as it came out of the chalk, through various stages of progress, on

to finished arrow-heads and hatchets; while small flint-chips, and

partially used flint-blocks, thickly scattered through the soil, served

to indicate that the British troglodyte had there his workshop, as well

as his kitchen, and wrought the raw material of that primitive

stone-period into the requisite tools and weapons of the chase. Nor were

indications wanting of the specific food of man in the remote era thus

recalled for us. Besides accumulated bones, shells of the mussel,

limpet, and oyster, lay heaped together near the mouth of the cave,

along with a palate of the scarus: indicating that the aborigines found

their precarious subsistence from the products of the chase and the

spoils of the neighbouring sea.

The same fact is further illustrated by similar relics of a subterranean

stone dwelling at Saverock, near Kirkwall, in Orkney, situated, like the

natural caverns of Torbay, close to the sea-shore. Accumulated remains

of charcoal and peat ashes lay intermingled with bones of the small

northern sheep, the horse, ox, deer, and whale, and also with some rude

implements illustrative of primitive Orcadian arts; while a layer of

shells of the oyster, escallop, and periwinkle, the common whelk, the

purpura, and the limpet, covered the floor and the adjacent ground, in

some places half a foot deep.

In the interval since I first drew attention to such traces of

Scotland’s prehistoric centuries, this class of remains has excited

special interest. Ancient shell-mounds, analogous to the kjökkenmöddingr

of Denmark, discovered on the coasts of Elgin and Inverness-shire, have

yielded similar results; and the explorations of other mounds,

especially that of Keiss, in Caithness, have proved beyond question that

the natives of North Britain were familiar at a comparative late period

with the Reindeer. Specimens of its horns have been found not only

associated with flint implements, cups and personal ornaments of stone

and shale, the miscellaneous heaps of fish-bones, littoral shells, and

other débris of a kitchen-midden; but with the masonry of the Scottish

Broch, or primitive round tower. Some of the reindeer horns thus found

show marks of sawing and cutting, apparently with metal tools. How old

they are may not be strictly determinable; but they serve to place the

Scottish Reindeer Period in a very modern era, compared with that

assigned to the “Reindeer Period” of France; and remove all grounds for

rejecting the statement of Torfæus that, so recently as the twelfth

century, the Jarls of Orkney were wont to cross the Pentland Firth, to

chase the roe and the reindeer in the wilds of Caithness.

But recent discoveries replete with interest and value, which thus

extend the resources of the European archæologist and anthropologist,

are only known to me through the ordinary channels of information; and I

turn therefore to another field of study and research, rendered valuable

by the contrast which it presents in all ways to that of historic

Europe, with its confusing elements pertaining to times when the

ambition of Rome so overrode all nationalities, and obliterated the

memories of history, that even now it is hard to persuade some men there

was a European world before that of the Cæsars.

The city of Toronto, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, is built on

the drift clays which have accumulated above the rocks of the Lower

Silurian formation to an average depth of upwards of thirty feet, and in

some places to more than seventy feet. The same overlying beds of

boulder clay and drift-gravel extend with monotonous uniformity eastward

from Lake Huron to the Ottawa; and throughout the lower valley of the

St. Lawrence to Labrador. The traces of ancient life recovered from

those Canadian glacial deposits, with very few exceptions, correspond to

living species,—including Radiata, Mollusca, Articulata, and

Vertebrata, now found in other latitudes. As might be anticipated, the

older glacial beds indicate a more Arctic condition of life; and thus

accord with other evidence in pointing to a gradual amelioration of

climate in Northern America. But it is only in the boulder clay of the

lower St. Lawrence that the palæontologist finds the fossils by means of

which such conclusions are formed; and alongside of which it would be

reasonable to anticipate traces of the presence of man. The construction

of an esplanade along the margin of the Bay of Toronto, during recent

years, exposed a cutting of upwards of two miles in length, and laid

bare the virgin soil of the most populous site now devoted to the

civilising processes of European colonisation in Upper Canada. The same

drift clay and gravel have been exposed in numerous other excavations,

but hitherto without disclosures of interest to the archæologist. In two

cases only, so far as I have been able to ascertain, did any trace of

prior human presence appear. At the depth of nearly two feet from the

surface, in front of the Parliament buildings, the bones and horn of a

deer lay amid an accumulation of charcoal and wood ashes, and with them

a rude stone chisel or hatchet. More recently, to the west of the same

spot, at a depth of eight or nine feet, one of the cervical vertebræ of

the Wapiti (_Cervus Canadensis_), was found along with a rude stone

hatchet and a lance-head of flint. But the travelled fossils of the

Toronto drift are of a very different era, and belong to the Hudson

river group of the Lower Silurian, like the rocks on which it is

superimposed. With varying organic remains imbedded in its clay and

gravel, the same formation overlies the true fossiliferous rocks of

Western Canada; and seems to make of its long stretch of wooded levels

and gentle undulations a country fitted to slumber through untold

centuries under the shadow of its forests, a type of the earth of

primeval man, until the new-born mechanical science of Europe provided

for it the railway and the locomotive, and made its vast chain of rivers

and lakes a highway for the steamboat. With such novel facilities added

to the indomitable energy of the intruding occupants, the whole face of

the continent is in rapid process of transformation; and it is well, ere

the change is completed, that some note be made of every decipherable

index of the characteristics of a past thus destined to speedy

obliteration.

From the uncleared wilds that still occupy the shores of Lake Superior,

south-eastward through the great lakes and rivers to the valley of the

St. Lawrence, those drift deposits reveal to the geologist marvellous

changes that have transpired in this extensive area of the North

American continent. Along the low shores stretching away from the rapids

of Sault Ste. Marie to Lake Superior, huge granitic boulders lie strewed

like the wreck of some Titanic Babel; raised beaches at various levels

on the shores of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, show traces of other

revolutions; and wherever the waves of the St. Lawrence reopen the

deposits along the lower portion of the valley, the bottoms of an

ancient ocean are revealed, frequently with littoral or deep-sea shells

imbedded at different levels in the stratified drift. But remote as is

the antiquity, according to all human chronology, to which the fauna of

these beds of marine detritus belong, the palæontologist detects among

their post-tertiary fossils the phoca, balænæ of more than one species,

fishes, articulata, and the shells of many mollusca still inhabiting the

neighbouring ocean along the northern Atlantic coasts. The period,

therefore, which embraces those relics of ancient life is the same to

which man belongs; and they mark for it one of the phases of that last

transitional era during which the continent was being prepared for his

entrance upon it. Since the natica, fusus, turritella, and other marine

animals of the post-pleiocene period, were the living occupants of the

St. Lawrence valley, vast changes have been wrought on the physical

geography of the continent. The relative levels of the sea and land have

altered, so as to elevate old sea-margins to the slopes of lofty hills,

and leave many hundred miles inland escarpments wrought by the waves of

that ancient sea. The conditions of climate have undergone no less

important changes, developing in a corresponding degree the new

character and conditions of life pertaining to this bed of an extinct

ocean: covered with successive deposits of marine detritus, and then

elevated into the region of sun and rain, to be clothed with the

umbrageous forest, and to become the dwelling-place through another

dimly-measured period of the wapiti, the beaver, and the bison; and with

them, of the Iroquois, the Huron, and the Chippewa: all alike the fauna

of conditions of life belonging to a transitional period of the New

World preparatory to our own.

Marvellous as are those cosmical revolutions belonging to the period of

emergence of the northern zone of America from the great Arctic Ocean,

when we look on each completed whole the process appears to have been

characterised by no abnormal violence. Slowly through long centuries the

ocean shallowed. The deep-sea organisms of a former generation were

overlaid by the littoral shells of a newer marine life, and then the

tidal waves retreated from the emerging sea-beach; until now we seek far

down in the gulf of the St. Lawrence and on the coast of Labrador for

the living descendants of species gathered from the post-pleiocene

drift. Thus the closing epoch of geology in the New World, as in the

Old, is brought into contact with that in which its archæology begins;

and we look upon the North American continent as at length prepared for

the presence of man.

Such records are here noted among the disclosures of the great valley of

the St. Lawrence, which drains well-nigh half a continent; for it is in

the valleys by which the present drainage of historic areas takes place,

that not only such deposits of recent shells and fossil relics of

existing fauna occur, but also that the most extensive remains of the

extinct mammalia are disclosed, in association with objects serving to

link them with those of modern eras. In formations of this character

have been found, in the lower valley of the Mississippi, the _Elephas

primigenius_, the _Mastodon Ohioticus_, the _Megalonyx_, _Megalodon_,

_Ereptodon_, and the _Equus curvidens_, or extinct American horse: with

many other traces of an unfamiliar fauna, and also a flora,

contemporaneous with those gigantic mammifers, but which also include

both marine and terrestrial representatives of existing species.

Corresponding in its great geographical outlines very nearly to its

present condition, the American continent must have presented in nearly

all other characteristics a striking contrast to its modern aspect,

clothed though it seems to us in primeval forests, and scarcely modified

by the presence of man. In the post-pleiocene 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 more interesting for our present purpose, as possibly

indicating the contemporaneous existence of some of those strange

mammals with man, are notices of remains of human art in the same

formation. Professor Holmes, in exhibiting a collection of fossils from

the post-pleiocene of South Carolina before the Academy of Natural

Sciences of Philadelphia, remarked: “Dr. Klipstein, who resides near

Charleston, in digging a ditch for the purpose of reclaiming a large

swamp, discovered and sent to me the tooth of a mastodon, with the

request that I should go down and visit the place, as there were

indications of the bones and teeth of the animal still remaining in the

sands which underlie the peat-bed. 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.”[21] It would

not be wise 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-pleiocene

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. The tusk of the mastodon lay alongside of the fragment of

pottery, in a deposit of the peat and sands of the post-pleiocene beds.

Immediately underneath lie marine deposits, rich with varied groups of

mollusca, corresponding to species now living on the sea-coast of

Carolina, but also including two fossil species no longer to be met with

there, though common in the Gulf of Mexico and the West Indian seas.

Here the palæontology of the New World discloses to us types of a fauna

pertaining to its latest transitional period, which serve to illustrate

the marvellous contrast between its commencement and its close. Until

the discovery of teeth of the megatherium in the post-pleiocene bed of

the Ashley River, remains of that extinct mammal had been found only in

the state of Georgia, in North America, while the _Mastodon Ohioticus_

and _Elephas primigenius_ are among the well-known fauna of the Canadian

drift. Of those, some North American localities have furnished remains

in remarkable profusion, but none more so than the celebrated morass in

Kentucky, known by its homely but expressive name of the Big-bone Lick.

Imbedded in the blue clay of this ancient bog, entire skeletons, or

detached bones, of not less than one hundred mastodons and twenty

mammoths, have been found, besides remains of the megalonyx and other

extinct quadrupeds. A magnificent skeleton of the _Mastodon Ohioticus_,

now in the British Museum, was discovered, with teeth and bones of many

others, near the banks of La Pomme de Terre, a tributary of the Osage

River, Missouri; and there once more we seem to come upon

contemporaneous traces of man. “The bones,” says Mantell, who examined

them in the presence of Mr. Albert Koch, their discoverer, “were

imbedded in a brown sandy deposit full of vegetable matter, with

recognisable remains of the cypress, tropical cane, and swamp-moss,

stems of the palmetto, etc., and this was covered by beds of blue clay

and gravel to a thickness of about 15 feet. Mr. Koch states, and he

personally assured me of the correctness of the statement, that an

Indian flint arrow-head was found beneath the leg-bones of this

skeleton, and four similar weapons were imbedded in the same

stratum.”[22] Some of the deductions of Mr. Koch were extravagant, and

tended to bring discredit on his statement. But there appear to be no

just grounds for doubting the main facts. A full-sized view of the large

arrow-head is given in the Smithsonian Report of 1872. Another, but more

dubious account, preserved in the _American Journal of Science_,

describes the discovery in Missouri of the bones of a mammoth, with

considerable portions of the skin, associated with stone spear-heads,

axes, and knives, under circumstances which suggest the idea that it had

been entangled in a bog, and there stoned to death and partially

consumed by fire.[23] Such contiguity of the works of man with those

extinct mammals warns us at least to be on our guard against any

supercilious rejection of indications of his ancient presence in the New

World as well as in the Old.

Whether or not the mammoth and mastodon had been contemporary with man,

their remains were objects of sufficiently striking magnitude to awaken

the curiosity even of the unimpressible Indian; and traditions were

common among the aborigines relative to their existence and destruction.

M. Fabri, a French officer, informed Buffon that they ascribed those

bones to an animal which they named the _Père aux Bœufs_. Among the

Shawnees, and other southern tribes, the belief was current that the

mastodon once occupied the continent along with a race of giants of

corresponding proportions, and that both perished together by the

thunderbolts of the Great Spirit. Another Indian tradition of Virginia

told that these monstrous quadrupeds had assembled together, and were

destroying the herds of deer and bisons, with the other animals created

by the Great Spirit for the use of his red children, when he slew them

all with his thunderbolts, excepting the big bull, who defiantly

presented his enormous forehead to the bolts, and shook them off as they

fell; until, being at length wounded, he fled to the region of the great

lakes, where he is to this day.

The first notice in an English scientific journal of the fossil mammals

of the American drift furnishes such a counterpart to the Shawnee

traditions of extinct giants as might teach a lesson to modern

speculators in science; when it is borne in remembrance that the

difficulty now is to reconcile with preconceived beliefs the discovery

of works of human art alongside of their remains. In 1712, certain

gigantic bones, which would now most probably be referred to the

mastodon, were found near Cluverack, in New England. The famous Dr.

Increase Mather soon after communicated the discovery to the Royal

Society of London; and an abstract in the _Philosophical Transactions_

duly set forth his opinion of this supposed confirmation of the

existence of men of prodigious stature in the antediluvian world, as

proved by the bones and teeth, which he judged to be human,

“particularly a tooth, which was a very large grinder, weighing four

pounds and three-quarters, with a thigh bone seventeen feet long.”[24]

They were doubtless looked upon with no little satisfaction by Dr.

Mather, as a striking confirmation of the Mosaic record, that “there

were giants in those days.” To have doubted the New England

philosopher’s conclusions might have been even more dangerous then than

to believe them now. Possibly, after the lapse of another century and a

half, some of our own confused minglings of religious questions with

scientific investigations will not seem less foolish than the

antediluvian giants of the New England divine.

In all that relates to the history of man in the New World, we have ever

to reserve ourselves for further truths. There are languages of living

tribes, of which we have neither vocabulary nor grammar. There are

nations of whose physical aspect we scarcely know anything; and areas

where it is a moot point even now, whether the ancient civilisation of

central America may not be still a living thing. The ossiferous caves of

England have only revealed their wonders during the present century, and

the works of art in the French drift lay concealed till our own day. We

cannot, therefore, even guess what America’s disclosures will be.

Discoveries in its ossiferous caverns have already pointed to the same

conclusions as those of Europe. A cabinet of the British Museum is

filled with fossil bones of mammalia, obtained by Dr. Lund and M.

Claussen from limestone caverns in the Brazils, closely resembling the

ossiferous caves of Europe. The relics were imbedded in a

reddish-coloured loam, covered over with a thick stalagmitic flooring;

and along with them lay numerous bones of genera still inhabiting the

continent, with shells of the large _bulimus_, a common terrestrial

mollusc of South America.

No clear line of demarcation can be traced here between the era of the

extinct carnivora and edentata, and those of existing species; and there

is therefore no greater cause of wonder than in the analogous examples

of Europe, to learn that in the same detritus of those Brazilian caves

Dr. Lund found human skeletons, which he believed to be coeval with some

of the extinct mammalia. Nor have the first disclosures of works of art

in the American drift still to be made. I have in my possession an

imperfect flint-knife (Fig. 1), to all appearance as unquestionable a

relic of human art as the most symmetrical of those assigned to a

similar origin by the explorers of the French and English drift-gravels.

It was given to me by Mr. P. A. Scott, an intelligent Canadian, who

found it at a depth of upwards of fourteen feet, among the rolled gravel

and gold-bearing quartz of the Grinell Leads, in Kansas Territory, while

engaged in digging for gold. In an alluvial bottom, in the Blue Range of

the Rocky Mountains, distant several hundred feet from a small stream

called Clear Creek, a shaft was sunk, passing through four feet of rich

black soil, and below this, through upwards of ten feet of gravel,

reddish clay, and rounded quartz. Here the flint implement was found,

and its unmistakably artificial origin so impressed the finder, that he

secured it, and carefully noted the depth at which it lay.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.—Flint-Knife, Grinell Leads.]

It is difficult at present to test such chance evidence accurately. The

discovery of the palæolithic implements of Europe had been recorded

upwards of half a century before their true significance was recognised;

whereas the American explorer is on the look-out for similar

disclosures, and evinces at times a feeling as though the honour of his

country is imperilled if he fail. It will be seen, moreover, from the

narrative of a subsequent chapter, that the abundance of flint and stone

implements in the virgin soil of the New World is almost marvellous. The

discovery, therefore, of stray specimens in modern river-gravels, the

washings of gold-drift, or in any excavations liable to be affected by

surface admixtures, must be viewed with the utmost caution. Several

flint implements from the auriferous gravel of California were produced

at the Paris Exposition of 1855. According to the geological survey of

Illinois, for 1866, the bones of the mastodon and other fossil mammals

have been found in a bed of “local drift” near Alton, underlying the

Loess; and at the same depth stone axes and flint spear-heads were

obtained.[25]

But such disclosures of worked flints or polished implements of stone

are cast into the shade by the reputed discovery of human remains in the

auriferous drift of California. In 1857 Dr. C. F. Winslow produced a

fragment of a human skull found eighteen feet below the surface, in the

“pay drift,” at Table Mountain, in connection with the bones of the

mastodon and fossil elephant. A later disclosure brought to light a

complete human skull, reported to have been discovered in auriferous

gravel, underlying five successive lava formations. Professor Whitney,

after satisfying himself of the genuineness of the discovery, produced

the skull at the Chicago meeting of the American Association for the

Advancement of Science, in 1869, to the manifest delight of some who

were prepared at once to relegate American man to a remoter epoch than

the Flint-folk of the Abbeville and Amiens gravel drift. More recently a

highly polished plummet of syenite, in the form of a double cone

perforated at one end, was produced before the Chicago Academy of

Sciences, as an implement found at a depth of thirty feet, in the

drift-gravel of San Joaquin, California, by some workmen engaged in

digging a well. In this case also Professor Whitney appears to have had

no hesitation in assigning it to the age of the fossil elephant and

mastodon. It does not seem to have been recognised how much more

probable it is that a highly finished stone implement like the San

Joaquin plummet should fall from the surface, in the process of

excavation, and so be perhaps no older than the era of the Mexican

conquest, than that it is a choice specimen of post-pleiocene art.

Much of the evidence hitherto adduced for the antiquity of the American

man has a singularly modern aspect. The human skulls are of the

predominant Indian type of the present day, though that need not

surprise us. Dr. Usher only notes this in the case of the “human

fossils” from the Brazil Caves, to add: “this consideration may spare

science the trouble of any further speculation on the _modus_ through

which the New World became peopled from the Old; for after carrying

backwards the existence of a people monumentally into the very night of

time, when we find that they have also preserved the same type back to a

remote, even to a geological, period, there can be no necessity for

going abroad to seek their origin.”[26] The question of this fancied

American type will come under review hereafter. But on a par with this

evidence are fragments of baskets and clay vessels submitted to the New

Orleans Academy of Sciences in 1867, as contemporary with the elephant

and other fossil mammals, the bones of which were found in digging the

same salt-pits in which the pottery and basket-work were met with; or a

fragment of cane-matting presented to the Smithsonian Institution in

1866 by Mr. J. F. Cleu, along with portions of tusks and teeth of the

fossil elephant which lay above it, at a depth of thirteen feet in a

Louisiana salt mine. Matting, or basket-work, of split cane is as common

among the contents of southern Indian graves as fragments of pottery;

and both may be reasonably suspected to carry with them evidence

inconsistent with any geological antiquity.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.—Lewiston Flint Implement. (5/7).]

Mr. Charles C. Jones notes a discovery of a more suggestive character,

due also to the search for gold. In the state of Georgia the river

Chattahoochee flows through an auriferous region of the Nacoochee

valley. From time to time the gold-diggers have made extensive cuttings

through the soil and underlying drift-gravel, down to the slate-rock

upon which it rests. During one of these excavations, at a depth of some

nine feet, intermingled with the gravel and boulders of the drift, three

large flint implements were found, measuring between three and four

inches in length, and “in material, manner of construction, and

appearance so nearly resembling some of the rough so-called flint

hatchets belonging to the drift-type that they might very readily be

mistaken the one for the others.”[27] With those may not unfitly be

classed a large implement of hornstone, now in the collection of the

Scottish Antiquaries, obtained by me from a dealer in Indian curiosities

at Lewiston in the State of New York, where it was said to have been

found at a great depth when sinking a well. Its form, though common

enough among the implements of the American Mound-Builders, rarely, if

ever, occurs on so large a scale in Europe, except among palæolithic

remains. Ovoid discs of the same class attracted the attention of the

Rev. J. MacEnery in his early explorations of Kent’s Cavern, and have

anew been brought to light in the recent systematic researches there.

Mr. Evans figures one found there in 1866 (Fig. 3), somewhat smaller,

and more ovoid in outline, but of the same type. The Lewiston implement

is shown in Fig. 2. It has been reduced to the present shape by

comparatively few strokes; and on the reverse side it appears as if

broken off by a final ill-directed blow. One edge is worn and fractured

as if by frequent use. Unfortunately more minute information of the

locality and the circumstances attendant on its discovery could not be

obtained. But even if it be regarded as only a stray relic of the same

class as those hereafter described among the ancient mound deposits of

Wisconsin and Ohio, it possesses a novel interest from its discovery

near the banks of the Niagara River, where no traces of the

Mound-Builders or their arts occur. Mr. Evans permits me to introduce

here the analogous example from Kent’s Cavern. It is of grey cherty

flint, and chipped on both faces with more than wonted care. Though

smaller than the Lewiston implement, the difference is only about half

an inch; the larger of the two being a little over five inches long. I

have purposely engraved the Lewiston disc on a large scale, in order to

suggest more clearly the proportions of this class of implements; and to

show the close analogy traceable between those of the American

continent, and the European disclosures of the river and cave drift.

[Illustration: FIG. 3.—Flint Disc, Kent’s Cavern. (½).]

Such, then, are some of the indications which have been assumed to point

to the ancient presence of man in the New World. If we estimate this by

historical, and not by geological periods, whatever proofs of his

antiquity archæology may supply will be found to accord with other

evidence; and especially with proofs furnished by the multitude of

independent languages, and the diversity of types of race, ranging from

the Arctic circle to Tierra del Fuego. But it would be rash to assume

from the partial evidence yet obtained, that the juxtaposition of flint

arrow-heads with the mastodon of Missouri, the pottery with bones and

tusk of the same animal in the post-pleiocene of South Carolina, the

human bones in the rich ossiferous caverns of the Brazils, or the flint

implements, and human remains recovered from Californian and other

auriferous drifts, unquestionably prove the existence of man on the

American continent contemporaneously with the fossil elephant or the

mastodon.

The proofs hitherto adduced have been at best only suggestive of further

research. There is no question that Dr. Lund visited that portion of

Brazil lying between the Rio das Velhas and the Rio Paraopeba, with very

important palæontological results. He there found a mountain chain of

limestone rock, abounding with fissures and caverns; and from some of

these calcareous caves he recovered, not only the bones of numerous

fossil mammals imbedded in red earth, but also human bones which he

pronounced to be fossil. The remains included not only those of sloths

and armadillos of gigantic size, but also extinct genera of monkeys, all

assumed to have been contemporaries of the fossil cave-men. But

experience is teaching the palæontologist that the mere recovery of

bones or implements from the same cave is no proof of contemporaneity. A

cave which had been filled with cave-earth and bone breccia, together

with extinct animals of the period of the _glyptodon_ and the _mylodon_,

may in a long subsequent era have become the shelter or the place of

sepulture of Indians.

Nearly forty years have elapsed since Dr. Lund’s discovery. Since then

the lamented Agassiz has visited Brazil with valuable results to

science; but no additional light has been thrown on the significance of

the disclosures of this interesting locality. One important fact,

however, has not only been admitted, but insisted upon. The crania of

the fossil men of Brazil betray no traces of approximation to that of

the fossil monkey, but on the contrary differ in no respect from the

predominant American Indian type; and the same has since been affirmed

of a set of human skulls now in the Smithsonian collection, which were

found incrusted with stalagmite, in a limestone cave in Calaveras

County, California. Their fossil character and extreme antiquity were at

first assumed to be indisputable. In this other respect they correspond

with the Brazilian fossil remains. Professor Jeffreys Wyman reported of

them that they present “no peculiarities by which they could be

distinguished from other crania of California.”[28]

Here then might seem to be additional proofs “that the general type of

races inhabiting America at that inconceivably remote era was the same

which prevailed at the period of the Columbian discovery”;[29] and that,

therefore, Dr. Morton’s assumed uniform cranial type pertains to the

American man from remotest geological time. There seems more reason,

however, for believing that the Calaveras Cave was a place of interment

of the present race of Indians; and that its crania are very modern

compared even with the fossil Caribs of Guadaloupe. But the increasing

evidence of the remote antiquity of the European man has naturally

suggested a revision of the evidence adduced in confirmation of his

ancient presence in the New World.

Sir Charles Lyell latterly regarded with greater favour than he had once

done, the possible coexistence of man with the mastodon, megalonyx, and

other extinct species, among bones of which, in the loam of the

Mississippi valley, near Natchez, a human pelvic bone was recovered, and

made the basis of very comprehensive theories. In the delta of the same

river, near New Orleans, a complete human skeleton is reported to have

been found, buried at a depth of sixteen feet, under the remains of four

successive cypress forests; and this discovery furnished the data from

which Dr. Bennet Dowler has assigned to the human race an existence in

the delta of the Mississippi 57,000 years ago.[30]

Evidence of this exceptional nature requires to be used with modest

caution. Antiquaries of Europe having found tobacco pipes of the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alongside of pottery and other

undoubted remains of Roman art, have hastily antedated the use of

tobacco to classic times.[31] On equally good evidence it might be

carried back to those of the mammoth, as the discovery of a similar

relic has been recorded at a depth of many feet, in sinking a coal-pit

at Misk, in Ayrshire.[32]

-----

[6] _The British Dominions in North America._ Lond. 1832. Vol. i. p. 89.

[7] _Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher._

[8] _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, vol. i. p. 41.

[9] _Antiguedades Prehistoricas de Andalusia_, Madrid, 1868.

[10] _The Land of Israel: a Journal of Travels in Palestine_, 1865, p.

11.

[11] J. Trimmer: _Jour. Geol. Soc._, vol. ix.

[12] _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, 1851, 1st Ed. p. 29.

[13] _Archæologia_, vol. xiii. p. 206; vol. xxxviii. p. 301.

[14] _Antiquity of Man_, 4th Ed. p. 190.

[15] _Archæologia_, vol. xxxviii. p. 296.

[16] _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, 1st Ed. p. 33.

[17] _Edin. Phil. Jour._, i. 395.

[18] This question was first brought forward by the author in an

“Inquiry into the Evidence of the existence of Primitive Races in

Scotland prior to the Celtæ.”—_British Association Report_, 1850.

[19] _Hamlet_, Act ii. sc. 2.

[20] Montgomery, _Pelican Island_.

[21] _Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia_,

July 1859, pp. 178, 186.

[22] Mantell’s _Fossils of the British Museum_, p. 473.

[23] _American Journ. of Science and Arts_, vol. xxxvi. p. 199, First

Series.

[24] _Philosophical Transactions_, vol. xxiv. p. 85.

[25] _Geol. Survey of Illinois_, by A. H. Worthen, vol. i. p. 38.

[26] _Types of Mankind_, p. 351.

[27] _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, p. 293.

[28] _Smithsonian Report_, 1867, p. 407.

[29] Dr. Usher, _Types of Mankind_, p. 351.

[30] _Types of Mankind_, p. 272.

[31] _La Normandie Souterraine_, p. 76.

[32] _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, vol. ii. p. 505.