Dwelling especially upon the received Hebrew text of the Old Testament,
he soon entangled himself in very serious difficulties; but, in spite of
the great fathers of the first three centuries, he reduced the antiquity
of man on the earth by nearly a thousand years, and, in spite of
mutterings against him as coming dangerously near a limit which made the
theological argument from the six days of creation to the six ages of
the world look doubtful, his authority had great weight, and did much to
fix western Europe in its allegiance to the general system laid down by
Eusebius and Jerome.
In the twelfth century this belief was re-enforced by a tide of thought
from a very different quarter. Rabbi Moses Maimonides and other Jewish
scholars, by careful study of the Hebrew text, arrived at conclusions
diminishing the antiquity of man still further, and thus gave
strength throughout the Middle Ages to the shorter chronology: it was
incorporated into the sacred science of Christianity; and Vincent of
Beauvais, in his great Speculum Historiale, forming part of that still
more enormous work intended to sum up all the knowledge possessed by the
ages of faith, placed the creation of man at about four thousand years
before our era.(182)
(182) For a table summing up the periods, from Adam to the building of
the Temple, explicitly given in the Scriptures, see the admirable paper
on The Pope and the Bible, in The Contemporary Review for April, 1893.
For the date of man's creation as given by leading chronologists in
various branches of the Church, see L'Art de Verifier les Dates,
Paris, 1819, vol. i, pp. 27 et seq. In this edition there are sundry
typographical errors; compare with Wallace, True Age of the World,
London, 1844. As to preference for the longer computation by the fathers
of the Church, see Clinton, Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii, p. 291. For the
sacred significance of the six days of creation in ascertaining
the antiquity of man, see especially Eichen, Geschichte der
mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung; also Wallace, True Age of the World,
pp. 2,3. For the views of St. Augustine, see Topinard, Anthropologie,
citing the De Civ. Dei., lib. xvi, c. viii, c. x. For the views of
Philastrius, see the De Hoeresibus, c. 102, 112, et passim, in Migne,
tome xii. For Eusebius's simple credulity, see the tables in Palmer's
Egyptian Chronicles, vol. ii, pp. 828, 829. For Bede, see Usher's
Chronologia Sacra, cited in Wallace, True Age of the World, p. 35. For
Isidore of Seville, see the Etymologia, lib. v, c. 39; also lib. iii, in
Migne, tome lxxxii.
At the Reformation this view was not disturbed. The same manner of
accepting the sacred text which led Luther, Melanchthon, and the great
Protestant leaders generally, to oppose the Copernican theory, fixed
them firmly in this biblical chronology; the keynote was sounded for
them by Luther when he said, "We know, on the authority of Moses,
that longer ago than six thousand years the world did not exist."
Melanchthon, more exact, fixed the creation of man at 3963 B.C.
But the great Christian scholars continued the old endeavour to make the
time of man's origin more precise: there seems to have been a sort
of fascination in the subject which developed a long array of
chronologists, all weighing the minutest indications in our sacred
books, until the Protestant divine De Vignolles, who had given forty
years to the study of biblical chronology, declared in 1738 that he had
gathered no less than two hundred computations based upon Scripture, and
no two alike.
As to the Roman Church, about 1580 there was published, by authority of
Pope Gregory XIII, the Roman Martyrology, and this, both as originally
published and as revised in 1640 under Pope Urban VIII, declared that
the creation of man took place 5199 years before Christ.
But of all who gave themselves up to these chronological studies, the
man who exerted the most powerful influence upon the dominant nations of
Christendom was Archbishop Usher. In 1650 he published his Annals of the
Ancient and New Testaments, and it at once became the greatest authority
for all English-speaking peoples. Usher was a man of deep and wide
theological learning, powerful in controversy; and his careful
conclusion, after years of the most profound study of the Hebrew
Scriptures, was that man was created 4004 years before the Christian
era. His verdict was widely received as final; his dates were inserted
in the margins of the authorized version of the English Bible, and
were soon practically regarded as equally inspired with the sacred text
itself: to question them seriously was to risk preferment in the Church
and reputation in the world at large.
The same adhesion to the Hebrew Scriptures which had influenced Usher
brought leading men of the older Church to the same view: men who would
have burned each other at the stake for their differences on other
points, agreed on this: Melanchthon and Tostatus, Lightfoot and Jansen,
Salmeron and Scaliger, Petavius and Kepler, inquisitors and reformers,
Jesuits and Jansenists, priests and rabbis, stood together in the belief
that the creation of man was proved by Scripture to have taken place
between 3900 and 4004 years before Christ.
In spite of the severe pressure of this line of authorities, extending
from St. Jerome and Eusebius to Usher and Petavius, in favour of this
scriptural chronology, even devoted Christian scholars had sometimes
felt obliged to revolt. The first great source of difficulty was
increased knowledge regarding the Egyptian monuments. As far back as
the last years of the sixteenth century Joseph Scaliger had done what
he could to lay the foundations of a more scientific treatment of
chronology, insisting especially that the historical indications in
Persia, in Babylon, and above all in Egypt, should be brought to bear
on the question. More than that, he had the boldness to urge that the
chronological indications of the Hebrew Scriptures should be fully and
critically discussed in the light of Egyptian and other records, without
any undue bias from theological considerations. His idea may well be
called inspired; yet it had little effect as regards a true view of the
antiquity of man, even upon himself, for the theological bias prevailed
above all his reasonings, even in his own mind. Well does a brilliant
modern writer declare that, "among the multitude of strong men in modern
times abdicating their reason at the command of their prejudices, Joseph
Scaliger is perhaps the most striking example." Early in the following
century Sir Walter Raleigh, in his History of the World (1603-1616),
pointed out the danger of adhering to the old system. He, too, foresaw
one of the results of modern investigation, stating it in these words,
which have the ring of prophetic inspiration: "For in Abraham's time
all the then known parts of the world were developed.... Egypt had many
magnificent cities,... and these not built with sticks, but of hewn
stone,... which magnificence needed a parent of more antiquity than
these other men have supposed." In view of these considerations Raleigh
followed the chronology of the Septuagint version, which enabled him to
give to the human race a few more years than were usually allowed.
About the middle of the seventeenth century Isaac Vossius, one of the
most eminent scholars of Christendom, attempted to bring the prevailing
belief into closer accordance with ascertained facts, but, save by a
chosen few, his efforts were rejected. In some parts of Europe a man
holding new views on chronology was by no means safe from bodily harm.
As an example of the extreme pressure exerted by the old theological
system at times upon honest scholars, we may take the case of La
Peyrere, who about the middle of the seventeenth century put forth his
book on the Pre-Adamites--an attempt to reconcile sundry well-known
difficulties in Scripture by claiming that man existed on earth before
the time of Adam. He was taken in hand at once; great theologians rushed
forward to attack him from all parts of Europe; within fifty years
thirty-six different refutations of his arguments had appeared;
the Parliament of Paris burned the book, and the Grand Vicar of the
archdiocese of Mechlin threw him into prison and kept him there until
he was forced, not only to retract his statements, but to abjure his
Protestantism.
In England, opposition to the growing truth was hardly less earnest.
Especially strong was Pearson, afterward Master of Trinity and Bishop
of Chester. In his treatise on the Creed, published in 1659, which has
remained a theologic classic, he condemned those who held the earth to
be more than fifty-six hundred years old, insisted that the first man
was created just six days later, declared that the Egyptian records were
forged, and called all Christians to turn from them to "the infallible
annals of the Spirit of God."
But, in spite of warnings like these, we see the new idea cropping out
in various parts of Europe. In 1672, Sir John Marsham published a work
in which he showed himself bold and honest. After describing the heathen
sources of Oriental history, he turns to the Christian writers,
and, having used the history of Egypt to show that the great Church
authorities were not exact, he ends one important argument with the
following words: "Thus the most interesting antiquities of Egypt have
been involved in the deepest obscurity by the very interpreters of
her chronology, who have jumbled everything up (qui omnia susque deque
permiscuerunt), so as to make them match with their own reckonings
of Hebrew chronology. Truly a very bad example, and quite unworthy of
religious writers."
This sturdy protest of Sir John against the dominant system and against
the "jumbling" by which Eusebius had endeavoured to cut down ancient
chronology within safe and sound orthodox limits, had little effect.
Though eminent chronologists of the eighteenth century, like Jackson,
Hales, and Drummond, gave forth multitudes of ponderous volumes pleading
for a period somewhat longer than that generally allowed, and
insisting that the received Hebrew text was grossly vitiated as
regards chronology, even this poor favour was refused them; the mass of
believers found it more comfortable to hold fast the faith committed to
them by Usher, and it remained settled that man was created about four
thousand years before our era.
To those who wished even greater precision, Dr. John Lightfoot,
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical
scholar of his time, gave his famous demonstration from our sacred books
that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created together,
in the same instant, and clouds full of water," and that "this work took
place and man was created by the Trinity on the twenty-third of October,
4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning."
This tide of theological reasoning rolled on through the eighteenth
century, swollen by the biblical researches of leading commentators,
Catholic and Protestant, until it came in much majesty and force into
our own nineteenth century. At the very beginning of the century it
gained new strength from various great men in the Church, among whom may
be especially named Dr. Adam Clarke, who declared that, "to preclude the
possibility of a mistake, the unerring Spirit of God directed Moses in
the selection of his facts and the ascertaining of his dates."
All opposition to the received view seemed broken down, and as late as
1835--indeed, as late as 1850--came an announcement in the work of one
of the most eminent Egyptologists, Sir J. G. Wilkinson, to the
effect that he had modified the results he had obtained from Egyptian
monuments, in order that his chronology might not interfere with the
received date of the Deluge of Noah.(183)
(183) For Lightfoot, see his Prolegomena relating to the age of the
world at the birth of Christ; see also in the edition of his works,
London, 1822, vol. 4, pp. 64, 112. For Scaliger, see in the De
Emendatione Temporum, 1583; also Mark Pattison, Essays, Oxford, 1889,
vol. i, pp. 162 et seq. For Raleigh's misgivings, see his History of the
World, London, 1614, p. 227, book ii of part i, section 7 of chapter
i; also Clinton's Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii, p. 293. For Usher, see
his Annales Vet. et Nov. Test., London, 1650. For Pearson, see his
Exposition of the Creed, sixth edition, London, 1692, pp. 59 et seq.
For Marsham, see his Chronicus Canon Aegypticus, Ebraicus, Graecus,
et Disquisitiones, London, 1672. For La Peyrere, see especially
Quatrefarges, in Revue de Deux Mondes for 1861; also other chapters in
this work. For Jackson, Hales, and others, see Wallace's True Age of
the World. For Wilkinson, see various editions of his work on Egypt. For
Vignolles, see Leblois, vol. iii, p. 617. As to the declaration in favor
of the recent origin of man, sanctioned by Popes Gregory XIII and Urban
VIII, see Strachius, cited in Wallace, p. 97. For the general agreement
of Church authorities, as stated, see L'Art de Verifier les Dates, as
above. As to difficulties of scriptural chronology, see Ewald, History
of Israel, English translation, London, 1883, pp. 204 et seq.
II. THE NEW CHRONOLOGY.
But all investigators were not so docile as Wilkinson, and there soon
came a new train of scientific thought which rapidly undermined all this
theological chronology. Not to speak of other noted men, we have early
in the present century Young, Champollion, and Rosellini, beginning a
new epoch in the study of the Egyptian monuments. Nothing could be more
cautious than their procedure, but the evidence was soon overwhelming in
favour of a vastly longer existence of man in the Nile Valley than
could be made to agree with even the longest duration then allowed by
theologians. For, in spite of all the suppleness of men like Wilkinson,
it became evident that, whatever system of scriptural chronology was
adopted, Egypt was the seat of a flourishing civilization at a period
before the "Flood of Noah," and that no such flood had ever interrupted
it. This was bad, but worse remained behind: it was soon clear that
the civilization of Egypt began earlier than the time assigned for
the creation of man, even according to the most liberal of the sacred
chronologists.
As time went on, this became more and more evident. The long duration
assigned to human civilization in the fragments of Manetho, the Egyptian
scribe at Thebes in the third century B.C., was discovered to be more
accordant with truth than the chronologies of the great theologians;
and, as the present century has gone on, scientific results have
been reached absolutely fatal to the chronological view based by the
universal Church upon Scripture for nearly two thousand years.
As is well known, the first of the Egyptian kings of whom mention is
made upon the monuments of the Nile Valley is Mena, or Menes. Manetho
had given a statement, according to which Mena must have lived nearly
six thousand years before the Christian era. This was looked upon for a
long time as utterly inadmissible, as it was so clearly at variance
with the chronology of our own sacred books; but, as time went on, large
fragments of the original work of Manetho were more carefully studied
and distinguished from corrupt transcriptions, the lists of kings at
Karnak, Sacquarah, and the two temples at Abydos were brought to light,
and the lists of court architects were discovered. Among all these
monuments the scholar who visits Egypt is most impressed by the
sculptured tablets giving the lists of kings. Each shows the monarch of
the period doing homage to the long line of his ancestors. Each of these
sculptured monarchs has near him a tablet bearing his name. That great
care was always taken to keep these imposing records correct is certain;
the loyalty of subjects, the devotion of priests, and the family pride
of kings were all combined in this; and how effective this care was,
is seen in the fact that kings now known to be usurpers are carefully
omitted. The lists of court architects, extending over the period from
Seti to Darius, throw a flood of light over the other records.
Comparing, then, all these sources, and applying an average from the
lengths of the long series of well-known reigns to the reigns preceding,
the most careful and cautious scholars have satisfied themselves that
the original fragments of Manetho represent the work of a man honest and
well informed, and, after making all allowances for discrepancies and
the overlapping of reigns, it has become clear that the period known as
the reign of Mena must be fixed at more than three thousand years
B.C. In this the great Egyptologists of our time concur. Mariette,
the eminent French authority, puts the date at 5004 B.C.; Brugsch, the
leading German authority, puts it at about 4500 B.C.; and Meyer, the
latest and most cautious of the historians of antiquity, declares 3180
B.C. the latest possible date that can be assigned it. With these
dates the foremost English authorities, Sayce and Flinders Petrie,
substantially agree. This view is also confirmed on astronomical grounds
by Mr. Lockyer, the Astronomer Royal. We have it, then, as the result of
a century of work by the most acute and trained Egyptologists, and with
the inscriptions upon the temples and papyri before them, both of which
are now read with as much facility as many medieval manuscripts, that
the reign of Mena must be placed more than five thousand years ago.
But the significance of this conclusion can not be fully understood
until we bring into connection with it some other facts revealed by the
Egyptian monuments.
The first of these is that which struck Sir Walter Raleigh, that,
even in the time of the first dynasties in the Nile Valley, a high
civilization had already been developed. Take, first, man himself:
we find sculptured upon the early monuments types of the various
races--Egyptians, Israelites, negroes, and Libyans--as clearly
distinguishable in these paintings and sculptures of from four to six
thousand years ago as the same types are at the present day. No one
can look at these sculptures upon the Egyptian monuments, or even the
drawings of them, as given by Lepsius or Prisse d' Avennes, without
being convinced that they indicate, even at that remote period, a
difference of races so marked that long previous ages must have been
required to produce it.
The social condition of Egypt revealed in these early monuments of art
forces us to the same conclusion. Those earliest monuments show that a
very complex society had even then been developed. We not only have a
separation between the priestly and military orders, but agriculturists,
manufacturers, and traders, with a whole series of subdivisions in
each of these classes. The early tombs show us sculptured and painted
representations of a daily life which even then had been developed into
a vast wealth and variety of grades, forms, and usages.
Take, next, the political and military condition. One fact out of many
reveals a policy which must have been the result of long experience.
Just as now, at the end of the nineteenth century, the British
Government, having found that they can not rely upon the native
Egyptians for the protection of the country, are drilling the negroes
from the interior of Africa as soldiers, so the celebrated inscription
of Prince Una, as far back as the sixth dynasty, speaks of the Maksi or
negroes levied and drilled by tens of thousands for the Egyptian army.
Take, next, engineering. Here we find very early operations in the way
of canals, dikes, and great public edifices, so bold in conception and
thorough in execution as to fill our greatest engineers of these days
with astonishment. The quarrying, conveyance, cutting, jointing, and
polishing of the enormous blocks in the interior of the Great Pyramid
alone are the marvel of the foremost stone-workers of our century.
As regards architecture, we find not only the pyramids, which date from
the very earliest period of Egyptian history, and which are to this hour
the wonder of the world for size, for boldness, for exactness, and for
skilful contrivance, but also the temples, with long ranges of
colossal columns wrought in polished granite, with wonderful beauty of
ornamentation, with architraves and roofs vast in size and exquisite in
adjustment, which by their proportions tax the imagination, and lead the
beholder to ask whether all this can be real.
As to sculpture, we have not only the great Sphinx of Gizeh, so
marvellous in its boldness and dignity, dating from the very first
period of Egyptian history, but we have ranges of sphinxes, heroic
statues, and bas-reliefs, showing that even in the early ages this
branch of art had reached an amazing development.
As regards the perfection of these, Lubke, the most eminent German
authority on plastic art, referring to the early works in the tombs
about Memphis, declares that, "as monuments of the period of the fourth
dynasty, they are an evidence of the high perfection to which the
sculpture of the Egyptians had attained." Brugsch declares that "every
artistic production of those early days, whether picture, writing, or
sculpture, bears the stamp of the highest perfection in art." Maspero,
the most eminent French authority in this field, while expressing his
belief that the Sphinx was sculptured even before the time of Mena,
declares that "the art which conceived and carved this prodigious statue
was a finished art--an art which had attained self-mastery and was sure
of its effects"; while, among the more eminent English authorities,
Sayce tells us that "art is at its best in the age of the
pyramid-builders," and Sir James Fergusson declares, "We are startled to
find Egyptian art nearly as perfect in the oldest periods as in any of
the later."
The evidence as to the high development of Egyptian sculpture in the
earlier dynasties becomes every day more overwhelming. What exquisite
genius the early Egyptian sculptors showed in their lesser statues is
known to all who have seen those most precious specimens in the museum
at Cairo, which were wrought before the conventional type was adopted in
obedience to religious considerations.
In decorative and especially in ceramic art, as early as the fourth
and fifth dynasties, we have vases, cups, and other vessels showing
exquisite beauty of outline and a general sense of form almost if not
quite equal to Etruscan and Grecian work of the best periods.
Take, next, astronomy. Going back to the very earliest period of
Egyptian civilization, we find that the four sides of the Great Pyramid
are adjusted to the cardinal points with the utmost precision. "The day
of the equinox can be taken by observing the sun set across the face of
the pyramid, and the neighbouring Arabs adjust their astronomical dates
by its shadow." Yet this is but one out of many facts which prove that
the Egyptians, at the earliest period of which their monuments exist,
had arrived at knowledge and skill only acquired by long ages of
observation and thought. Mr. Lockyer, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain,
has recently convinced himself, after careful examination of various
ruined temples at Thebes and elsewhere, that they were placed with
reference to observations of stars. To state his conclusion in his own
words: "There seems a very high probability that three thousand, and
possibly four thousand, years before Christ the Egyptians had among them
men with some knowledge of astronomy, and that six thousand years ago
the course of the sun through the year was practically very well known,
and methods had been invented by means of which in time it might
be better known; and that, not very long after that, they not only
considered questions relating to the sun, but began to take up other
questions relating to the position and movement of the stars."
The same view of the antiquity of man in the Nile valley is confirmed by
philologists. To use the words of Max Duncker: "The oldest monuments
of Egypt--and they are the oldest monuments in the world--exhibit the
Egyptian in possession of the art of writing." It is found also, by the
inscriptions of the early dynasties, that the Egyptian language had even
at that early time been developed in all essential particulars to the
highest point it ever attained. What long periods it must have required
for such a development every scholar in philology can imagine.
As regards medical science, we have the Berlin papyrus, which, although
of a later period, refers with careful specification to a medical
literature of the first dynasty.
As regards archaeology, the earliest known inscriptions point to still
earlier events and buildings, indicating a long sequence in previous
history.
As to all that pertains to the history of civilization, no man of fair
and open mind can go into the museums of Cairo or the Louvre or the
British Museum and look at the monuments of those earlier dynasties
without seeing in them the results of a development in art, science,
laws, customs, and language, which must have required a vast period
before the time of Mena. And this conclusion is forced upon us all the
more invincibly when we consider the slow growth of ideas in the earlier
stages of civilization as compared with the later--a slowness of growth
which has kept the natives of many parts of the world in that earliest
civilization to this hour. To this we must add the fact that Egyptian
civilization was especially immobile: its development into castes is but
one among many evidences that it was the very opposite of a civilization
developed rapidly.
As to the length of the period before the time of Mena, there is, of
course, nothing exact. Manetho gives lists of great personages before
that first dynasty, and these extend over twenty-four thousand years.
Bunsen, one of the most learned of Christian scholars, declares that
not less than ten thousand years were necessary for the development of
civilization up to the point where we find it in Mena's time. No one can
claim precision for either of these statements, but they are valuable
as showing the impression of vast antiquity made upon the most competent
judges by the careful study of those remains: no unbiased judge can
doubt that an immensely long period of years must have been required for
the development of civilization up to the state in which we there find
it.
The investigations in the bed of the Nile confirm these views. That some
unwarranted conclusions have at times been announced is true; but the
fact remains that again and again rude pottery and other evidences of
early stages of civilization have been found in borings at places so
distant from each other, and at depths so great, that for such a range
of concurring facts, considered in connection with the rate of earthy
deposit by the Nile, there is no adequate explanation save the existence
of man in that valley thousands on thousands of years before the longest
time admitted by our sacred chronologists.
Nor have these investigations been of a careless character. Between
the years 1851 and 1854, Mr. Horner, an extremely cautious English
geologist, sank ninety-six shafts in four rows at intervals of eight
English miles, at right angles to the Nile, in the neighbourhood of
Memphis. In these pottery was brought up from various depths, and
beneath the statue of Rameses II at Memphis from a depth of thirty-nine
feet. At the rate of the Nile deposit a careful estimate has declared
this to indicate a period of over eleven thousand years. So eminent a
German authority, in geography as Peschel characterizes objections to
such deductions as groundless. However this may be, the general results
of these investigations, taken in connection with the other results of
research, are convincing.
And, finally, as if to make assurance doubly sure, a series of
archaeologists of the highest standing, French, German, English, and
American, have within the past twenty years discovered relics of a
savage period, of vastly earlier date than the time of Mena, prevailing
throughout Egypt. These relics have been discovered in various parts of
the country, from Cairo to Luxor, in great numbers. They are the same
sort of prehistoric implements which prove to us the early existence of
man in so many other parts of the world at a geological period so remote
that the figures given by our sacred chronologists are but trivial. The
last and most convincing of these discoveries, that of flint implements
in the drift, far down below the tombs of early kings at Thebes, and
upon high terraces far above the present bed of the Nile, will be
referred to later.
But it is not in Egypt alone that proofs are found of the utter
inadequacy of the entire chronological system derived from our sacred
books. These results of research in Egypt are strikingly confirmed by
research in Assyria and Babylonia. Prof. Sayce exhibits various proofs
of this. To use his own words regarding one of these proofs: "On the
shelves of the British Museum you may see huge sun-dried bricks, on
which are stamped the names and titles of kings who erected or repaired
the temples where they have been found.... They must... have reigned
before the time when, according to the margins of our Bibles, the Flood
of Noah was covering the earth and reducing such bricks as these to
their primeval slime."
This conclusion was soon placed beyond a doubt. The lists of king's and
collateral inscriptions recovered from the temples of the great valley
between the Tigris and Euphrates, and the records of astronomical
observations in that region, showed that there, too, a powerful
civilization had grown up at a period far earlier than could be made
consistent with our sacred chronology. The science of Assyriology was
thus combined with Egyptology to furnish one more convincing proof that,
precious as are the moral and religious truths in our sacred books
and the historical indications which they give us, these truths
and indications are necessarily inclosed in a setting of myth and
legend.(184)
(184) As to Manetho, see, for a very full account of his relations to
other chronologists, Palmer, Egyptian Chronicles, vol. i, chap. ii.
For a more recent and readable account, see Brugsch, Egypt under the
Pharaohs, English edition, London, 1879, chap. iv. For lists of kings at
Abydos and elsewhere, also the lists of architects, see Brugsch, Palmer,
Mariette, and others; also illustrations in Lepsius. For proofs that the
dynasties given were consecutive and not contemporeaneous, as was
once so fondly argued by those who tried to save Archbishop Usher's
chronology, see Mariette; also Sayce's Herodotus, appendix, p. 316.
For the various race types given on early monuments, see the coloured
engravings in Lepsius, Denkmaler; also Prisse d'Avennes, and the
frontpiece in the English edition of Brugsch; see also statement
regarding the same subject in Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i. For
the fulness of development of Egyptian civilization in the earliest
dynasties, see Rawlinson's Egypt, London, 1881, chap. xiii; also Brugsch
and other works cited. For the perfection of Egyptian engineering,
I rely not merely upon my own observation, but on what is far more
important, the testimony of my friend the Hon. J. G. Batterson, probably
the largest and most experienced worker in granite in the United States,
who acknowledges, from personal observation, that the early Egyptian
work is, in boldness and perfection, far beyond anything known since,
and a source of perpetual wonder to him. As to the perfection of
Egyptian architecture, see very striking statements in Fergusson,
History of Architecture, book i, chap. i. As to the pyramids, showing a
very high grade of culture already reached under the earliest dynasties,
see Lubke, Gesch. der Arch., book i. For Sayce's views, see his
Herodotus, appendix, p. 348. As to sculpture, see for representations
photographs published by the Boulak Museum, and such works as the
Description de l'Egypte, Lepsius's Denkmaler, and Prisse d'Avennes; see
also a most small work, easy of access, Maspero, Archeology, translated
by Miss A. B. Edwards, New York and London, 1887, chaps. i and ii. See
especially in Prisse, vol. ii, the statue of Chafre the Scribe, and the
group of "Tea" and his wife. As to the artistic value of the Sphinx,
see Maspero, as above, pp. 202, 203. See also similar ideas in Lubke's
History of Sculpture, vol. i, p. 24. As to astronomical knowledge
evidenced by the Great Pyramid, see Tylor, as above, p. 21; also
Lockyer, On Some Points in the Early History of Astronomy, in Nature
for 1891, and especially in the issues of June 4th and July 2d; also his
Dawn of Astronomy, passim. For a recent and conservative statement as to
the date of Mena, see Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, London, 1894,
chap. ii. For delineations of vases, etc., showing Grecian proportion
and beauty of form under the fourth and fifth dynasties, see Prisse,
vol. ii, Art Industriel. As to the philological question, and the
development of language in Egypt, with the hieroglyphic sytem of
writing, see Rawlinson's Egypt, London, 1881, chap. xii; also Lenormanr;
also Max Duncker, Geschichte des Alterthums, Abbott's translation, 1877.
As to the medical papyrus of Berlin, see Brugsch, vol. i, p. 58, but
especially the Papyrus Ebers. As to the corruption of later copies of
Manetho and fidelity of originals as attested by the monuments, see
Brugsch, chap. iv. On the accuracy of the present Egyptian chronology as
regards long periods, see ibid, vol. i, p. 32. As to the pottery found
deep in the Nile and the value of Horner's discovery, see Peschel, Races
of Man, New York, 1876, pp. 42-44. For succinct statement, see also
Laing, Problems of the Future, p. 94. For confirmatory proofs from
Assyriology, see Sayce, Lectures on the Religion of the Babylonians
(Hibbert Lectures for 1887), London, 1887, introductory chapter, and
especially pp. 21-25. See also Laing, Human Origins, chap. ii, for an
excellent summary. For an account of flint implements recently found
in gravel terraces fifteen hundred feet above the present level of the
Nile, and showing evidences of an age vastly greater even than those dug
out of the gravel at Thebes, see article by Flinders Petrie in London
Times of April 18th, 1895.
CHAPTER VII. THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY
I. THE THUNDER-STONES.
While the view of chronology based upon the literal acceptance of
Scripture texts was thus shaken by researches in Egypt, another line
of observation and thought was slowly developed, even more fatal to the
theological view.
From a very early period there had been dug from the earth, in various
parts of the world, strangely shaped masses of stone, some rudely
chipped, some polished: in ancient times the larger of these were very
often considered as thunderbolts, the smaller as arrows, and all of
them as weapons which had been hurled by the gods and other supernatural
personages. Hence a sort of sacredness attached to them. In Chaldea,
they were built into the wall of temples; in Egypt, they were strung
about the necks of the dead. In India, fine specimens are to this day
seen upon altars, receiving prayers and sacrifices.
Naturally these beliefs were brought into the Christian mythology and
adapted to it. During the Middle Ages many of these well-wrought stones
were venerated as weapons, which during the "war in heaven" had been
used in driving forth Satan and his hosts; hence in the eleventh century
an Emperor of the East sent to the Emperor of the West a "heaven axe";
and in the twelfth century a Bishop of Rennes asserted the value of
thunder-stones as a divinely-appointed means of securing success in
battle, safety on the sea, security against thunder, and immunity from
unpleasant dreams. Even as late as the seventeenth century a French
ambassador brought a stone hatchet, which still exists in the museum at
Nancy, as a present to the Prince-Bishop of Verdun, and claimed for it
health-giving virtues.
In the last years of the sixteenth century Michael Mercati tried to
prove that the "thunder-stones" were weapons or implements of early
races of men; but from some cause his book was not published until the
following century, when other thinkers had begun to take up the same
idea, and then it had to contend with a theory far more accordant with
theologic modes of reasoning in science. This was the theory of the
learned Tollius, who in 1649 told the world that these chipped or
smoothed stones were "generated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation
conglobed in a cloud by the circumposed humour."
But about the beginning of the eighteenth century a fact of great
importance was quietly established. In the year 1715 a large pointed
weapon of black flint was found in contact with the bones of an
elephant, in a gravel bed near Gray's Inn Lane, in London. The world in
general paid no heed to this: if the attention of theologians was called
to it, they dismissed it summarily with a reference to the Deluge of
Noah; but the specimen was labelled, the circumstances regarding it were
recorded, and both specimen and record carefully preserved.
In 1723 Jussieu addressed the French Academy on The Origin and Uses of
Thunder-stones. He showed that recent travellers from various parts of
the world had brought a number of weapons and other implements of stone
to France, and that they were essentially similar to what in Europe had
been known as "thunder-stones." A year later this fact was clinched into
the scientific mind of France by the Jesuit Lafitau, who published
a work showing the similarity between the customs of aborigines then
existing in other lands and those of the early inhabitants of Europe. So
began, in these works of Jussieu and Lafitau, the science of Comparative
Ethnography.
But it was at their own risk and peril that thinkers drew from these
discoveries any conclusions as to the antiquity of man. Montesquieu,
having ventured to hint, in an early edition of his Persian Letters,
that the world might be much older than had been generally supposed,
was soon made to feel danger both to his book and to himself, so that in
succeeding editions he suppressed the passage.
In 1730 Mahudel presented a paper to the French Academy of Inscriptions
on the so-called "thunder-stones," and also presented a series of plates
which showed that these were stone implements, which must have been used
at an early period in human history.
In 1778 Buffon, in his Epoques de la Nature, intimated his belief that
"thunder-stones" were made by early races of men; but he did not press
this view, and the reason for his reserve was obvious enough: he had
already one quarrel with the theologians on his hands, which had cost
him dear--public retraction and humiliation. His declaration, therefore,
attracted little notice.
In the year 1800 another fact came into the minds of thinking men in
England. In that year John Frere presented to the London Society of
Antiquaries sundry flint implements found in the clay beds near
Hoxne: that they were of human make was certain, and, in view of the
undisturbed depths in which they were found, the theory was suggested
that the men who made them must have lived at a very ancient geological
epoch; yet even this discovery and theory passed like a troublesome
dream, and soon seemed to be forgotten.
About twenty years later Dr. Buckland published a discussion of the
subject, in the light of various discoveries in the drift and in caves.
It received wide attention, but theology was soothed by his temporary
concession that these striking relics of human handiwork, associated
with the remains of various extinct animals, were proofs of the Deluge
of Noah.
In 1823 Boue, of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, showed to Cuvier sundry
human bones found deep in the alluvial deposits of the upper Rhine,
and suggested that they were of an early geological period; this Cuvier
virtually, if not explicitly, denied. Great as he was in his own field,
he was not a great geologist; he, in fact, led geology astray for many
years. Moreover, he lived in a time of reaction; it was the period of
the restored Bourbons, of the Voltairean King Louis XVIII, governing
to please orthodoxy. Boue's discovery was, therefore, at first opposed,
then enveloped in studied silence.
Cuvier evidently thought, as Voltaire had felt under similar
circumstances, that "among wolves one must howl a little"; and his
leading disciple, Elie de Beaumont, who succeeded, him in the sway over
geological science in France, was even more opposed to the new view
than his great master had been. Boue's discoveries were, therefore,
apparently laid to rest forever.(185)
(185) For the general history of early views regarding stone implements,
see the first chapters in Cartailhac, La France Prehistorique; also
Jolie, L'Homme avant les Metaux; also Lyell, Lubbock, and Evans. For
lightning-stones in China and elsewhere, see citation from a Chinese
encyclopedia of 1662, in Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 209. On the
universality of this belief, on the surviving use of stone implements
even into civilized times, and on their manufacture to-day, see ibid.,
chapter viii. For the treatment of Boue's discovery, see especially
Morillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, p. 11. For the suppression of
the passage in Montesquieu's Persian Letters, see Letter 113, cited in
Schlosser's History of the Eighteenth Century (English translation),
vol. i, p. 135.
In 1825 Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, was explored by the Rev. Mr.
McEnery, a Roman Catholic clergyman, who seems to have been completely
overawed by orthodox opinion in England and elsewhere; for, though
he found human bones and implements mingled with remains of extinct
animals, he kept his notes in manuscript, and they were only brought to
light more than thirty years later by Mr. Vivian.
The coming of Charles X, the last of the French Bourbons, to the throne,
made the orthodox pressure even greater. It was the culmination of
the reactionary period--the time in France when a clerical committee,
sitting at the Tuileries, took such measures as were necessary to hold
in check all science that was not perfectly "safe"; the time in Austria
when Kaiser Franz made his famous declaration to sundry professors, that
what he wanted of them was simply to train obedient subjects, and that
those who did not make this their purpose would be dismissed; the time
in Germany when Nicholas of Russia and the princelings and ministers
under his control, from the King of Prussia downward, put forth all
their might in behalf of "scriptural science"; the time in Italy when
a scientific investigator, arriving at any conclusion distrusted by
the Church, was sure of losing his place and in danger of losing his
liberty; the time in England when what little science was taught was
held in due submission to Archdeacon Paley; the time in the United
States when the first thing essential in science was, that it be
adjusted to the ideas of revival exhorters.
Yet men devoted to scientific truth laboured on; and in 1828 Tournal, of
Narbonne, discovered in the cavern of Bize specimens of human industry,
with a fragment of a human skeleton, among bones of extinct animals. In
the following year Christol published accounts of his excavations in the
caverns of Gard; he had found in position, and under conditions which
forbade the idea of after-disturbance, human remains mixed with bones of
the extinct hyena of the early Quaternary period. Little general notice
was taken of this, for the reactionary orthodox atmosphere involved such
discoveries in darkness.
But in the French Revolution of 1830 the old politico-theological system
collapsed: Charles X and his advisers fled for their lives; the other
continental monarchs got glimpses of new light; the priesthood in charge
of education were put on their good behaviour for a time, and a better
era began.
Under the constitutional monarchy of the house of Orleans in France and
Belgium less attention was therefore paid by Government to the saving
of souls; and we have in rapid succession new discoveries of remains
of human industry, and even of human skeletons so mingled with bones of
extinct animals as to give additional proofs that the origin of man was
at a period vastly earlier than any which theologians had dreamed of.
A few years later the reactionary clerical influence against science in
this field rallied again. Schmerling in 1833 had explored a multitude
of caverns in Belgium, especially at Engis and Engihoul, and had found
human skulls and bones closely associated with bones of extinct animals,
such as the cave bear, hyena, elephant, and rhinoceros, while mingled
with these were evidences of human workmanship in the shape of chipped
flint implements; discoveries of a similar sort had been made by
De Serres in France and by Lund in Brazil; but, at least as far as
continental Europe was concerned, these discoveries were received with
much coolness both by Catholic leaders of opinion in France and Belgium
and by Protestant leaders in England and Holland. Schmerling himself
appears to have been overawed, and gave forth a sort of apologetic
theory, half scientific, half theologic, vainly hoping to satisfy the
clerical side.
Nor was it much better in England. Sir Charles Lyell, so devoted a
servant of prehistoric research thirty years later, was still holding
out against it on the scientific side; and, as to the theological
side, it was the period when that great churchman, Dean Cockburn, was
insulting geologists from the pulpit of York Minster, and the Rev.
Mellor Brown denouncing geology as "a black art," "a forbidden province"
and when, in America, Prof. Moses Stuart and others like him were
belittling the work of Benjamin Silliman and Edward Hitchcock.
In 1840 Godwin Austin presented to the Royal Geological Society
an account of his discoveries in Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, and
especially of human bones and implements mingled with bones of the
elephant, rhinoceros, cave bear, hyena, and other extinct animals;
yet this memoir, like that of McEnery fifteen years before, found an
atmosphere so unfavourable that it was not published.
II. THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS.
At the middle of the nineteenth century came the beginning of a new
epoch in science--an epoch when all these earlier discoveries were to
be interpreted by means of investigations in a different field: for,
in 1847, a man previously unknown to the world at large, Boucher de
Perthes, published at Paris the first volume of his work on Celtic and
Antediluvian Antiquities, and in this he showed engravings of typical
flint implements and weapons, of which he had discovered thousands upon
thousands in the high drift beds near Abbeville, in northern France.
The significance of this discovery was great indeed--far greater than
Boucher himself at first supposed. The very title of his book showed
that he at first regarded these implements and weapons as having
belonged to men overwhelmed at the Deluge of Noah; but it was soon
seen that they were something very different from proofs of the literal
exactness of Genesis: for they were found in terraces at great heights
above the river Somme, and, under any possible theory having regard to
fact, must have been deposited there at a time when the river system
of northern France was vastly different from anything known within
the historic period. The whole discovery indicated a series of great
geological changes since the time when these implements were made,
requiring cycles of time compared to which the space allowed by the
orthodox chronologists was as nothing.
His work was the result of over ten years of research and thought.
Year after year a force of men under his direction had dug into these
high-terraced gravel deposits of the river Somme, and in his book he
now gave, in the first full form, the results of his labour. So far as
France was concerned, he was met at first by what he calls "a conspiracy
of silence," and then by a contemptuous opposition among orthodox
scientists, at the head of whom stood Elie de Beaumont.
This heavy, sluggish opposition seemed immovable: nothing that Boucher
could do or say appeared to lighten the pressure of the orthodox
theological opinion behind it; not even his belief that these fossils
were remains of men drowned at the Deluge of Noah, and that they were
proofs of the literal exactness of Genesis seemed to help the matter.
His opponents felt instinctively that such discoveries boded danger to
the accepted view, and they were right: Boucher himself soon saw the
folly of trying to account for them by the orthodox theory.
And it must be confessed that not a little force was added to the
opposition by certain characteristics of Boucher de Perthes himself.
Gifted, far-sighted, and vigorous as he was, he was his own worst enemy.
Carried away by his own discoveries, he jumped to the most astounding
conclusions. The engravings in the later volume of his great work,
showing what he thought to be human features and inscriptions upon
some of the flint implements, are worthy of a comic almanac; and at
the National Museum of Archaeology at St. Germain, beneath the shelves
bearing the remains which he discovered, which mark the beginning of a
new epoch in science, are drawers containing specimens hardly worthy of
a penny museum, but from which he drew the most unwarranted inferences
as to the language, religion, and usages of prehistoric man.
Boucher triumphed none the less. Among his bitter opponents at first was
Dr. Rigollot, who in 1855, searching earnestly for materials to refute
the innovator, dug into the deposits of St. Acheul--and was converted:
for he found implements similar to those of Abbeville, making still more
certain the existence of man during the Drift period. So, too, Gaudry a
year later made similar discoveries.
But most important was the evidence of the truth which now came from
other parts of France and from other countries. The French leaders in
geological science had been held back not only by awe of Cuvier but by
recollections of Scheuchzer. Ridicule has always been a serious weapon
in France, and the ridicule which finally overtook the supporters of
the attempt of Scheuchzer, Mazurier, and others, to square geology with
Genesis, was still remembered. From the great body of French geologists,
therefore, Boucher secured at first no aid. His support came from the
other side of the Channel. The most eminent English geologists, such as
Falconer, Prestwich, and Lyell, visited the beds at Abbeville and St.
Acheul, convinced themselves that the discoveries of Boucher, Rigollot,
and their colleagues were real, and then quietly but firmly told England
the truth.
And now there appeared a most effective ally in France. The
arguments used against Boucher de Perthes and some of the other early
investigators of bone caves had been that the implements found might
have been washed about and turned over by great floods, and therefore
that they might be of a recent period; but in 1861 Edward Lartet
published an account of his own excavations at the Grotto of Aurignac,
and the proof that man had existed in the time of the Quaternary animals
was complete. This grotto had been carefully sealed in prehistoric times
by a stone at its entrance; no interference from disturbing currents of
water had been possible; and Lartet found, in place, bones of eight out
of nine of the main species of animals which characterize the Quaternary
period in Europe; and upon them marks of cutting implements, and in the
midst of them coals and ashes.
Close upon these came the excavations at Eyzies by Lartet and his
English colleague, Christy. In both these men there was a carefulness in
making researches and a sobriety in stating results which converted many
of those who had been repelled by the enthusiasm of Boucher de Perthes.
The two colleagues found in the stony deposits made by the water
dropping from the roof of the cave at Eyzies the bones of numerous
animals extinct or departed to arctic regions--one of these a vertebra
of a reindeer with a flint lance-head still fast in it, and with these
were found evidences of fire.
Discoveries like these were thoroughly convincing; yet there still
remained here and there gainsayers in the supposed interest of
Scripture, and these, in spite of the convincing array of facts,
insisted that in some way, by some combination of circumstances, these
bones of extinct animals of vastly remote periods might have been
brought into connection with all these human bones and implements of
human make in all these different places, refusing to admit that
these ancient relics of men and animals were of the same period. Such
gainsayers virtually adopted the reasoning of quaint old Persons, who,
having maintained that God created the world "about five thousand sixe
hundred and odde yeares agoe," added, "And if they aske what God was
doing before this short number of yeares, we answere with St. Augustine
replying to such curious questioners, that He was framing Hell for
them." But a new class of discoveries came to silence this opposition.
At La Madeleine in France, at the Kessler cave in Switzerland, and
at various other places, were found rude but striking carvings and
engravings on bone and stone representing sundry specimens of those
long-vanished species; and these specimens, or casts of them, were soon
to be seen in all the principal museums. They showed the hairy mammoth,
the cave bear, and various other animals of the Quaternary period,
carved rudely but vigorously by contemporary men; and, to complete the
significance of these discoveries, travellers returning from the
icy regions of North America brought similar carvings of animals now
existing in those regions, made by the Eskimos during their long arctic
winters to-day.(186)
(186) For the explorations in Belgium, see Dupont, Le Temps
Prehistorique en Belgique. For the discoveries by McEnery and Godwin
Austin, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, London, 1869, chap. x; also
Cartailhac, Joly, and others above cited. For Boucher de Perthes, see
his Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes, Paris, 1847-'64, vol. iii,
pp. 526 et seq. For sundry extravagances of Boucher de Perthes, see
Reinach, Description raisonne du Musee de St.-Germain-en-Laye, Paris,
1889, vol. i, pp. 16 et seq. For the mixture of sound and absurd results
in Boucher's work, see Cartailhac as above, p. 19. Boucher had published
in 1838 a work entitled De la Creation, but it seems to have dropped
dead from the press. For the attempts of Scheuchzer to reconcile geology
and Genesis by means of the Homo diluvii testis, and similar "diluvian
fossils," see the chapter on Geology in this series. The original
specimens of these prehistoric engravings upon bone and stone may best
be seen at the Archaeological Museum of St.-Germain and the British
Museum. For engravings of some of the most recent, see especially
Dawkin's Early Man in Britain, chap. vii, and the Description du Musee
de St.-Germain. As to the Kessler etchings and their antiquity, see
D. G. Brinton, in Science, August 12, 1892. For comparison of this
prehistoric work with that produced to-day by the Eskimos and others,
see Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, chapters x and xiv. For very striking
exhibitions of this same artistic gift in a higher field to-day by
descendants of the barbarian tribes of northern America, see the very
remarkable illustrations in Rink, Danish Greenland, London, 1877,
especially those in chap. xiv.
As a result of these discoveries and others like them, showing that man
was not only contemporary with long-extinct animals of past geological
epochs, but that he had already developed into a stage of culture above
pure savagery, the tide of thought began to turn. Especially was this
seen in 1863, when Lyell published the first edition of his Geological
Evidence of the Antiquity of Man; and the fact that he had so long
opposed the new ideas gave force to the clear and conclusive argument
which led him to renounce his early scientific beliefs.
Research among the evidences of man's existence in the early Quaternary,
and possibly in the Tertiary period, was now pressed forward along the
whole line. In 1864 Gabriel Mortillet founded his review devoted to
this subject; and in 1865 the first of a series of scientific congresses
devoted to such researches was held in Italy. These investigations
went on vigorously in all parts of France and spread rapidly to other
countries. The explorations which Dupont began in 1864, in the caves
of Belgium, gave to the museum at Brussels eighty thousand flint
implements, forty thousand bones of animals of the Quaternary period,
and a number of human skulls and bones found mingled with these remains.
From Germany, Italy, Spain, America, India, and Egypt similar results
were reported.
Especially noteworthy were the further explorations of the caves and
drift throughout the British Islands. The discovery by Colonel Wood, In
1861, of flint tools in the same strata with bones of the earlier forms
of the rhinoceros, was but typical of many. A thorough examination of
the caverns of Brixham and Torquay, by Pengelly and others, made it
still more evident that man had existed in the early Quaternary period.
The existence of a period before the Glacial epoch or between different
glacial epochs in England, when the Englishman was a savage, using rude
stone tools, was then fully ascertained, and, what was more significant,
there were clearly shown a gradation and evolution even in the history
of that period. It was found that this ancient Stone epoch showed
progress and development. In the upper layers of the caves, with remains
of the reindeer, who, although he has migrated from these regions, still
exists in more northern climates, were found stone implements revealing
some little advance in civilization; next below these, sealed up in
the stalagmite, came, as a rule, another layer, in which the remains
of reindeer were rare and those of the mammoth more frequent, the
implements found in this stratum being less skilfully made than those
in the upper and more recent layers; and, finally, in the lowest levels,
near the floors of these ancient caverns, with remains of the cave
bear and others of the most ancient extinct animals, were found stone
implements evidently of a yet ruder and earlier stage of human progress.
No fairly unprejudiced man can visit the cave and museum at Torquay
without being convinced that there were a gradation and an evolution in
these beginnings of human civilization. The evidence is complete;
the masses of breccia taken from the cave, with the various soils,
implements, and bones carefully kept in place, put this progress beyond
a doubt.
All this indicated a great antiquity for the human race, but in it lay
the germs of still another great truth, even more important and more
serious in its consequences to the older theologic view, which will be
discussed in the following chapter.
But new evidences came in, showing a yet greater antiquity of man.
Remains of animals were found in connection with human remains, which
showed not only that man was living in times more remote than the
earlier of the new investigators had dared dream, but that some of
these early periods of his existence must have been of immense length,
embracing climatic changes betokening different geological periods; for
with remains of fire and human implements and human bones were found not
only bones of the hairy mammoth and cave bear, woolly rhinoceros, and
reindeer, which could only have been deposited there in a time of arctic
cold, but bones of the hyena, hippopotamus, sabre-toothed tiger, and
the like, which could only have been deposited when there was in these
regions a torrid climate. The conjunction of these remains clearly
showed that man had lived in England early enough and long enough to
pass through times when there was arctic cold and times when there was
torrid heat; times when great glaciers stretched far down into England
and indeed into the continent, and times when England had a land
connection with the European continent, and the European continent with
Africa, allowing tropical animals to migrate freely from Africa to the
middle regions of England.
The question of the origin of man at a period vastly earlier than the
sacred chronologists permitted was thus absolutely settled, but among
the questions regarding the existence of man at a period yet more
remote, the Drift period, there was one which for a time seemed to give
the champions of science some difficulty. The orthodox leaders in the
time of Boucher de Perthes, and for a considerable time afterward, had
a weapon of which they made vigorous use: the statement that no human
bones had yet been discovered in the drift. The supporters of science
naturally answered that few if any other bones as small as those of man
had been found, and that this fact was an additional proof of the great
length of the period since man had lived with the extinct animals; for,
since specimens of human workmanship proved man's existence as fully as
remains of his bones could do, the absence or even rarity of human and
other small bones simply indicated the long periods of time required for
dissolving them away.
Yet Boucher, inspired by the genius he had already shown, and filled
with the spirit of prophecy, declared that human bones would yet be
found in the midst of the flint implements, and in 1863 he claimed that
this prophecy had been fulfilled by the discovery at Moulin Quignon of
a portion of a human jaw deep in the early Quaternary deposits. But his
triumph was short-lived: the opposition ridiculed his discovery; they
showed that he had offered a premium to his workmen for the discovery
of human remains, and they naturally drew the inference that some
tricky labourer had deceived him. The result of this was that the men
of science felt obliged to acknowledge that the Moulin Quignon discovery
was not proven.
But ere long human bones were found in the deposits of the early
Quaternary period, or indeed of an earlier period, in various other
parts of the world, and the question regarding the Moulin Quignon relic
was of little importance.
We have seen that researches regarding the existence of prehistoric
man in England and on the Continent were at first mainly made in the
caverns; but the existence of man in the earliest Quaternary period
was confirmed on both sides of the English Channel, in a way even
more striking, by the close examination of the drift and early gravel
deposits. The results arrived at by Boucher de Perthes were amply
confirmed in England. Rude stone implements were found in terraces a
hundred feet and more above the levels at which various rivers of Great
Britain now flow, and under circumstances which show that, at the time
when they were deposited, the rivers of Great Britain in many cases were
entirely different from those of the present period, and formed parts
of the river system of the European continent. Researches in the high
terraces above the Thames and the Ouse, as well as at other points in
Great Britain, placed beyond a doubt the fact that man existed on the
British Islands at a time when they were connected by solid land
with the Continent, and made it clear that, within the period of the
existence of man in northern Europe, a large portion of the British
Islands had been sunk to depths between fifteen hundred and twenty-five
hundred feet beneath the Northern Ocean,--had risen again from the
water,--had formed part of the continent of Europe, and had been in
unbroken connection with Africa, so that elephants, bears, tigers,
lions, the rhinoceros and hippopotamus, of species now mainly extinct,
had left their bones in the same deposits with human implements as far
north as Yorkshire. Moreover, connected with this fact came in the new
conviction, forced upon geologists by the more careful examination of
the earth and its changes, that such elevations and depressions of Great
Britain and other parts of the world were not necessarily the results
of sudden cataclysms, but generally of slow processes extending through
vast cycles of years--processes such as are now known to be going on in
various parts of the world. Thus it was that the six or seven thousand
years allowed by the most liberal theologians of former times were seen
more and more clearly to be but a mere nothing in the long succession of
ages since the appearance of man.
Confirmation of these results was received from various other parts of
the world. In Africa came the discovery of flint implements deep in the
hard gravel of the Nile Valley at Luxor and on the high hills behind
Esneh. In America the discoveries at Trenton, N.J., and at various
places in Delaware, Ohio, Minnesota, and elsewhere, along the southern
edge of the drift of the Glacial epochs, clinched the new scientific
truth yet more firmly; and the statement made by an eminent American
authority is, that "man was on this continent when the climate and ice
of Greenland extended to the mouth of New York harbour." The discoveries
of prehistoric remains on the Pacific coast, and especially in British
Columbia, finished completely the last chance at a reasonable contention
by the adherents of the older view. As to these investigations on the
Pacific slope of the United States, the discoveries of Whitney and
others in California had been so made and announced that the judgment of
scientific men regarding them was suspended until the visit of perhaps
the greatest living authority in his department, Alfred Russel Wallace,
in 1887. He confirmed the view of Prof. Whitney and others with the
statement that "both the actual remains and works of man found deep
under the lava-flows of Pliocene age show that he existed in the
New World at least as early as in the Old." To this may be added the
discoveries in British Columbia, which prove that, since man existed in
these regions, "valleys have been filled up by drift from the waste of
mountains to a depth in some cases of fifteen hundred feet; this covered
by a succession of tuffs, ashes, and lava-streams from volcanoes long
since extinct, and finally cut down by the present rivers through beds
of solid basalt, and through this accumulation of lavas and gravels."
The immense antiquity of the human remains in the gravels of the Pacific
coast is summed up by a most eminent English authority and declared
to be proved, "first, by the present river systems being of subsequent
date, sometimes cutting through them and their superincumbent lava-cap
to a depth of two thousand feet; secondly, by the great denudation that
has taken place since they were deposited, for they sometimes lie on the
summits of mountains six thousand feet high; thirdly, by the fact that
the Sierra Nevada has been partly elevated since their formation."(187)
(187) For the general subject of investigations in British prehistoric
remains, see especially Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain and his Place
in the Tertiary Period, London, 1880. For Boucher de Perthes's account
of his discovery of the human jaw at Moulin Quignon, see his Antiquites
Celtiques et Antediluviennes, vol. iii, p. 542 et seq., Appendix. For an
excellent account of special investigations in the high terraces above
the Thames, see J. Allen Brown, F. G. S., Palaeolithic Man in Northwest
Middlesex, London, 1887. For discoveries in America, and the citations
regarding them, see Wright, the Ice Age in North America, New York,
1889, chap. xxi. Very remarkable examples of these specimens from
the drift at Trenton may be seen in Prof. Abbott's collections at the
University of Pennsylvania. For an admirable statement, see Prof. Henry
W. Haynes, in Wright, as above. For proofs of the vast antiquity of man
upon the Pacific coast, cited in the text, see Skertchley, F. G. S., in
the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1887, p. 336; see also
Wallace, Darwinism, London, 1890, chap. xv; and for a striking summary
of the evidence that man lived before the last submergence of Britain,
see Brown, Palaeolithic Man in Northwest Middlesex, as above cited.
For proofs that man existed in a period when the streams were flowing
hundreds of feet above their present level, see ibid., p. 33. As to the
evidence of the action of the sea and of glacial action in the Welsh
bone caves after the remains of extinct animals and weapons of human
workmanship had been deposited, see ibid., p. 198. For a good statement
of the slowness of the submergance and emergence of Great Britain, with
an illustration from the rising of the shore of Finland, see ibid.,
pp. 47, 48. As to the flint implements of Palaeolithic man in the high
terraced gravels throughout the Thames Valley, associated with bones of
the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, etc., see Brown, p. 31. For still
more conclusive proofs that man inhabited North Wales before the last
submergence of the greater part of the British Islands to a depth of
twelve hundred to fourteen hundred feet, see ibid., pp. 199, 200. For
maps showing the connection of the British river system with that of the
Continent, see Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, London, 1880, pp.
18, 41, 73; also Lyell, Antiquity of Man, chap. xiv. As to the long
continuance of the early Stone period, see James Geikie, The Great Ice
Age, New York, 1888, p. 402. As to the impossibility of the animals of
the arctic and torrid regions living together or visiting the same place
at different times in the same year, see Geikie, as above, pp. 421
et seq.; and for a conclusive argument that the animals of the period
assigned lived in England not since, but before, the Glacial period,
or in the intergalcial period, see ibid., p. 459. For a very candid
statement by perhaps the foremost leader of the theological rear-guard,
admitting the insuperable difficulties presented by the Old Testament
chronology as regards the Creation and the Deluge, see the Duke of
Argyll's Primeval Man, pp. 90-100, and especially pp. 93, 124. For a
succinct statement on the general subject, see Laing, Problems of the
Future, London, 1889, chapters v and vi. For discoveries of prehistoric
implements in India, see notes by Bruce Foote, F. G. S., in the British
Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1886 and 1887. For
similar discoveries in South Africa, see Gooch, in Journal of the
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. xi, pp. 124
et seq. For proofs of the existance of Palaeolithic man in Egypt, see
Mook, Haynes, Pitt-Rivers, Flinders-Petrie, and others, cited at length
in the next chapter. For the corroborative and concurrent testimony
of ethnology, philology, and history to the vast antiquity of man, see
Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i.
As an important supplement to these discoveries of ancient implements
came sundry comparisons made by eminent physiologists between human
skulls and bones found in different places and under circumstances
showing vast antiquity.
Human bones had been found under such circumstances as early as 1835
at Cannstadt near Stuttgart, and in 1856 in the Neanderthal near
Dusseldorf; but in more recent searches they had been discovered in a
multitude of places, especially in Germany, France, Belgium, England,
the Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America. Comparison of these
bones showed that even in that remote Quaternary period there were great
differences of race, and here again came in an argument for the yet
earlier existence of man on the earth; for long previous periods must
have been required to develop such racial differences. Considerations
of this kind gave a new impulse to the belief that man's existence might
even date back into the Tertiary period. The evidence for this earlier
origin of man was ably summed up, not only by its brilliant advocate,
Mortillet, but by a former opponent, one of the most conservative of
modern anthropologists, Quatrefages; and the conclusion arrived at
by both was, that man did really exist in the Tertiary period. The
acceptance of this conclusion was also seen in the more recent work
of Alfred Russel Wallace, who, though very cautious and conservative,
placed the origin of man not only in the Tertiary period, but in an
earlier stage of it than most had dared assign--even in the Miocene.
The first thing raising a strong presumption, if not giving proof, that
man existed in the Tertiary, was the fact that from all explored
parts of the world came in more and more evidence that in the earlier
Quaternary man existed in different, strongly marked races and in great
numbers. From all regions which geologists had explored, even from
those the most distant and different from each other, came this same
evidence--from northern Europe to southern Africa; from France to China;
from New Jersey to British Columbia; from British Columbia to Peru. The
development of man in such numbers and in so many different regions,
with such differences of race and at so early a period, must have
required a long previous time.
This argument was strengthened by discoveries of bones bearing marks
apparently made by cutting instruments, in the Tertiary formations of
France and Italy, and by the discoveries of what were claimed to be
flint implements by the Abbe Bourgeois in France, and of implements and
human bones by Prof. Capellini in Italy.
On the other hand, some of the more cautious men of science are still
content to say that the existence of man in the Tertiary period is not
yet proven. As to his existence throughout the Quaternary epoch, no new
proofs are needed; even so determined a supporter of the theological
side as the Duke of Argyll has been forced to yield to the evidence.
Of attempts to make an exact chronological statement throwing light on
the length of the various prehistoric periods, the most notable have
been those by M. Morlot, on the accumulated strata of the Lake of
Geneva; by Gillieron, on the silt of Lake Neufchatel; by Horner, in the
delta deposits of Egypt; and by Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi.
But while these have failed to give anything like an exact result,
all these investigations together point to the central truth, so amply
established, of the vast antiquity of man, and the utter inadequacy of
the chronology given in our sacred books. The period of man's past life
upon our planet, which has been fixed by the universal Church, "always,
everywhere, and by all," is thus perfectly proved to be insignificant
compared with those vast geological epochs during which man is now known
to have existed.(188)
(188) As to the evidence of man in the Tertiary period, see works
already cited, especially Quatrefages, Cartailhac, and Mortillet. For an
admirable summary, see Laing, Human Origins, chap. viii. See also, for
a summing up of the evidence in favour of man in the Tertiary period,
Quatrefages, History Generale des Races Humaines, in the Bibliotheque
Ethnologique, Paris, 1887, chap. iv. As to the earlier view, see Vogt,
Lectures on Man, London, 1864, lecture xi. For a thorough and convincing
refutation of Sir J. W. Dawson's attempt to make the old and new Stone
periods coincide, see H. W. Haynes, in chap. vi of the History of
America, edited by Justin Winsor. For development of various important
points in the relation of anthropology to the human occupancy of our
planet, see Topinard, Anthropology, London, 1890, chap. ix.
CHAPTER VIII. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY
In the previous chapters we have seen how science, especially within
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has thoroughly changed the
intelligent thought of the world in regard to the antiquity of man upon
our planet; and how the fabric built upon the chronological indications
in our sacred books--first, by the early fathers of the Church,
afterward by the medieval doctors, and finally by the reformers and
modern orthodox chronologists--has virtually disappeared before an
entirely different view forced upon us, especially by Egyptian and
Assyrian studies, as well as by geology and archeology.
In this chapter I purpose to present some outlines of the work of
Anthropology, especially as assisted by Ethnology, in showing what the
evolution of human civilization has been.
Here, too, the change from the old theological view based upon the
letter of our sacred books to the modern scientific view based upon
evidence absolutely irrefragable is complete. Here, too, we are at the
beginning of a vast change in the basis and modes of thought upon man--a
change even more striking than that accomplished by Copernicus and
Galileo, when they substituted for a universe in which sun and planets
revolved about the earth a universe in which the earth is but the merest
grain or atom revolving with other worlds, larger and smaller, about the
sun; and all these forming but one among innumerable systems.
Ever since the beginning of man's effective thinking upon the great
problems around him, two antagonistic views have existed regarding the
life of the human race upon earth. The first of these is the belief that
man was created "in the beginning" a perfect being, endowed with the
highest moral and intellectual powers, but that there came a "fall,"
and, as its result, the entrance into the world of evil, toil, sorrow,
and death.
Nothing could be more natural than such an explanation of the existence
of evil, in times when men saw everywhere miracle and nowhere law. It
is, under such circumstances, by far the most easy of explanations, for
it is in accordance with the appearances of things: men adopted it just
as naturally as they adopted the theory that the Almighty hangs up the
stars as lights in the solid firmament above the earth, or hides the sun
behind a mountain at night, or wheels the planets around the earth, or
flings comets as "signs and wonders" to scare a wicked world, or allows
evil spirits to control thunder, lightning, and storm, and to cause
diseases of body and mind, or opens the "windows of heaven" to let down
"the waters that be above the heavens," and thus to give rain upon the
earth.
A belief, then, in a primeval period of innocence and perfection--moral,
intellectual, and physical--from which men for some fault fell, is
perfectly in accordance with what we should expect.
Among the earliest known records of our race we find this view taking
shape in the Chaldean legends of war between the gods, and of a fall of
man; both of which seemed necessary to explain the existence of evil.
In Greek mythology perhaps the best-known statement was made by Hesiod:
to him it was revealed, regarding the men of the most ancient times,
that they were at first "a golden race," that "as gods they were wont
to live, with a life void of care, without labour and trouble; nor was
wretched old age at all impending; but ever did they delight themselves
out of the reach of all ills, and they died as if overcome by sleep;
all blessings were theirs: of its own will the fruitful field would bear
them fruit, much and ample, and they gladly used to reap the labours
of their hands in quietness along with many good things, being rich in
flocks and true to the blessed gods." But there came a "fall," caused
by human curiosity. Pandora, the first woman created, received a vase
which, by divine command, was to remain closed; but she was tempted to
open it, and troubles, sorrow, and disease escaped into the world, hope
alone remaining.
So, too, in Roman mythological poetry the well-known picture by Ovid
is but one among the many exhibitions of this same belief in a primeval
golden age--a Saturnian cycle; one of the constantly recurring attempts,
so universal and so natural in the early history of man, to account for
the existence of evil, care, and toil on earth by explanatory myths and
legends.
This view, growing out of the myths, legends, and theologies of earlier
peoples, we also find embodied in the sacred tradition of the Jews,
and especially in one of the documents which form the impressive poem
beginning the books attributed to Moses. As to the Christian Church, no
word of its Blessed Founder indicates that it was committed by him to
this theory, or that he even thought it worthy of his attention. How,
like so many other dogmas never dreamed of by Jesus of Nazareth and
those who knew him best, it was developed, it does not lie within the
province of this chapter to point out; nor is it worth our while to
dwell upon its evolution in the early Church, in the Middle Ages, at the
Reformation, and in various branches of the Protestant Church: suffice
it that, though among English-speaking nations by far the most important
influence in its favour has come from Milton's inspiration rather than
from that of older sacred books, no doctrine has been more universally
accepted, "always, everywhere, and by all," from the earliest fathers of
the Church down to the present hour.
On the other hand appeared at an early period the opposite view--that
mankind, instead of having fallen from a high intellectual, moral, and
religious condition, has slowly risen from low and brutal beginnings.
In Greece, among the philosophers contemporary with Socrates, we find
Critias depicting a rise of man, from a time when he was beastlike
and lawless, through a period when laws were developed, to a time
when morality received enforcement from religion; but among all the
statements of this theory the most noteworthy is that given by Lucretius
in his great poem on The Nature of Things. Despite its errors, it
remains among the most remarkable examples of prophetic insight in
the history of our race. The inspiration of Lucretius gave him
almost miraculous glimpses of truth; his view of the development
of civilization from the rudest beginnings to the height of its
achievements is a wonderful growth, rooted in observation and thought,
branching forth into a multitude of striking facts and fancies; and
among these is the statement regarding the sequence of inventions:
"Man's earliest arms were fingers, teeth, and nails, And stones and
fragments from the branching woods; Then copper next; and last, as
latest traced, The tyrant, iron."
Thus did the poet prophesy one of the most fruitful achievements of
modern science: the discovery of that series of epochs which has been so
carefully studied in our century.
Very striking, also, is the statement of Horace, though his idea is
evidently derived from Lucretius. He dwells upon man's first condition
on earth as low and bestial, and pictures him lurking in caves,
progressing from the use of his fists and nails, first to clubs, then
to arms which he had learned to forge, and, finally, to the invention of
the names of things, to literature, and to laws.(189)
(189) For the passage in Hesiod, as given, see the Works and Days, lines
109-120, in Banks's translation. As to Horace, see the Satires, i, 3,
99. As to the relation of the poetic account of the Fall in Genesis to
Chaldean myths, see Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, pp. 13, 17. For
a very instructive separation of the Jehovistic and Elohistic parts
of Genesis, with the account of the "Fall" as given in the former, see
Lenormant, La Genese, Paris, 1883, pp. 166-168; also Bacon, Genesis of
Genesis. Of the lines of Lucretius--
"Arma antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt, Et lapides, et item
sylvarum fragmina rami, Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta, Sed
prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus"---
the translation is that of Good. For a more exact prose translation, see
Munro's Lucretius, fourth edition, which is much more careful, at least
in the proof-reading, than the first edition. As regards Lucretius's
propheitc insight into some of the greatest conclusions of modern
science, see Munro's translation and notes, fourth edition, book v,
notes ii, p. 335. On the relation of several passages in Horace to the
ideas of Lucretius, see Munro as above. For the passage from Luther, see
the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, p. 242.
During the mediaeval ages of faith this view was almost entirely
obscured, and at the Reformation it seemed likely to remain so. Typical
of the simplicity of belief in "the Fall" cherished among the Reformers
is Luther's declaration regarding Adam and Eve. He tells us, "they
entered into the garden about noon, and having a desire to eat, she took
the apple; then came the fall--according to our account at about
two o'clock." But in the revival of learning the old eclipsed truth
reappeared, and in the first part of the seventeenth century we find
that, among the crimes for which Vanini was sentenced at Toulouse to
have his tongue torn out and to be burned alive, was his belief that
there is a gradation extending upward from the lowest to the highest
form of created beings.
Yet, in the same century, the writings of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and
Pascal were evidently undermining the old idea of "the Fall." Bodin
especially, brilliant as were his services to orthodoxy, argued lucidly
against the doctrine of general human deterioration.
Early in the eighteenth century Vico presented the philosophy of history
as an upward movement of man out of animalism and barbarism. This idea
took firm hold upon human thought, and in the following centuries such
men as Lessing and Turgot gave new force to it.
The investigations of the last forty years have shown that Lucretius and
Horace were inspired prophets: what they saw by the exercise of reason
illumined by poetic genius, has been now thoroughly based upon facts
carefully ascertained and arranged--until Thomsen and Nilsson, the
northern archaeologists, have brought these prophecies to evident
fulfilment, by presenting a scientific classification dividing the age
of prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an old stone
period, a new stone period, a period of beaten copper, a period of
bronze, and a period of iron, and arraying vast masses of facts from all
parts of the world, fitting thoroughly into each other, strengthening
each other, and showing beyond a doubt that, instead of a FALL, there
has been a RISE of man, from the earliest indications in the Quaternary,
or even, possibly, in the Tertiary period.(190)
(190) For Vanini, see Topinard, Elements of Anthropologie, p. 52. For a
brief and careful summary of the agency of Eccard in Germany, Goguet
in France, Hoare in England, and others in various parts of Europe, as
regards this development of the scientific view during the eighteenth
century, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, chap. i. For the
agency of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal, see Flint, Philosophy
of History, introduction, pp. 28 et seq. For a shorter summary,
see Lubbock, Prehistoric Man. For the statements by the northern
archaeologists, see Nilsson, Worsaae, and the other main works cited in
this article. For a generous statement regarding the great services of
the Danish archaeologists in this field, see Quatrefages, introduction
to Cartailhac, Les Ages Prehistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal.
The first blow at the fully developed doctrine of "the Fall" came, as
we have seen, from geology. According to that doctrine, as held quite
generally from its beginnings among the fathers and doctors of
the primitive Church down to its culmination in the minds of great
Protestants like John Wesley, the statement in our sacred books
that "death entered the world by sin" was taken as a historic fact,
necessitating the conclusion that, before the serpent persuaded Eve to
eat of the forbidden fruit, death on our planet was unknown. Naturally,
when geology revealed, in the strata of a period long before the coming
of man on earth, a vast multitude of carnivorous tribes fitted
to destroy their fellow-creatures on land and sea, and within the
fossilized skeletons of many of these the partially digested remains of
animals, this doctrine was too heavy to be carried, and it was quietly
dropped.
But about the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrine of the
rise of man as opposed to the doctrine of his "fall" received a great
accession of strength from a source most unexpected. As we saw in the
last chapter, the facts proving the great antiquity of man foreshadowed
a new and even more remarkable idea regarding him. We saw, it is true,
that the opponents of Boucher de Perthes, while they could not deny his
discovery of human implements in the drift, were successful in securing
a verdict of "Not proven" as regarded his discovery of human bones; but
their triumph was short-lived. Many previous discoveries, little thought
of up to that time, began to be studied, and others were added which
resulted not merely in confirming the truth regarding the antiquity of
man, but in establishing another doctrine which the opponents of science
regarded with vastly greater dislike--the doctrine that man has not
fallen from an original high estate in which he was created about six
thousand years ago, but that, from a period vastly earlier than any
warranted by the sacred chronologists, he has been, in spite of lapses
and deteriorations, rising.
A brief review of this new growth of truth may be useful. As early as
1835 Prof. Jaeger had brought out from a quantity of Quaternary remains
dug up long before at Cannstadt, near Stuttgart, a portion of a human
skull, apparently of very low type. A battle raged about it for a time,
but this finally subsided, owing to uncertainties arising from the
circumstances of the discovery.
In 1856, in the Neanderthal, near Dusseldorf, among Quaternary remains
gathered on the floor of a grotto, another skull was found bearing
the same evidence of a low human type. As in the case of the Cannstadt
skull, this again was fiercely debated, and finally the questions
regarding it were allowed to remain in suspense. But new discoveries
were made: at Eguisheim, at Brux, at Spy, and elsewhere, human skulls
were found of a similarly low type; and, while each of the earlier
discoveries was open to debate, and either, had no other been
discovered, might have been considered an abnormal specimen, the
combination of all these showed conclusively that not only had a race of
men existed at that remote period, but that it was of a type as low as
the lowest, perhaps below the lowest, now known.
Research was now redoubled, and, as a result, human skulls and complete
skeletons of various types began to be discovered in the ancient
deposits of many other parts of the world, and especially in France,
Belgium, Germany, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America.
But soon began to emerge from all these discoveries a fact of enormous
importance. The skulls and bones found at Cro Magnon, Solutre, Furfooz,
Grenelle, and elsewhere, were compared, and it was thus made certain
that various races had already appeared and lived in various grades of
civilization, even in those exceedingly remote epochs; that even then
there were various strata of humanity ranging from races of a very low
to those of a very high type; and that upon any theory--certainly upon
the theory of the origin of mankind from a single pair--two things were
evident: first, that long, slow processes during vast periods of time
must have been required for the differentiation of these races, and for
the evolution of man up to the point where the better specimens show
him, certainly in the early Quaternary and perhaps in the Tertiary
period; and, secondly, that there had been from the first appearance of
man, of which we have any traces, an UPWARD tendency.(191)
(191) For Wesley's statement of the amazing consequences of the entrance
of death into the world by sin, see citations in his sermon on The Fall
of Man in the chapter on Geology. For Boucher de Perthes, see his Life
by Ledieu, especially chapters v and xix; also letters in the appendix;
also Les Antiquities Celtiques et Antediluviennes, as cited in previous
chapters of this work. For an account of the Neanderthal man and other
remains mentioned, see Quatrefages, Human Species, chap. xxvi; also
Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, pp. 232 et seq.; also other
writers cited in this chapter. For the other discoveries mentioned, see
the same sources. For an engraving of the skull and the restored human
face of the Neanderthal man, see Reinach, Antiquities Nationales, etc.,
vol. i, p. 138. For the vast regions over which that early race spread,
see Quatrefages as above, p. 307. See also the same author, Histoire
Generale des Races Humaines, in the Bibliotheque Ethnologique, Paris,
1887, p. 4. In the vast mass of literature bearing on this subject, see
Quatrefages, Dupont, Reinach, Joly, Mortillet, Tylor, and Lubbock, in
works cited through these chapters.
This second conclusion, the upward tendency of man from low beginnings,
was made more and more clear by bringing into relations with these
remains of human bodies and of extinct animals the remains of human
handiwork. As stated in the last chapter, the river drift and bone
caves in Great Britain, France, and other parts of the world, revealed a
progression, even in the various divisions of the earliest Stone period;
for, beginning at the very lowest strata of these remains, on the floors
of the caverns, associated mainly with the bones of extinct animals,
such as the cave bear, the hairy elephant, and the like, were the rudest
implements then, in strata above these, sealed in the stalagmite of the
cavern floors, lying with the bones of animals extinct but more recent,
stone implements were found, still rude, but, as a rule, of an improved
type; and, finally, in a still higher stratum, associated with bones
of animals like the reindeer and bison, which, though not extinct, have
departed to other climates, were rude stone implements, on the whole
of a still better workmanship. Such was the foreshadowing, even at that
early rude Stone period, of the proofs that the tendency of man has
been from his earliest epoch and in all parts of the world, as a rule,
upward.
But this rule was to be much further exemplified. About 1850, while the
French and English geologists were working more especially among the
relics of the drift and cave periods, noted archaeologists of the
North--Forchammer, Steenstrup, and Worsaae--were devoting themselves to
the investigation of certain remains upon the Danish Peninsula. These
remains were of two kinds: first, there were vast shell-heaps or
accumulations of shells and other refuse cast aside by rude tribes
which at some unknown age in the past lived on the shores of the Baltic,
principally on shellfish. That these shell-heaps were very ancient
was evident: the shells of oysters and the like found in them were far
larger than any now found on those coasts; their size, so far from being
like that of the corresponding varieties which now exist in the brackish
waters of the Baltic, was in every case like that of those varieties
which only thrive in the waters of the open salt sea. Here was a clear
indication that at the time when man formed these shell-heaps those
coasts were in far more direct communication with the salt sea than at
present, and that sufficient time must have elapsed since that period to
have wrought enormous changes in sea and land throughout those regions.
Scattered through these heaps were found indications of a grade of
civilization when man still used implements of stone, but implements and
weapons which, though still rude, showed a progress from those of the
drift and early cave period, some of them being of polished stone.
With these were other evidences that civilization had progressed.
With implements rude enough to have survived from early periods, other
implements never known in the drift and bone caves began to appear,
and, though there were few if any bones of other domestic animals, the
remains of dogs were found; everything showed that there had been a
progress in civilization between the former Stone epoch and this.
The second series of discoveries in Scandinavia was made in the
peat-beds: these were generally formed in hollows or bowls varying in
depth from ten to thirty feet, and a section of them, like a section of
the deposits in the bone caverns, showed a gradual evolution of human
culture. The lower strata in these great bowls were found to be made up
chiefly of mosses and various plants matted together with the trunks
of fallen trees, sometimes of very large diameter; and the botanical
examination of the lowest layer of these trees and plants in the various
bowls revealed a most important fact: for this layer, the first in point
of time, was always of the Scotch fir--which now grows nowhere in the
Danish islands, and can not be made to grow anywhere in them--and of
plants which are now extinct in these regions, but have retreated within
the arctic circle. Coming up from the bottom of these great bowls there
was found above the first layer a second, in which were matted together
masses of oak trees of different varieties; these, too, were relics of
a bygone epoch, since the oak has almost entirely disappeared from
Denmark. Above these came a third stratum made up of fallen beech trees;
and the beech is now, and has been since the beginning of recorded
history, the most common tree of the Danish Peninsula.
Now came a second fact of the utmost importance as connected with the
first. Scattered, as a rule, through the lower of these deposits, that
of the extinct fir trees and plants, were found implements and weapons
of smooth stone; in the layer of oak trees were found implements of
bronze; and among the layer of beeches were found implements and weapons
of iron.
The general result of these investigations in these two sources, the
shell mounds and the peat deposits, was the same: the first civilization
evidenced in them was marked by the use of stone implements more or less
smooth, showing a progress from the earlier rude Stone period made known
by the bone caves; then came a later progress to a higher civilization,
marked by the use of bronze implements; and, finally, a still higher
development when iron began to be used.
The labours of the Danish archaeologists have resulted in the formation
of a great museum at Copenhagen, and on the specimens they have
found, coupled with those of the drift and bone caves, is based the
classification between the main periods or divisions in the evolution of
the human race above referred to.
It was not merely in Scandinavian lands that these results were reached;
substantially the same discoveries were made in Ireland and France, in
Sardinia and Portugal, in Japan and in Brazil, in Cuba and in the United
States; in fact, as a rule, in nearly every part of the world which was
thoroughly examined.(192)
(192) For the general subject, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, p. 498,
et passim. For examples of the rude stone implements, improving as we go
from earlier to later layers in the bone caves, see Boyd Hawkins, Early
Man in Britain, chap. vii, p. 186; also Quatrefages, Human Species, New
York, 1879, pp. 305 et seq. An interesting gleam of light is thrown on
the subject in De Baye, Grottes Prehistoriques de la Marne, pp. 31 et
seq.; also Evans, as cited in the previous chapter. For the more recent
investigations in the Danish shell-heaps, see Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in
Britain, pp. 303, 304. For these evidences of advanced civilization in
the shell-heaps, see Mortillet, p. 498. He, like Nilsson, says that only
the bones of the dog were found; but compare Dawkins, p. 305. For the
very full list of these discoveries, with their bearing on each other,
see Mortillet, p. 499. As to those in Scandanavian countries, see
Nilsson, The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, third edition, with
Introduction by Lubbock, London, 1868; also the Pre-History of the
North, by Worsaae, English translation, London, 1886. For shell-mounds
and their contents in the Spanish Peninsula, see Cartailhac's greater
work already cited. For summary of such discoveries throughout the
world, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, pp. 497 et seq.
But from another quarter came a yet more striking indication of this
same evolution. As far back as the year 1829 there were discovered,
in the Lake of Zurich, piles and other antiquities indicating a former
existence of human dwellings, standing in the water at some distance
from the shore; but the usual mixture of thoughtlessness and dread of
new ideas seems to have prevailed, and nothing was done until about
1853, when new discoveries of the same kind were followed up vigorously,
and Rutimeyer, Keller, Troyon, and others showed not only in the Lake
of Zurich, but in many other lakes in Switzerland, remains of former
habitations, and, in the midst of these, great numbers of relics,
exhibiting the grade of civilization which those lake-dwellers had
attained.
Here, too, were accumulated proofs of the upward tendency of the human
race. Implements of polished stone, bone, leather, pottery of various
grades, woven cloth, bones of several kinds of domestic animals, various
sorts of grain, bread which had been preserved by charring, and a
multitude of evidences of progress never found among the earlier, ruder
relics of civilization, showed yet more strongly that man had arrived
here at a still higher stage than his predecessor of the drift, cave,
and shell-heap periods, and had gone on from better to better.
Very striking evidences of this upward tendency were found in each class
of implements. As by comparing the chipped flint implements of the lower
and earlier strata in the cave period with those of the later and upper
strata we saw progress, so, in each of the periods of polished stone,
bronze, and iron, we see, by similar comparisons, a steady progress from
rude to perfected implements; and especially is this true in the
remains of the various lake-dwellings, for among these can be traced out
constant increase in the variety of animals domesticated, and gradual
improvements in means of subsistence and in ways of living.
Incidentally, too, a fact, at first sight of small account, but on
reflection exceedingly important, was revealed. The earlier bronze
implements were frequently found to imitate in various minor respects
implements of stone; in other words, forms were at first given to bronze
implements natural in working stone, but not natural in working bronze.
This showed the DIRECTION of the development--that it was upward from
stone to bronze, not downward from bronze to stone; that it was progress
rather than decline.
These investigations were supplemented by similar researches elsewhere.
In many other parts of the world it was found that lake-dwellers had
existed in different grades of civilization, but all within a certain
range, intermediate between the cave-dwellers and the historic period.
To explain this epoch of the lake-dwellers, history came in with the
account given by Herodotus of the lake-dwellings on Lake Prasias,
which gave protection from the armies of Persia. Still more important,
Comparative Ethnography showed that to-day, in various parts of the
world, especially in New Guinea and West Africa, races of men are living
in lake-dwellings built upon piles, and with a range of implements and
weapons strikingly like many of those discovered in these ancient lake
deposits of Switzerland.
In Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, and other
countries, remains of a different sort were also found, throwing light
on this progress. The cromlechs, cranogs, mounds, and the like,
though some of them indicate the work of weaker tribes pressed upon by
stronger, show, as a rule, the same upward tendency.
At a very early period in the history of these discoveries, various
attempts were made--nominally in the interest of religion, but really in
the interest of sundry creeds and catechisms framed when men knew little
or nothing of natural laws--to break the force of such evidences of the
progress and development of the human race from lower to higher. Out
of all the earlier efforts two may be taken as fairly typical, for
they exhibit the opposition to science as developed under two different
schools of theology, each working in its own way. The first of these
shows great ingenuity and learning, and is presented by Mr. Southall in
his book, published in 1875, entitled The Recent Origin of the World.
In this he grapples first of all with the difficulties presented by the
early date of Egyptian civilization, and the keynote of his argument is
the statement made by an eminent Egyptologist, at a period before modern
archaeological discoveries were well understood, that "Egypt laughs the
idea of a rude Stone age, a polished Stone age, a Bronze age, an Iron
age, to scorn."
Mr. Southall's method was substantially that of the late excellent Mr.
Gosse in geology. Mr. Gosse, as the readers of this work may remember,
felt obliged, in the supposed interest of Genesis, to urge that safety
to men's souls might be found in believing that, six thousand years ago,
the Almighty, for some inscrutable purpose, suddenly set Niagara pouring
very near the spot where it is pouring now; laid the various strata,
and sprinkled the fossils through them like plums through a pudding;
scratched the glacial grooves upon the rocks, and did a vast multitude
of things, subtle and cunning, little and great, in all parts of the
world, required to delude geologists of modern times into the conviction
that all these things were the result of a steady progress through long
epochs. On a similar plan, Mr. Southall proposed, at the very beginning
of his book, as a final solution of the problem, the declaration that
Egypt, with its high civilization in the time of Mena, with its races,
classes, institutions, arrangements, language, monuments--all indicating
an evolution through a vast previous history--was a sudden creation
which came fully made from the hands of the Creator. To use his own
words, "The Egyptians had no Stone age, and were born civilized."
There is an old story that once on a time a certain jovial King of
France, making a progress through his kingdom, was received at the gates
of a provincial town by the mayor's deputy, who began his speech on this
wise: "May it please your Majesty, there are just thirteen reasons why
His Honour the Mayor can not be present to welcome you this morning. The
first of these reasons is that he is dead." On this the king graciously
declared that this first reason was sufficient, and that he would not
trouble the mayor's deputy for the twelve others.
So with Mr. Southall's argument: one simple result of scientific
research out of many is all that it is needful to state, and this is,
that in these later years we have a new and convincing evidence of
the existence of prehistoric man in Egypt in his earliest, rudest
beginnings; the very same evidence which we find in all other parts of
the world which have been carefully examined. This evidence consists
of stone implements and weapons which have been found in Egypt in
such forms, at such points, and in such positions that when studied in
connection with those found in all other parts of the world, from New
Jersey to California, from France to India, and from England to the
Andaman Islands, they force upon us the conviction that civilization
in Egypt, as in all other parts of the world, was developed by the same
slow process of evolution from the rudest beginnings.
It is true that men learned in Egyptology had discouraged the idea of
an earlier Stone age in Egypt, and that among these were Lepsius and
Brugsch; but these men were not trained in prehistoric archaeology;
their devotion to the study of the monuments of Egyptian civilization
had evidently drawn them away from sympathy, and indeed from
acquaintance, with the work of men like Boucher de Perthes, Lartet,
Nilsson, Troyon, and Dawkins. But a new era was beginning. In 1867
Worsaae called attention to the prehistoric implements found on
the borders of Egypt; two years later Arcelin discussed such stone
implements found beneath the soil of Sakkara and Gizeh, the very
focus of the earliest Egyptian civilization; in the same year Hamy and
Lenormant found such implements washed out from the depths higher up the
Nile at Thebes, near the tombs of the kings; and in the following year
they exhibited more flint implements found at various other places.
Coupled with these discoveries was the fact that Horner and Linant found
a copper knife at twenty-four feet, and pottery at sixty feet, below the
surface. In 1872 Dr. Reil, director of the baths at Helouan, near Cairo,
discovered implements of chipped flint; and in 1877. Dr. Jukes Brown
made similar discoveries in that region. In 1878 Oscar Fraas, summing up
the question, showed that the stone implements were mainly such as are
found in the prehistoric deposits of other countries, and that, Zittel
having found them in the Libyan Desert, far from the oases, there was
reason to suppose that these implements were used before the region
became a desert and before Egypt was civilized. Two years later
Dr. Mook, of Wurzburg, published a work giving the results of his
investigations, with careful drawings of the rude stone implements
discovered by him in the upper Nile Valley, and it was evident that,
while some of these implements differed slightly from those before
known, the great mass of them were of the character so common in the
prehistoric deposits of other parts of the world.
A yet more important contribution to this mass of facts was made by
Prof. Henry Haynes, of Boston, who in the winter of 1877 and 1878 began
a very thorough investigation of the subject, and discovered, a few
miles east of Cairo, many flint implements. The significance of Haynes's
discoveries was twofold: First, there were, among these, stone axes like
those found in the French drift beds of St. Acheul, showing that the men
who made or taught men how to make these in Egypt were passing through
the same phase of savagery as that of Quaternary France; secondly, he
found a workshop for making these implements, proving that these flint
implements were not brought into Egypt by invaders, but were made to
meet the necessities of the country. From this first field Prof. Haynes
went to Helouan, north of Cairo, and there found, as Dr. Reil had done,
various worked flints, some of them like those discovered by M. Riviere
in the caves of southern France; thence he went up the Nile to Luxor,
the site of ancient Thebes, began a thorough search in the Tertiary
limestone hills, and found multitudes of chipped stone implements, some
of them, indeed, of original forms, but most of forms common in other
parts of the world under similar circumstances, some of the chipped
stone axes corresponding closely to those found in the drift beds of
northern France.
All this seemed to show conclusively that, long ages before the earliest
period of Egyptian civilization of which the monuments of the first
dynasties give us any trace, mankind in the Nile Valley was going
through the same slow progress from the period when, standing just above
the brutes, he defended himself with implements of rudely chipped stone.
But in 1881 came discoveries which settled the question entirely.
In that year General Pitt-Rivers, a Fellow of the Royal Society and
President of the Anthropological Institute, and J. F. Campbell, Fellow
of the Royal Geographical Society of England, found implements not only
in alluvial deposits, associated with the bones of the zebra, hyena, and
other animals which have since retreated farther south, but, at Djebel
Assas, near Thebes, they found implements of chipped flint in the hard,
stratified gravel, from six and a half to ten feet below the surface;
relics evidently, as Mr. Campbell says, "beyond calculation older than
the oldest Egyptian temples and tombs." They certainly proved that
Egyptian civilization had not issued in its completeness, and all at
once, from the hand of the Creator in the time of Mena. Nor was this
all. Investigators of the highest character and ability--men like Hull
and Flinders Petrie--revealed geological changes in Egypt requiring
enormous periods of time, and traces of man's handiwork dating from
a period when the waters in the Nile Valley extended hundreds of feet
above the present level. Thus was ended the contention of Mr. Southall.
Still another attack upon the new scientific conclusions came from
France, when in 1883 the Abbe Hamard, Priest of the Oratory, published
his Age of Stone and Primitive Man. He had been especially vexed at the
arrangement of prehistoric implements by periods at the Paris Exposition
of 1878; he bitterly complains of this as having an anti-Christian
tendency, and rails at science as "the idol of the day." He attacks
Mortillet, one of the leaders in French archaeology, with a great
display of contempt; speaks of the "venom" in books on prehistoric man
generally; complains that the Church is too mild and gentle with such
monstrous doctrines; bewails the concessions made to science by some
eminent preachers; and foretells his own martyrdom at the hands of men
of science.
Efforts like this accomplished little, and a more legitimate attempt was
made to resist the conclusions of archaeology by showing that knives of
stone were used in obedience to a sacred ritual in Egypt for embalming,
and in Judea for circumcision, and that these flint knives might have
had this later origin. But the argument against the conclusions drawn
from this view was triple: First, as we have seen, not only stone
knives, but axes and other implements of stone similar to those of a
prehistoric period in western Europe were discovered; secondly,
these implements were discovered in the hard gravel drift of a period
evidently far earlier than that of Mena; and, thirdly, the use of stone
implements in Egyptian and Jewish sacred functions within the historic
period, so far from weakening the force of the arguments for the long
and slow development of Egyptian civilization from the men who used rude
flint implements to the men who built and adorned the great temples
of the early dynasties, is really an argument in favour of that long
evolution. A study of comparative ethnology has made it clear that the
sacred stone knives and implements of the Egyptian and Jewish priestly
ritual were natural survivals of that previous period. For sacrificial
or ritual purposes, the knife of stone was considered more sacred than
the knife of bronze or iron, simply because it was ancient; just as
to-day, in India, Brahman priests kindle the sacred fire not with
matches or flint and steel, but by a process found in the earliest,
lowest stages of human culture--by violently boring a pointed stick into
another piece of wood until a spark comes; and just as to-day, in Europe
and America, the architecture of the Middle Ages survives as a special
religious form in the erection of our most recent churches, and to such
an extent that thousands on thousands of us feel that we can not worship
fitly unless in the midst of windows, decorations, vessels, implements,
vestments, and ornaments, no longer used for other purposes, but which
have survived in sundry branches of the Christian Church, and derived a
special sanctity from the fact that they are of ancient origin.
Taking, then, the whole mass of testimony together, even though a
plausible or very strong argument against single evidences may be made
here and there, the force of its combined mass remains, and leaves both
the vast antiquity of man and the evolution of civilization from its
lowest to its highest forms, as proved by the prehistoric remains of
Egypt and so many other countries in all parts of the world, beyond
a reasonable doubt. Most important of all, the recent discoveries in
Assyria have thrown a new light upon the evolution of the dogma of "the
fall of man." Reverent scholars like George Smith, Sayce, Delitzsch,
Jensen, Schrader, and their compeers have found in the Ninevite records
the undoubted source of that form of the fall legend which was adopted
by the Hebrews and by them transmitted to Christianity.(193)
(193) For Mr. Southall's views, see his Recent Origin of Man, p. 20
and elsewhere. For Mr. Gosse'e views, see his Omphalos as cited in the
chapter on Geology in this work. For a summary of the work of Arcelin,
Hamy, Lenormant, Richard, Lubbock, Mook, and Haynes, see Mortillet, Le
Prehistorique, passim. As to Zittel's discovery, see Oscar Fraas's Aus
dem Orient, Stuttgart, 1878. As to the striking similarities of the stone
implements found in Egypt with those found in the drift and bone
caves, see Mook's monograph, Wurzburg, 1880, cited in the next chapter,
especially Plates IX, XI, XII. For even more striking reproductions
of photographs showing this remarkable similarity between Egyptian
and European chipped stone remains, see H. W. Haynes, Palaeolithic
Implements in Upper Egypt, Boston, 1881. See also Evans, Ancient Stone
Implements, chap. i, pp. 8, 9, 44, 102, 316, 329. As to stone implements
used by priests of Jehovah, priests of Baal, priests of Moloch, priests
of Odin, and Egyptian priests, as religious survivals, see Cartailhac,
as above, 6 and 7; also Lartet, in De Luynes, Expedition to the Dead
Sea; also Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, pp. 96, 97;
also Sayce, Herodotus, p. 171, note. For the discoveries by Pitt-Rivers,
see the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and
Ireland for 1882, vol. xi, pp. 382 et seq.; and for Campbell's decision
regarding them, see ibid., pp. 396, 397. For facts summed up in the
words, "It is most probable that Egypt at a remote period passed like
many other countries through its stone period," see Hilton Price, F. S.
A., F. G. S., paper in the Journal of the Archaeological Institute of
Great Britain and Ireland for 1884, p. 56. Specimens of Palaeolithic
implements from Egypt--knives, arrowheads, spearheads, flakes, and
the like, both of peculiar and ordinary forms--may be seen in various
museums, but especially in that of Prof. Haynes, of Boston. Some
interesting light is also thrown into the subject by the specimens
obtained by General Wilson and deposited in the Smithsonian Institution
at Washington. For Abbe Hamard's attack, see his L'Age de la Pierre et
L'Homme Primitif, Paris, 1883--especially his preface. For the stone
weapon found in the high drift behind Esneh, see Flinders Petrie,
History of Egypt, chap. i. Of these discoveries by Pitt-Rivers and
others, Maspero appears to know nothing.
CHAPTER IX. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY.
We have seen that, closely connected with the main lines of
investigation in archaeology and anthropology, there were other
researches throwing much light on the entire subject. In a previous
chapter we saw especially that Lafitau and Jussieu were among the first
to collect and compare facts bearing on the natural history of man,
gathered by travellers in various parts of the earth, thus laying
foundations for the science of comparative ethnology. It was soon seen
that ethnology had most important bearings upon the question of the
material, intellectual, moral, and religious evolution of the human
race; in every civilized nation, therefore, appeared scholars who began
to study the characteristics of various groups of men as ascertained
from travellers, and to compare the results thus gained with each other
and with those obtained by archaeology.
Thus, more and more clear became the evidences that the tendency of the
race has been upward from low beginnings. It was found that groups
of men still existed possessing characteristics of those in the early
periods of development to whom the drift and caves and shell-heaps
and pile-dwellings bear witness; groups of men using many of the same
implements and weapons, building their houses in the same way, seeking
their food by the same means, enjoying the same amusements, and going
through the same general stages of culture; some being in a condition
corresponding to the earlier, some to the later, of those early periods.
From all sides thus came evidence that we have still upon the
earth examples of all the main stages in the development of human
civilization; that from the period when man appears little above the
brutes, and with little if any religion in any accepted sense of the
word, these examples can be arranged in an ascending series leading
to the highest planes which humanity has reached; that philosophic
observers may among these examples study existing beliefs, usages, and
institutions back through earlier and earlier forms, until, as a rule,
the whole evolution can be easily divined if not fully seen. Moreover,
the basis of the whole structure became more and more clear: the fact
that "the lines of intelligence have always been what they are, and have
always operated as they do now; that man has progressed from the simple
to the complex, from the particular to the general."
As this evidence from ethnology became more and more strong, its
significance to theology aroused attention, and naturally most
determined efforts were made to break its force. On the Continent the
two great champions of the Church in this field were De Maistre and De
Bonald; but the two attempts which may be especially recalled as the
most influential among English-speaking peoples were those of Whately,
Archbishop of Dublin, and the Duke of Argyll.
First in the combat against these new deductions of science was Whately.
He was a strong man, whose breadth of thought and liberality in practice
deserve all honour; but these very qualities drew upon him the distrust
of his orthodox brethren; and, while his writings were powerful in
the first half of the present century to break down many bulwarks of
unreason, he seems to have been constantly in fear of losing touch with
the Church, and therefore to have promptly attacked some scientific
reasonings, which, had he been a layman, not holding a brief for
the Church, he would probably have studied with more care and less
prejudice. He was not slow to see the deeper significance of archaeology
and ethnology in their relations to the theological conception of "the
Fall," and he set the battle in array against them.
His contention was, to use his own words, that "no community ever did
or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a state of utter
barbarism into anything that can be called civilization"; and that, in
short, all imperfectly civilized, barbarous, and savage races are but
fallen descendants of races more fully civilized. This view was urged
with his usual ingenuity and vigour, but the facts proved too strong
for him: they made it clear, first, that many races were without simple
possessions, instruments, and arts which never, probably, could have
been lost if once acquired--as, for example, pottery, the bow for
shooting, various domesticated animals, spinning, the simplest
principles of agriculture, household economy, and the like; and,
secondly, it was shown as a simple matter of fact that various savage
and barbarous tribes HAD raised themselves by a development of means
which no one from outside could have taught them; as in the cultivation
and improvement of various indigenous plants, such as the potato and
Indian corn among the Indians of North America; in the domestication of
various animals peculiar to their own regions, such as the llama among
the Indians of south America; in the making of sundry fabrics out of
materials and by processes not found among other nations, such as
the bark cloth of the Polynesians; and in the development of weapons
peculiar to sundry localities, but known in no others, such as the
boomerang in Australia.