A WOMAN OF THE ICE AGE
A WOMAN OF THE
ICE AGE
BY
L. P. GRATACAP
Author of “The Certainty of a
Future Life in Mars.”
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
BRENTANO’S
1906
Copyright, 1906, by
L. P. GRATACAP
[Illustration]
A WOMAN OF THE ICE AGE
APOLOGY
The _Prehistoric Man_ needs rehabilitation. At least it can be urged
that there are possible phases of the prehistoric man that can be
elevated into emotional dignity, not unworthy of romance and heroics.
It has been too commonly assumed, under the omnipresent pressure of
scientific generalizations, that the _prehistoric_ was a semi-feral
type of human animal, squalid, distorted, simian-faced, thin-thighed
and adumbrant, without speech, perchance groping his blind and
biological course upward, by some sort of evolution, into a reasoning,
talking, purposive and spiritual creature; that he was a faunal
expression simply, like a _triceratops_ in the Upper Cretaceous, or a
_mud-buffalo_ in the Philippines.
But there is some sense in claiming for him the possibilities of
dramatic action and feeling, assuring to him the restitution of poetic
feeling, religious designs, and emotional episodes. It is sensible,
for if we place the _prehistoric_ anywhere before the advent of human
annals, the length in time of his existence is so enormous that it is
inconceivable that he could not have evolved speech, and if speech
then the retinue of feelings and ideas which arise with speech, just
as speech itself is the index of a cerebral cortex that has become
elaborately modified. Let us look at this claim more closely; let us
even affectionately increase, intensify and adorn it.
This story has been written under the influence of a melodramatic
assumption, hostile, it will be said, to probability, and essentially
fanciful, chimerical and fabulous. It cannot be denied that it departs,
perhaps summarily, from the postulates of archæology, as to the life
and demeanor and mental compass, or, more particularly, emotional
resources of that necessary object who must, to relieve anthropology of
its lugubrious alarm over accepting a quicker entrance into the world
of our race, have lived in the great Prehistoric Day of Geology.
In the day which saw the passage into sedimentary records of the last
of the Tertiaries, and carried on its calendars the rise, amplitude and
disappearance of the Ice Age, in that day Man lived, and he lived all
through it, and it was a long day, measured by thousands of years. But
why must it be predicated that man could not have reached in that day
such a range of feelings as are involved in the rise and refinement of
love? It is perfectly true, as it is entirely permissible so to choose,
that this tale of the Woman of the Ice Age, has to do with the advanced
types of prehistoric man, and that thus typified the author has reason
to insist that Lhatto and Ogga are just creations.
The physical perfection of Lhatto and Ogga cannot be wisely disputed.
The _prehistoric_ is usually thought of as a half-emancipated ape,
shaggy with hair, protuberant in eye-brows and mouth, shuffling,
chattering his uncouth experiments in speech or conveying his desires
by grimaces, shrugs, gestures and contortions. But when we realize,
that however explained, evolution does not present us with abundant
intermediate forms in its processes of improvement, but rather
offers us a range of ascending steps, or positions, with the blended
connexions removed, it is quite unlikely that in the evolution of man
there was any hesitancy in passing from the monkey state to the rights
of primogeniture as God’s image.
And the prehistoric must have done so. The requirements of his life,
the need of strength and agility, of ingenuity, of muscular resources
coupled with the fruitfulness of improving forms, as from century to
century reproduction placed him farther and farther in the void and
waste of a world, inarticulate and unbridled, these things made him,
where environment was favorable, sinuous, forceful, tall, harmonious in
physique. And these things, besides putting upon the body the abiding
beauty of form, through allied avenues of change would have placed upon
his face the stamp of beauty in expression. At least with some. And of
these were Lhatto and Ogga. It is not obligatory to be too precise. The
romance bends to no sterile laws of ratiocination and logic. It may,
for an instant, supercede the harshest negations of science. It does so
in this book, but not too carelessly.
For as to environment, it cannot be too sharply noted that it adapts
and modifies its organic contents. The plant, the animal, the Man, are
bent and made according to the emotional plan it permits.
Buckle has shown how the physical features of a land have been
profoundly active in shaping the racial temperaments of the contrasted
populations of India and Greece. In India nature is dominating; the
lofty mountains, the torrential and wide rivers, the tyrannous climate,
form so severe and overpowering a restraint upon human activity
that man becomes dwarfed and insignificant. In Greece, nature, less
oppressively developed, has induced the growth of a radiant and high
and forceful type of man.
Prof. Keane has said of the Hebrew intellect that it is “less varied,
but more intense, a contrast due to the monotonous and almost
changeless environment of yellow sands, blue skies, flora and fauna
limited to a few species, and mainly confined to oases and plains,
reclaimed by irrigation from the desert, everywhere presenting
the same uniform aspect.” Prof. Gregory has also pointed out the
decisive influence of physical environment on the East African races.
He summarizes the aspects of these under the general heading of
“instability,” as the variable rainfall, earth movements, etc. He says
these “keep alive a disposition toward nomad life, alien alike to the
growth of either a fatalism like that of India, or culture like that
of Greece. All the tribes, however, cannot become nomadic. Some of
them are physically and mentally incompetent for the strains of such a
life, and must be content with servitude, or else submit to the ever
recurring raids of the more powerful tribes. The physical conditions of
the country therefore help to divide the people into two classes: one
consists of warlike, conquering nomads; the other of feebler races, who
either eke out a precarious existence on mountain summits, in forest
clearings, and on islands in the vast malarial swamp, or else live as
serfs and helots in subjection to the dominant tribes.”
The intensive influence of nature upon man is deeply hidden in the
response Man makes to his physical surroundings, which response in some
way grows from the attributes of his mind, as that he loves beauty,
that he is stimulated to action by desire, that he feels the subtlety
of contrast and color, and living wonders and natural splendor.
And that we may extract from this truth the last possible quantity of
justification, the story here places Lhatto and Ogga in the midst of
a great diversity and extension of natural features. It assumes that
long before their time man had eventuated. Not a shadow and mask and
caricature, but man in the possession of a mental character that was
responsive to all these wonders about him. It assumes that whereas men
living near or in glaciated and cold countries were still immersed in a
sort of moral hebitude; those men, as Ogga and Lhatto, who by a sudden
juxtaposition of the cold and the hot, were swayed by the contrasted
marvels of the glacier and semi-tropic forest, had felt the excitation
of their sense of beauty and wonder and worship. It assumes for them at
least a psychological stage. It assumes that such a region of contrasts
could have existed along our western coasts, where the great terminal
moraine, the limital outline of the glacier, bends northward. Here was
a southern section, warm and prolific and luxuriant, and here was a
northern section, as described in the story, lingering under the malign
torpor of ice and snow.
It assumes that the period of time chosen, when the Ice was itself
surrendering its strongholds and in stubborn despair relinquishing its
conquests, was not so far distant from the historic or semi-historic
period, not so far distant from this present period of emotional
complexity.
Nor is this last assumption unreasonable. The views as to the distance
of the Ice Age in time from our own geological day have undergone some
marked changes. It is no longer a requisite of geological orthodoxy to
place that period in a chronological perspective diminishing to a point
of time which may be sixty thousand years away.
Sir Henry H. Howorth, Prof. Bonney, Matthieu Williams, Pettersen,
Kjerulf have promulgated their views as to the necessary assumptions
of the Glacialists. Howorth, indeed, says (_Glacial Nightmare and
the Flood_) of the tremendous conception of a continental ice-sheet
sweeping over the Northern Sea from Norway into Great Britain, that
it was “the invention of Croll, who, sitting in his armchair, and
endowed with a brilliant imagination, imposed upon sober science this
extraordinary postulate.”
The recentness,--and we may here quote acceptably from the Rev. H. N.
Hutchinson--“of the Glacial period, is becoming much more generally
recognized, and many geologists failed to see how the striations,
moraines and _roches moutonnées_ could have lasted for anything like
the periods required by the Astronomical theory. One is inclined to
think that delicate striations and polishings would have been destroyed
by atmospheric influences within the space of twenty thousand years.”
Lhatto and Ogga were indeed placed at a great distance from us, but
they are not therefore utterly lost in the shadows or clouds of
antiquity, of myth and fable, or somnambulous reverie, as to be alien
to our hearts and sympathies.
Lhatto and Ogga were the heirs to a vast amount of temperamental
evolution. If they were elevated in feeling, adroit and sensitive in
thought, there had been enough time expended in developing men to
bestow upon them these virtues of the head and heart.
Has not Prof. A. H. Keane, in his authoritative Compendium of Geography
and Travel of South America, said that, “it is beyond reasonable doubt
that man had spread in _early Pleistocene_ times from his eastern
cradle to the New World, probably by two routes: from Europe by the
still persisting land connexion with Greenland and Labrador, and from
Asia by the narrow Behring Sea?”
He says “the inference seems inevitable that South America was already
in _Pleistocene_ time peopled to its utmost (?) limits by two primitive
races, that still persist in the same region”; and if South America _a
fortiori_ North America.
It is here assumed, and with reason, that Lhatto and Ogga and
Lagk talked, and Prof. Cunningham has pointed out that speech has
necessitated structural modifications in the human brain _totally
absent_ from the brain of the Anthropoid Ape, and of the speechless
microcephalic idiot.
These waifs of reconstruction dwelling in the dark backward of time,
from whom, as from others, the motions of the heart and head were
to start the wide ethnic impulses which have moved to and fro, like
luminous and refluent waves, over the sad face of savage life, these
waifs deny no natural assumptions. They lead us only into a new zone of
imaginative work, and we are bidden to weave fabrics of design which
carry on them the pictures of a lost past, when strange creatures, long
extinct, were known to men, themselves extinct, when a strange epoch
was placing its landmarks over a world, upon which the dawn of Mind had
opened, when the _Prehistoric_ somehow extricated from an inheritance
of claws and hair and carnivorous ferocity, felt the mystery of the
earth, looked with question upon the unrolled skies, and began the long
drama of human love and hate.
Let it be so. Let us not be overscrupulous in the dogmas of our
literary faith, nor too inquisitive as to the realism of a resurrected
day. Were we always too cautious, our religion--which furnishes
you, reader, with the balm and fortitude of your existence--would
decrepitate and pass away into smoke and dust.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I.
PRELUDE.
The existence of Man in the geological period that preceded the
one we live in, in his full anthropoid reality, possessing a mind,
self conscious, radiant with powers of creation, of language, of
inquisition, has been established. Man, vested with his essential
attributes and physiologically and psychologically erect, as a peculiar
dissonant and discrete living thing lived and died in the Quarternary
Day of this Earth. The proof is incontestible. The fact is fixed to-day
in the records of scientific assertion and discovery.
Doubtfully realized at first, it has been slowly established through
the heaping up of successive proofs, that in the waning years of that
geological section of time called the Ice Age, man had begun this slow
conquest of the earth.
All geological periods are text book accidents, or professional
conveniences. The diorama of geological change was a continuous
evolution of physics and topography, the rolling ages did not halt at
sectional points, the mechanism of Creation did not stop at intervals
to permit the introduction of a new set of designs and preparations, a
new web of structural fancies and ideas, a new _modus operandi_ and a
new _modus vivendi_.
Neither can we contend for moments of catastrophic intervention and
the sudden release of Omnipotent mandates, sweeping away what had
previously lived, and inundating the regions of life with irruptions of
new forms.
The movement of life beginning within the recesses of Archæan time
went on in its progress from a few centres of creation, until as age
succeeded age, and the first utterances of life began to fill the voids
of ocean and land, the kingdoms of animal being slowly possessed the
earth.
And yet it is also true that the course of organic evolution in the
records of palæontology expresses an Intention accomplishing its
purpose under resistance. It conforms in the phenomena it presents to
the conception of a Mind pursuing a purpose with an accelerated motion
as that purpose was approached. For what is that record of extinct life?
From the first scintillations of life in the Cambrian era to the last
contributions of Zoic energy in the Tertiaries, we see a succession
of ascending stages of life, a series of zoological platforms which
are linked together by a stairway of organisms passing from one to the
next, and separated by a disappearance of forms which never reappear.
Resistance is periodically overcome, but by it the intention of a
Supreme Mind to produce the highest and widest and deepest life is
forced into a display of creative energy.
In the earlier ages--the Palæozoic--the invertebrates appear in greater
numbers, and the lower orders of plants, and only the preparatory
groups of the vertebrates force their prophetic outlines in view, the
invertebrates and plants begin in more generalized forms, and advance
to the more specialized, which are the higher.
As the intention is to embrace higher zoological and structural ideas,
this again awakens resistance, and we see its gradual repulse. These
periodic floodings or gushes of forms of life, as the brachiopods in
the Silurian, the trilobites in the upper Potsdam, and crustacea in
modern seas, the bivalves in the Devonian, the crinoids in the Lower
Carboniferous, the echinoids in the Cretaceous, the cephalopods and
reptiles in the Jurassic, the gastropods and mammals in the Tertiaries,
are the wide escape of a propulsive intention as it overcomes
resistance, which it has undermined or repelled by processes of
development, slowly and unintermittently inaugurated long before.
Premonitions of these outbursts are found before they come, in the
genera and orders of the preceding era. So striking is this that it
has led M. Naudin, a French naturalist, with no theological hobbies
or convictions, to propound, on the evidence, the analogous idea, that
a force of variation or origination of forms has acted rhythmically
or unintermittently, because each movement was the result of the
rupture of an equilibrium, the liberation of a force which till then
was retained in a potential state, by some opposing force or obstacle,
overcoming which, it passes to a new equilibrium, and so on.
Hence stages of dynamic activity and static repose, of origination of
species and types, alternated with periods of stability or fixity.
The time-piece does not run down regularly, but “la force procede par
saccades; et par pulsation d’autant plus energiques que la nature etait
plus près de son commencement.”
Now, it is a remarkable circumstance, strengthening the Doctrine of
Intention, that the vast length of time involved in the progress
of the Palæozoic Ages was employed in establishing the kingdoms of
invertebrate life, and that as at its close, the vertebrate type
was reached (in which resided the potential power of the highest
development) the Supreme Will rose swiftly to its object--Man, his
powers and destiny!
Resistance accumulated against the flow of that intention, and by
obstruction attempted to close its exit into the pregnant channel of
vertebrate forms. This resistance was slowly dissipated through the
prolific avenues of invertebrate life. And the Intending Mind, having
ushered in the vertebrates, thence proceeds with rapidity through its
evolving phases to complete its organic purpose, creating Man, and
pushing in upon the world’s stage the vast psychic consequences of this
supreme result.
And Man is reached--When! How! Where! The figures of men are observed
stealing along the banks of the swollen Somme, in northern France, in
the twilight of an Arctic day. The river, exasperated by the continuous
contributions of cold streams rushing from distant summits that still
retain the remnants of the shrinking burden of the northern ice sheet,
washes the high levels with its turbid waves. Squalid shelters hide the
rude domesticities of these skin-coated and tangle-haired aborigines of
the earth, these mysterious tenants of the unconquered virgin world in
whose crania lies the potency of art and science. Through the long mist
of time they move like spectral groups presented to us, as dumb figures
mechanically manipulated upon a distant stage. They use the motions
of men engaged in play, in fishing, in mending nets, in repelling
enemies, in rude wrestling, in working points of stone, or carving
ivory, in erecting low-roofed houses, in cleaning skins, in felling
trees and engaging in rapid navigation on the calamitous and groaning
stream before them. Women are seen here and there amongst them, and
children; faces stir with laughter, gesticulation accompanies the
dumb motion of their lips. It is an imaginative kinetoscope wherein
sound has vanished, and motion only, articulate throughout with human
adaptibility, remains before our eyes. We are watching the pre-Adamites.
Again we see men moving in scattered bands along the banks of the
Delaware, in New Jersey. The river, widely extended, has invaded the
outlying country in broad, lake-like arms, and only at narrowing
throats between cliffs and resistant ledges does the confined flood
raise a murmur of expostulation as it churns in flying spray against
its gneissoid barriers. Ice, in broad, deep cakes, or low piled up
hummocks, or occasional castellated ice hills carrying stones upon
their surface, appear over the wave-scurried waters, and now and then
from some concealed inlet, a rude dug-out moves cautiously, piloted
by strong arms, crossing between the struggling fragments of ice to
gain, in a series of hesitating advances, the opposite shore. Human
figures disembark, they climb up the bank by a half-worn escalade of
steps rudely dug into the frozen gravel and sand, and disappear in the
black opening of a cave excavated in the cliff faces, and overhung by
the projecting angles of an irregular boulder of rock, half imbedded
and half exposed, in the morainal mass of earth and pebbles, sand and
stone.
The country for leagues about is desolate; in its denuded state it
exposes to the scowling sky its torn areas, furrowed with gulches,
heaped up cairns, plains strewn with loosened stones, while stranded
along a distant coast line and gleaming in titanic splendor, far beyond
on remote terraces, are icebergs. They are tumbling in decay before
a sun more southern than their origin, and contributing a hundred
rivulets, spreading fan-like in lines of silver over the flat declines
about them, meandering to the gray shores, deserted by an ebbing tide.
The rigors of the Ice Age in its extremest form have passed, and here,
in its lingering epoch of control, man, inventive, apt, procreative and
vocal, holding the augury of the civilized ages advancing towards him,
is seen.
Seen amid a waste of which he is a part, but from which by no
conceivable dream of transformation was he evolved. The moment of
his birth on earth was more propitious. Nature cradled him somewhere
beneath other skies, warmer suns and blossoming life. He has survived
the Ice Age. His adaptive nature has met it, as it crept like some
continental torpor over the fair world it supplanted. He has lived
through and out of it. He has kept alive on earth in the awful
desolation of this menace and assassination, his inherited flame of
intelligence, and the primal instincts of man. Before the Ice Age, man
was.
Again in the broad savannahs of the Mississippi Valley man is
discovered, where its waters, confluent with the broad streams flowing
from Missouri and Ohio, spread in sluggish lake-like expanses, stirred
by the river flow into movement, around archipelagoes of low islands.
The waves of this water met the retreating frontier of the ice-cap,
vociferous with the fall of shivered icebergs, and washed on one hand
the lowlands of Appalachia, yet glistening from snow-buried crests, and
the emergent domes of the Rocky Mountains, on the other, yet flecked
with scattered citadels of ice, resisting extermination in valley-bowls
and precipice-lined declivities.
The scene wears a softened aspect. The low islands have retained a
cheerful growth of trees, and amongst them flowering bushes and patches
of keen-colored flowers invite rest and dreams. Glades pass across the
larger domains of insulated land; white beeches shine beneath trees,
whose shadows are thrown in meshes of crossing lines and figures upon
them, and a blazing sun, set in the zenith, administers to the wide
expanse a temperate splendor. And here man again moves across the
foreground of our vision. He is less weirdly strange and aboriginal,
less dumb and impenetrable, and, as he stands alone upon a projecting
tip of sand, with an erect beauty, a touch of decoration in his dress
shows he has outgrown the dogged stupor of animal life. The charms
of emotion have also awakened him; we hear, over the waters, the long
musical halloo of a calling voice, and somewhere rising from the tufted
wilderness answering voices in sweet sopranos return the salutation.
He turns to the meridian sun, and fear clouds his face. Across the
sunlight a darkening blot has arisen. Its whirling and tempestuous
shapes change from second to second--a murmur in the air, made visible
by a thousand increasing ripples on the blinded water, tells of some
approaching storm. The man has dropped upon his knees, the struggling
lines of his face, as he watches the black cloud, deepen into a rigid
expression of terror. Now the waves roll heavily upon the beach, the
light is extinguished, and there descends a rain of dust. It thickens
until the air is impenetrable, the man, prostrate upon his face, is
lost to sight. The verdurous islands disappear, and the descending
_Loess_ dust extinguishes the sun.
It is another phase of human life in the vast backward of time, when
the dust and dirt deposits of the Mississippi, and its tributary
valleys, were accumulating as the ice fled northward. Again Man comes
into our view, the same identity of thought and form, which makes the
hero and the lover, the fundamental consciousness developed, as in you
and me.
We move westward to where the Sierra Nevada Valley Mountains breast
the Sacramento Valley, and nod to the answering summons of the Coast
Range, where the rays that empurple the sawed edges of the Sierras dip
the peaks of the coast in roseate halos.
A sunburst from the gathered edges of a thunderstorm reveals upon a
platform of rock, that sticks out from the mountain side like a lozenge
from a cake, a group of sunburnt men and women. Somewhat higher up
and behind them a circle of low covers made of boughs, woven together
and rudely thatched, indicates their simple homes. The place of their
sojourn has been propitiously, even tastefully chosen. It is a somewhat
scattered woodland, made up of colossal cone-bearing trees, that
seem located at such even distances apart that their contact creates
over the ground beneath them a softened twilight, though the sun at
its zenith pours over their motionless and dependent boughs its full
effulgence. The spot forms a terrace upon the ascending areas of a
great mountain chain whose highest and peaked ridges glisten from
distant snowfields.
Before this group of silent people, far below them in the broad valley
of the present Sacramento, a scene of incomparable interest and beauty
is displayed. They seem absorbed in its contemplation, and to their
eyes perchance its varied features appeal with a force symptomatic
of all the intense delight the poet or the artist would to-day feel
before the return of its exciting and marvellous incidents.
It is a critical moment in the vast drama of orogenic change, which has
built the continent; one act in that procession of acts, which moulded
the surface of the earth into habitable forms, and etched its surface
with the beauty of design.
The broad physiographic trough upon which these mountain denizens are
gazing has become an area of conflict. The volcanic forces of the
earth are even now engaged in making monumental deformations, and here
below them they watch the splendid crisis of an engagement between the
lava-rock welling from the furnaces of the earth’s interior, and the
flashing currents of foam-filled water. Let us trace the picture.
On one side of the broad depression, filled to its farthest marge with
intermittent forest-land, broad backs of alluvial sand, and seamed with
sparkling rivers, rise the myriad summits of a long range of mountains
torn by time and deeply bitten into picturesque contrasts of ravine,
gorge, canyon, buttes and facetted pinnacles of stone. Far over the
wide valley, scarcely seen, but still like a shadow upon the horizon,
is the western limit of this quarternary basin, another line of hills,
less wonderful, younger, and rather monotonously low.
The landscape disappears northward in bare regions that are hidden in
clouds of mist, and far southward, and to the west, spectators just
discern the limits of the Salt Sea. But it is upon the marvels beneath
them that their eyes are fixed, eyes that are yet more quickly arrested
by sensation, by the brusque struggles of natural forces, than by the
alluring distance, shimmering hot beneath the noon-day sun.
Almost immediately beneath their feet, though on the level of the
general valley, is a river bed, which, deserted by its former tenant,
still holds dwindling lakes of water, somewhat connected, like a string
of opal dishes, by filaments of thin and feeble rivulets. At a point
north of them and fixed to their attention upon the mountain side by
a dull murmurous succession of detonations, and splintering gashes in
the rock, a pasty exudation of molten rock slips down in black lines
or faintly rubescent streaks, and, uniting in an invading tongue of
slaggy fusion, has entered the river valley, which is now, at its first
courses, filled from rim to rim with half liquid scoria.
The lithic tide is carried on in a sluggish simulation of water
currents, rolling over in its advance, or spurting in sudden liquid
torrents from swelling concretions; now caught by the asperities of
the channel, and now flowing faster at its unimpeded centre, dragged
out in liguous coils and ropes of lava, and again, down some steeper
declivity, tumbling in a shaggy cataract of braids, tortuous links,
and vermiculate confusion. Beneath the mute group the igneous outburst
has reached a pond, one of the derelict lakes along the river’s
deserted way, and it is the fierce conflict thus begun which holds
them in a rapt posture, like modelled images. As the flowing rock
enters the lake with slow and even step, or spills into it, in flocks
of bubbling slag, from its higher decrepitating surfaces, explosion
follows explosion; the water is ejected in spurts of spray, and falling
backward over the hot and half consolidated magma, flashes into steam.
Rising clouds of vapor conceal the exact limits of the invasion, and
points of contact, but the coarse rumble, the intermittent gushes of
water upward, the far away reverberations of the earth’s opening crust,
and the quivering pulsations that shake the table rock on which our
spectators are standing, announce the new geological chapter in the
world’s making, the last catastrophe before the earth lies quiet and
smiling at the feet of men.
As they turn away in frightened dismay, the sunlight flashes from
their tawny necks, their girdled arms and ankles, and from the bunched
tresses of their dark hair, flashes from gold. They are the gold
ornaments formed in naive and curious ways which these early children
of the earth filched from the stream beds, that soon, before their
gaze, from shore to shore, will be wedged tight with black dikes of
rock, holding down the sealed bonanzas, until in Time’s own time the
life of a later day shall search the primeval sands again, and dress
its beauty too with the same entrancing glitter.
The picture disappears, but we are standing where the Calaveras
Skull, the discovery of human implements beneath the Table Mountains
of California have proven that Man was a witness of these geognostic
changes in the great internal valley of that state.
Shall we pursue the western trail of men’s birth, bending our eyes
upon the mysterious regions of southeastern Asia, where perhaps a too
inquisitive scrutiny will reveal the very beginnings of the human tribe?
We have no reason to go further. We have observed the changing aspect
of man from the edges of the ice sheet in western Europe and eastern
North America, his ameliorated habits in the loess valley of the
Mississippi and Missouri. In the far west where the contemporaneous
climatic conditions were milder, or even conjoined with phases that
were semi-tropic we have found him, at the same time that farther
north, and pervasively to the east, frigid or boreal aspects prevailed.
It is with the story of Love, told of these strange and remote periods
of Time, that we are now concerned, and we place the Woman of the Ice
Age far in the West, somewhere not exposed to the extreme arctic
vicissitudes of a glacial imprisonment, although not quite beyond
the rumors and tokens of its partial survival, nor quite within the
lassitudes of a southern and perennial summer, but at a possible
point of such picturesque contrasts, of such organic fascination, of
such compromises in physical expression, that we may discern in her
the elements of poetry, elements born of her response to Nature’s
vitality and variousness, and with them elements of passion born of
her inheritance of blood instincts, which had formed in her ancestors,
under the same diversity of natural features. In Her, prehistoric
and primal, the type of all women since, we shall find the instinct
of love, evincing its supremacy over her nature, holding her before
the mirror of her own vanity, rousing her to the extremest verge of
her emotional design and activity, nursing her on the breast of its
satisfaction, and filling her life with the currents of its amorous
expectations.
[Illustration]