The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably old; a good
deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher (who invented all out of
his own archiepiscopal head the date commonly assigned for the creation
of the world) would by any means have been ready to admit. It is a
bas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique in origin than
the most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, the
mildly decorous Louvre in Paris, or the eminently respectable British
Museum, which is the glory of our own smoky London in the spectacled
eyes of German professors, all put together. When Assyrian sculptors
carved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib’s
hair, just like a modern coachman’s wig, this work of primæval art was
already hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in
the morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or
Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying,
already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave
in the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess
authentic records of man’s abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten
epochs—an epoch being a good high-sounding word which doesn’t commit
one to any definite chronology in particular—then it is probable that
all known art, from the Egyptian onward, would fall into the tenth of
the epochs thus loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief
would fall into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I should
say it was most likely about 244,000 years before the creation of Adam
according to Ussher.
The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer horn, and
represents two horses, of a very early and heavy type, following
one another, with heads stretched forward, as if sniffing the air
suspiciously in search of enemies. The horses would certainly excite
unfavorable comment at Newmarket. Their “points” are undoubtedly coarse
and clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly; their
manes are bushy and ill-defined; their legs are distinctly feeble and
spindle-shaped; their tails more closely resemble the tail of the
domestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing
the love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless there is
little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old master did, on the
whole, accurately represent the ancestral steed of his own exceedingly
remote period. There were once horses even as is the horse of the
prehistoric Dordognian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun in
hue and striped down the back like modern donkeys, did actually once
roam over the low plains where Paris now stands, and browse off lush
grass and tall water-plants around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not
only do the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, prove
this, but quite recently the Russian traveller Prjevalsky (whose name
is so much easier to spell than to pronounce) has discovered a similar
living horse, which drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the high
table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky’s horse (you see, as I have
only to write the word, without uttering it, I don’t mind how often or
how intrepidly I use it) is so singularly like the clumsy brutes that
sat, or rather stood, for their portraits to my old master that we
can’t do better than begin by describing him _in propria persona_.
The horse family of the present day is divided, like most other
families, into two factions, which may be described for variety’s sake
as those of the true horses and the donkeys, these latter including
also the zebras, quaggas, and various other unfamiliar creatures whose
names, in very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent
visitors at the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have noticed that the
chief broad distinction between these two great groups consists in the
feathering of the tail. The domestic donkey, with his near congeners,
the zebra and co., have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single
bunch or fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a tufted bundle
at the extreme tip. The horse, on the other hand, besides having horny
patches or callosities on both fore and hind legs, while the donkeys
have them on the fore legs only, has a hairy tail, in which the long
hairs are almost equally distributed from top to bottom, thus giving
it its peculiarly bushy and brushy appearance. But Prjevalsky’s horse,
as one would naturally expect from an early intermediate form, stands
halfway in this respect between the two groups, and acts the thankless
part of a family mediator; for it has most of its long tail-hairs
collected in a final flourish, like the donkey, but several of them
spring from the middle distance, as in the genuine Arab, though never
from the very top, thus showing an approach to the true horsey habit
without actually attaining that final pinnacle of equine glory. So
far as one can make out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my
prehistoric Phidias the horse of the quaternary epoch had much the
same caudal peculiarity; his tail was bushy, but only in the lower
half. He was still in the intermediate stage between horse and
donkey, a natural mule still struggling up aspiringly toward perfect
horsehood. In all other matters the two creatures—the cave man’s horse
and Prjevalsky’s—closely agree. Both display large heads, thick necks,
coarse manes, and a general disregard of “points” which would strike
disgust and dismay into the stout breasts of Messrs. Tattersall. In
fact over a T.Y.C. it may be confidently asserted, in the pure Saxon of
the sporting papers, that Prjevalsky’s and the cave man’s lot wouldn’t
be in it. Nevertheless a candid critic would be forced to admit that,
in spite of clumsiness, they both mean staying.
So much for the two sitters; now let us turn to the artist who sketched
them. Who was he, and when did he live? Well, his name, like that of
many other old masters, is quite unknown to us; but what does that
matter so long as his work itself lives and survives? Like the Comtists
he has managed to obtain objective immortality. The work, after all, is
for the most part all we ever have to go upon. “I have my own theory
about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey,” said Lewis Carroll
(of “Alice in Wonderland”) once in Christ Church common room: “it is
that they weren’t really written by Homer, but by another person of
the same name.” There you have the Iliad in a nutshell as regards the
authenticity of great works. All we know about the supposed Homer (if
anything) is that he was the reputed author of the two unapproachable
Greek epics; and all we know directly about my old master, viewed
personally, is that he once carved with a rude flint flake on a
fragment of reindeer horn these two clumsy prehistoric horses. Yet
by putting two and two together we can make, not four, as might be
naturally expected, but a fairly connected history of the old master
himself and what Mr. Herbert Spencer would no doubt playfully term “his
environment.”
The work of art was dug up from under the firm concreted floor of a
cave in the Dordogne. That cave was once inhabited by the nameless
artist himself, his wife, and family. It had been previously tenanted
by various other early families, as well as by bears, who seem to have
lived there in the intervals between the different human occupiers.
Probably the bears ejected the men, and the men in turn ejected the
bears, by the summary process of eating one another up. In any case the
freehold of the cave was at last settled upon our early French artist.
But the date of his occupancy is by no means recent; for since he lived
there the long cold spell known as the Great Ice Age, or Glacial Epoch,
has swept over the whole of Northern Europe, and swept before it the
shivering descendants of my poor prehistoric old master. Now, how long
ago was the Great Ice Age? As a rule, if you ask a geologist for a
definite date, you will find him very chary of giving you a distinct
answer. He knows that chalk is older than the London clay, and the
oolite than the chalk, and the red marl than the oolite; and he knows
also that each of them took a very long time indeed to lay down, but
exactly how long he has no notion. If you say to him, “Is it a million
years since the chalk was deposited?” he will answer, like the old
lady of Prague, whose ideas were excessively vague, “Perhaps,” If you
suggest five millions, he will answer oracularly once more, “Perhaps;”
and if you go on to twenty millions, “Perhaps,” with a broad smile, is
still the only confession of faith that torture will wring out of him.
But in the matter of the Glacial Epoch, a comparatively late and almost
historical event, geologists have broken through their usual reserve
on this chronological question and condescended to give us a numerical
determination. And here is how Dr. Croll gets at it.
Every now and again, geological evidence goes to show us, a long cold
spell occurs in a northern or southern hemisphere. During these long
cold spells the ice cap at the poles increases largely, till it spreads
over a great part of what are now the temperate regions of the globe,
and makes ice a mere drug in the market as far south as Covent Garden
or the Halles at Paris. During the greatest extension of this ice
sheet in the last glacial epoch, in fact, all England except a small
south-western corner (about Torquay and Bournemouth) was completely
covered by one enormous mass of glaciers, as is still the case with
almost the whole of Greenland. The ice sheet, grinding slowly over the
hills and rocks, smoothed and polished and striated their surfaces
in many places till they resembled the _roches moutonnées_ similarly
ground down in our own day by the moving ice rivers of Chamouni and
Grindelwald. Now, since these great glaciations have occurred at
various intervals in the world’s past history, they must depend upon
some frequently recurring cause. Such a cause, therefore, Dr. Croll
began ingeniously to hunt about for.
He found it at last in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit. This
world of ours, though usually steady enough in its movements, is at
times decidedly eccentric. Not that I mean to impute to our old and
exceedingly respectable planet any occasional aberrations of intellect,
or still less of morals (such as might be expected from Mars and
Venus); the word is here to be accepted strictly in its scientific or
Pickwickian sense as implying merely an irregularity of movement, a
slight wobbling out of the established path, a deviation from exact
circularity. Owing to a combination of astronomical revolutions, the
precession of the equinoxes and the motion of the aphelion (I am not
going to explain them here; the names alone will be quite sufficient
for most people; they will take the rest on trust)—owing to the
combination of these profoundly interesting causes, I say, there occur
certain periods in the world’s life when for a very long time together
(10,500 years, to be quite precise) the northern hemisphere is warmer
than the southern, or _vice versa_. Now Dr. Croll has calculated that
about 250,000 years ago this eccentricity of the earth’s orbit was
at its highest, so that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in
either hemisphere alternately then set in; and such cold spells it
was that produced the Great Ice Age in Northern Europe. They went on
till about 80,000 years ago, when they stopped short for the present,
leaving the climate of Britain and the neighboring continent with its
existing inconvenient Laodicean temperature. And, as there are good
reasons for believing that my old master and his contemporaries lived
just before the greatest cold of the Glacial Epoch, and that his
immediate descendants, with the animals on which they feasted, were
driven out of Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the
enormous ice sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that his date was
somewhere about B.C. 248,000. In any case we must at least admit, with
Mr. Andrew Lang, the laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century,
that
He lived in the long long agoes;
’Twas the manner of primitive man.
The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre-Glacial Europe, just
at the moment before the temporary extinction of his race in France by
the coming on of the Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the
character of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in which
species of cold and warm climates are at times quite capriciously
intermingled. We get the reindeer and the mammoth side by side with
the hippopotamus and the hyena; we find the chilly cave bear and the
Norway lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same deposits
with the lion and the lynx, the leopard and the rhinoceros. The fact
is, as Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace has pointed out, we live to-day in a
zoologically impoverished world, from which all the largest, fiercest,
and most remarkable animals have lately been weeded out. And it was
in all probability the coming on of the Ice Age that did the weeding.
Our Zoo can boast no mammoth and no mastodon. The sabre-toothed lion
has gone the way of all flesh; the deinotherium and the colossal
ruminants of the Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks of
Seine. But our old master saw the last of some at least among those
gigantic quadrupeds; it was his hand or that of one among his fellows
that scratched the famous mammoth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine
and carved the figure of the extinct cave bear on the reindeer-horn
ornaments of Laugerie Basse. Probably, therefore, he lived in the
period immediately preceding the Great Ice Age, or else perhaps in one
of the warm interglacial spells with which the long secular winter
of the northern hemisphere was then from time to time agreeably
diversified.
And what did the old master himself look like? Well, painters have
always been fond of reproducing their own lineaments. Have we not the
familiar young Raffael, painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and the
Titian, and the Rubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits, all
flattering and all famous? Even so primitive man has drawn himself many
times over, not indeed on this particular piece of reindeer horn, but
on several other media to be seen elsewhere, in the original or in good
copies. One of the best portraits is that discovered in the old cave
at Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Massénat, where a very early pre-Glacial
man is represented in the act of hunting an aurochs, at which he is
casting a flint-tipped javelin. In this as in all other pictures of the
same epoch I regret to say that the ancient hunter is represented in
the costume of Adam before the fall. Our old master’s studies, in fact,
are all in the nude. Primitive man was evidently unacquainted as yet
with the use of clothing, though primitive woman, while still unclad,
had already learnt how to heighten her natural charms by the simple
addition of a necklace and bracelets. Indeed, though dresses were still
wholly unknown, rouge was even then extremely fashionable among French
ladies, and lumps of the ruddle with which primitive woman made herself
beautiful for ever are now to be discovered in the corner of the cave
where she had her little prehistoric boudoir. To return to our hunter,
however, who for aught we know to the contrary may be our old master
himself in person, he is a rather crouching and semi-erect savage, with
an arched back, recalling somewhat that of the gorilla, a round head,
long neck, pointed beard, and weak, shambling, ill-developed legs. I
fear we must admit that pre-Glacial man cut, on the whole, a very sorry
and awkward figure.
Was he black? That we don’t certainly know, but all analogy would lead
one to answer positively, Yes. White men seem, on the whole, to be a
very recent and novel improvement on the original evolutionary pattern.
At any rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines
of Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so
startling and sensational a picture. Several of the pre-Glacial
sketches show us lank and gawky savages with the body covered with
long scratches, answering exactly to the scratches which represent
the hanging hair of the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still
retained his old original hairy covering. The few skulls and other
fragments of skeletons now preserved to us also indicate that our
old master and his contemporaries much resembled in shape and build
the Australian black fellows, though their foreheads were lower and
more receding, while their front teeth still projected in huge fangs,
faintly recalling the immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite apart
from any theoretical considerations as to our probable descent (or
ascent) from Mr. Darwin’s hypothetical “hairy arboreal quadrumanous
ancestor,” whose existence may or may not be really true, there can be
no doubt that the actual historical remains set before us pre-Glacial
man as evidently approaching in several important respects the higher
monkeys.
It is interesting to note too that while the Men of the Time still
retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many traces of the old
monkey-like progenitor, the horses which our old master has so cleverly
delineated for us on his scrap of horn similarly retained many traces
of the earlier united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has
admirably reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, beginning
with a little creature from the Eocene beds of New Mexico, with five
toes to each hind foot, and ending with the modern horse, whose
hoof is now practically reduced to a single and solid-nailed toe.
Intermediate stages show us an Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox,
with four toes on his front feet and three behind; a Miocene kind as
big as a sheep, with only three toes on the front foot, the two outer
of which are smaller than the big middle one; and finally a Pliocene
form, as big as a donkey, with one stout middle toe, the real hoof,
flanked by two smaller ones, too short by far to reach the ground. In
our own horse these lateral toes have become reduced to what are known
by veterinaries as splint bones, combined with the canon in a single
solidly morticed piece. But in the pre-Glacial horses the splint bones
still generally remained quite distinct, thus pointing back to the
still earlier period when they existed as two separate and independent
side toes in the ancestral quadruped. In a few cave specimens, however,
the splints are found united with the canons in a single piece, while
conversely horses are sometimes, though very rarely, born at the
present day with three-toed feet, exactly resembling those of their
half-forgotten ancestor the Pliocene hipparion.
The reason why we know so much about the horses of the cave period
is, I am bound to admit, simply and solely because the man of the
period ate them. Hippophagy has always been popular in France; it was
practised by pre-Glacial man in the caves of Périgord, and revived
with immense enthusiasm by the gourmets of the Boulevards after the
siege of Paris and the hunger of the Commune. The cave men hunted and
killed the wild horse of their own times, and one of the best of their
remaining works of art represents a naked hunter attacking two horses,
while a huge snake winds itself unperceived behind close to his heel.
In this rough prehistoric sketch one seems to catch some faint antique
foreshadowing of the rude humor of the “Petit Journal pour Rire.” Some
archæologists even believe that the horse was domesticated by the cave
men as a source of food, and argue that the familiarity with its form
shown in the drawings could only have been acquired by people who knew
the animal in its domesticated state; they declare that the cave man
was obviously horsey. But all the indications seem to me to show that
tame animals were quite unknown in the age of the cave men. The mammoth
certainly was never domesticated; yet there is a famous sketch of the
huge beast upon a piece of his own ivory, discovered in the cave of
La Madelaine by Messrs. Lartet and Christy, and engraved a hundred
times in works on archæology, which forms one of the finest existing
relics of pre-Glacial art. In another sketch, less well known, but
not unworthy of admiration, the early artist has given us with a few
rapid but admirable strokes his own reminiscence of the effect produced
upon him by the sudden onslaught of the hairy brute, tusks erect and
mouth wide open, a perfect glimpse of elephantine fury. It forms a
capital example of early impressionism, respectfully recommended to the
favorable attention of Mr. J. M. Whistler.
The reindeer, however, formed the favorite food and favorite model
of the pre-Glacial artists. Perhaps it was a better sitter than the
mammoth; certainly it is much more frequently represented on these
early prehistoric bas-reliefs. The high-water mark of palæolithic art
is undoubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen, in
Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation of a buck grazing,
in which the perspective of the two horns is better managed than a
Chinese artist would manage it at the present day. Another drawing of
two reindeer fighting, scratched on a fragment of schistose rock and
unearthed in one of the caves of Périgord, though far inferior to the
Swiss specimen in spirit and execution, is yet not without real merit.
The perspective, however, displays one marked infantile trait, for
the head and legs of one deer are seen distinctly through the body of
another. Cave bears, fish, musk sheep, foxes, and many other extinct or
existing animals are also found among the archaic sculptures. Probably
all these creatures were used as food; and it is even doubtful whether
the artistic troglodytes were not also confirmed cannibals. To quote
Mr. Andrew Lang once more on primitive man, “he lived in a cave by the
seas; he lived upon oysters and foes.” The oysters are quite undoubted
and the foes may be inferred with considerable certainty.
I have spoken of our old master more than once under this rather
question-begging style and title of primitive man. In reality, however,
the very facts which I have here been detailing serve themselves
to show how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive.
You can’t speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits
of extinct animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense
primordial. Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted
cannibals; nevertheless they could design far better than the modern
Esquimaux or Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilized
being who is now calmly discoursing about their personal peculiarities
in his own study. Between the cave men of the pre-Glacial age and the
hypothetical hairy quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid there must have
intervened innumerable generations of gradually improving intermediate
forms. The old master, when he first makes his bow to us, naked and
not ashamed, in his Swiss or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand
and necklet of bear’s teeth dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, is
nevertheless in all essentials a completely evolved human being, with
a whole past of slowly acquired culture lying dimly and mysteriously
behind him. Already he had invented the bow with its flint-tipped
arrow, the neatly chipped javelin-head, the bone harpoon, the barbed
fish-hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger, and the needle. Already he
had learnt how to decorate his implements with artistic skill, and to
carve the handles of his knives with the figures of animals. I have no
doubt that he even knew how to brew and to distil; and he was probably
acquainted with the noble art of cookery as applied to the persons
of his human fellow creatures. Such a personage cannot reasonably be
called primitive; cannibalism, as somebody has rightly remarked, is the
first step on the road to civilisation.
No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive man we must
go much further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 years,
with which Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously provide
us for pre-Glacial humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably
earlier fire-split flints which the Abbé Bourgeois—undaunted
mortal!—ventured to discover among the Miocene strata of the _calcaire
de Beauce_. Those flints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned
by some naked and still more hairy creature who might fairly claim to
be considered as genuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though
evidently artificial, one distinguished archæologist will not admit
they can be in any way human; he will have it that they were really the
handiwork of the great European anthropoid ape of that early period.
This, however, is nothing more than very delicate hair-splitting; for
what does it matter whether you call the animal that fashioned these
exceedingly rough and fire-marked implements a man-like ape or an
ape-like human being? The fact remains quite unaltered, whichever name
you choose to give to it. When you have got to a monkey who can light
a fire and proceed to manufacture himself a convenient implement, you
may be sure that man, noble man, with all his glorious and admirable
faculties—cannibal or otherwise—is lurking somewhere very close just
round the corner. The more we examine the work of our old master, in
fact, the more does the conviction force itself upon us that he was
very far indeed from being primitive—that we must push back the early
history of our race not for 250,000 winters alone, but perhaps for two
or three million years into the dim past of Tertiary ages.
But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the origin of the race
by a very long interval indeed, it is none the less true that he
is separated from our own time by the intervention of a vast blank
space, the space occupied by the coming on and passing away of the
Glacial Epoch. A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as
the relatively modern age of the mound-builders, whose grassy barrows
still cap the summits of our southern chalk downs. When the great ice
sheet drove away palæolithic man—the man of the caves and the unwrought
flint axes—from Northern Europe, he was still nothing more than a naked
savage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art, indeed, but armed
only with roughly chipped stone implements, and wholly ignorant of
taming animals or of the very rudiments of agriculture. He knew nothing
of the use of metals—_aurum irrepertum spernere fortior_—and he had
not even learnt how to grind and polish his rude stone tomahawks to a
finished edge. He couldn’t make himself a bowl of sun-baked pottery,
and if he had discovered the almost universal art of manufacturing an
intoxicating liquor from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too
great anthropological truth, justly remarks, “man, being reasonable,
_must_ get drunk”) he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy from
the capacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That was the kind of
human being who alone inhabited France and England during the later
pre-Glacial period.
A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the play bills put
it), and then the curtain rises afresh upon neolithic Europe. Man
meanwhile, loitering somewhere behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as
yet imperfectly explored from this point of view), had acquired the
important arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-made
pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice sheet cleared
away he followed the returning summer into Northern Europe, another
man, physically, intellectually, and morally, with all the slow
accumulations of nearly two thousand centuries (how easily one writes
the words! how hard to realise them!) upon his maturer shoulders. Then
comes the age of what older antiquaries used to regard as primitive
antiquity—the age of the English barrows, of the Danish kitchen
middens, of the Swiss lake dwellings. The men who lived in it had
domesticated the dog, the cow, the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable
pig; they had begun to sow small ancestral wheat and undeveloped
barley; they had learnt to weave flax and wear decent clothing; in a
word, they had passed from the savage hunting condition to the stage of
barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists. That is a comparatively modern
period, and yet I suppose we must conclude with Dr. James Geikie
that it isn’t to be measured by mere calculations of ten or twenty
centuries, but of ten or twenty thousand years. The perspective of the
past is opening up rapidly before us; what looked quite close yesterday
is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere in the dim distance. Like our
palæolithic artists, we fail to get the reindeer fairly behind the ox
in the foreground, as we ought to do if we saw the whole scene properly
foreshortened.
On the table where I write there lie two paper weights, preserving
from the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which
this article is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint
hatchet, produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by
dexterous blows, and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It
belongs to the age of the very old master (or possibly even to a
slightly earlier epoch), and it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by
that indefatigable unearther of prehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin
Harrison. That flint, which now serves me in the office of a paper
weight, is far ruder, simpler, and more ineffective than any weapon
or implement at present in use among the lowest savages. Yet with it,
I doubt not, some naked black fellow by the banks of the Thames has
hunted the mammoth among unbroken forests two hundred thousand years
ago and more; with it he has faced the angry cave bear and the original
and only genuine British lion (for everybody knows that the existing
mongrel heraldic beast is nothing better than a bastard modification of
the leopard of the Plantagenets). Nay, I have very little doubt in my
own mind that with it some æsthetic ancestor has brained and cut up for
use his next-door neighbor in the nearest cavern, and then carved upon
his well-picked bones an interesting sketch of the entire performance.
The Du Mauriers of that remote age, in fact, habitually drew their
society pictures upon the personal remains of the mammoth or the man
whom they wished to caricature in deathless bone-cuts. The other paper
weight is a polished neolithic tomahawk, belonging to the period of the
mound-builders, who succeeded the Glacial Epoch, and it measures the
distance between the two levels of civilisation with great accuracy. It
is the military weapon of a trained barbaric warrior as opposed to the
universal implement and utensil of a rude, solitary, savage hunter. Yet
how curious it is that even in the midst of this “so-called nineteenth
century,” which perpetually proclaims itself an age of progress, men
should still prefer to believe themselves inferior to their original
ancestors, instead of being superior to them! The idea that man has
risen is considered base, degrading, and positively wicked; the idea
that he has fallen is considered to be immensely inspiring, ennobling,
and beautiful. For myself, I have somehow always preferred the boast of
the Homeric Glaucus that we indeed maintain ourselves to be much better
men that ever were our fathers.—_Cornhill Magazine._