From what has thus been set forth, some general inferences of a comprehensive character are suggested. It is scarcely open to doubt that at a very early stage in the development of primitive mechanical art, the exceptional aptitude of skilled workmen was recognised and brought into use for the general benefit. Co-operation and some division of labour in the industrial arts, necessary to meet the universal demand for tools and weapons, appear also to have been recognised from a very remote period in the social life of the race. There were the quarriers for the flint, the obsidian, the shale, the pipestones, the favourite minerals, and the close-grained igneous rocks, adapted for the variety of implements in general use. There were also the traders by whom the raw material was transported to regions where it could only be procured by barter; as appears to be demonstrated by the repeated discovery, not only of flint and stone implements, alike in stray examples, and in well-furnished caches; but also of work-places, remote from any flint-producing formation, strewn with the chips, flakes, and imperfect or unfinished implements of the tool-makers. It thus becomes obvious that the men of the earliest Stone age transported suitable material for their simplearts from many remote localities, and purchased the services of the skilled workman with the produce of the chase, or whatever other equivalent they could offer in exchange. The further archæological search is extended, the evidence of social co-operation and systematised industry among the men of the Palæolithic era, as well as among those of later periods prior to the dawn of metallurgic skill, becomes more apparent. Nor is it less interesting to note that there was no more equality among the men of those primitive ages, than in later civilised stages of social progress. Diversities in capacity and consequent moral force asserted themselves in the skilled handicraftsmen of the Palæolithic dawn, much as they do in the most artificial states of modern society. As a natural concomitant to this, and an invaluable element of co-operation, the prized flint flakes appear to have furnished a primitive medium of exchange, more generally available as a currency of recognised value than any other substitute for coined money. The principles on which the wealth of nations and the whole social fabric of human society depend, were thus already in operation ages before the merchants of Tyre, or the traders of Massala, had learned to turn to account the mineral resources of the Cassiterides; or that vaguer and still more remote era before the ancient Atlantis had vanished from the ken of the civilised dwellers around the Mediterranean Sea.
[10]Ancient Stone Implements, p. 14.
[10]
Ancient Stone Implements, p. 14.
[11]Hoare’sSouth Wilts, p. 195.
[11]
Hoare’sSouth Wilts, p. 195.
[12]Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, viii. 137.
[12]
Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, viii. 137.
[13]Ibid.N.S. vii. 356.
[13]
Ibid.N.S. vii. 356.
[14]Ibid.N.S. xii. 436.
[14]
Ibid.N.S. xii. 436.
[15]Archæologia, xiii. 204.
[15]
Archæologia, xiii. 204.
[16]Archæologia, xiii. 224, 225; pl. xiv. xv.
[16]
Archæologia, xiii. 224, 225; pl. xiv. xv.
[17]Athenæum, Dec. 18, 1886.
[17]
Athenæum, Dec. 18, 1886.
[18]U.S. Geological Survey, 1872, p. 652.
[18]
U.S. Geological Survey, 1872, p. 652.
[19]Primitive Industry, Figs. 241, 254, 292, 295, etc.
[19]
Primitive Industry, Figs. 241, 254, 292, 295, etc.
[20]Evans’Stone Implements, Fig. 94.
[20]
Evans’Stone Implements, Fig. 94.
[21]Archæologia, xlii. 72.
[21]
Archæologia, xlii. 72.
[22]Ibid.p. 68.
[22]
Ibid.p. 68.
[23]Ibid.p. 68.
[23]
Ibid.p. 68.
[24]British Barrows, p. 166.
[24]
British Barrows, p. 166.
[25]Palæolithic Man in Eastern and Central North America, pp. 152, 153.
[25]
Palæolithic Man in Eastern and Central North America, pp. 152, 153.
[26]VidePrehistoric Man, 3rd ed. ii. 132.
[26]
VidePrehistoric Man, 3rd ed. ii. 132.
[27]Smithsonian Reports, Part I. 1885, p. 880.
[27]
Smithsonian Reports, Part I. 1885, p. 880.
[28]Report of the Peabody Museum, ii. 262.
[28]
Report of the Peabody Museum, ii. 262.
[29]Prehistoric Man, 3d ed. vol. ii. p. 223.
[29]
Prehistoric Man, 3d ed. vol. ii. p. 223.
[30]Tribes of the Extreme North-West, pp. 81, 82.
[30]
Tribes of the Extreme North-West, pp. 81, 82.
[31]Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 158.
[31]
Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 158.
[32]Abbott’sPrimitive Industry, p. 33.
[32]
Abbott’sPrimitive Industry, p. 33.
[33]Smithsonian Report, 1872.
[33]
Smithsonian Report, 1872.
[34]Ibid.1868, p. 402.
[34]
Ibid.1868, p. 402.
[35]Smithsonian Report, 1877, p. 293.
[35]
Smithsonian Report, 1877, p. 293.
[36]Smithsonian Report, 1885, Part I. p. 873.
[36]
Smithsonian Report, 1885, Part I. p. 873.
[37]Smithsonian Report, 1885, Part I. p. 873.
[37]
Smithsonian Report, 1885, Part I. p. 873.
[38]Smithsonian Report, Part I. 1885, p. 874.
[38]
Smithsonian Report, Part I. 1885, p. 874.
[39]Science, iii. 342.
[39]
Science, iii. 342.
IVPRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN
Thedepartment of American ethnology, notwithstanding its many indefatigable workers, is still to a large extent a virgin soil. The western hemisphere is rich in materials for ethnical study, but there is urgent demand for diligent labourers to rescue them for future use. On all hands we see ancient nations passing away. The prairie tribes are vanishing with the buffalo; the Flathead Indians of diverse types and stranger tongues; and, more interesting than either, the ingenious Haidahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands: are all diminishing in numbers, giving up their distinctive customs, and confusing their mythic and legendary traditions with foreign admixtures; while some are destined to speedy extinction.
When, in 1846, the artist, Paul Kane, entered on his exploratory travels among the tribes of the North-West, the Flathead Indians of Oregon and British Columbia embraced populous settlements of Cowlitz, Chinook, Newatee, and other nations. Now the researches of the American Bureau of Ethnology are stimulated by the disclosure that of the Clatsop and Chinook tribes there are only three survivors who speak the former language, and only one with a knowledge of the latter. Of the Klaskanes, in like manner, only one is known to survive; and from a like solitary representative of the Tuteloes the language of a vanished race has recently been rescued. With all the native tribes who have been brought into near relations with the intruding white race their languages and customs are undergoing important modifications. Other elements of confusion and erasure are also at work. Alarge influx of Chinese complicates the ethnological problem; and it cannot be wisely left to the efforts of individuals, carried on without concert, and on no comprehensive or systematic plan, to rescue for future study the invaluable materials of American ethnology. To the native languages especially the inquirer into some of the curious problems involved in the peopling of this continent must look for a key to the mystery.
The intelligent inquirer cannot fail to be rewarded for any time he may devote to a consideration of the condition and relative status of the aborigines, north of the Gulf of Mexico, not only as studied from existing native tribes, or from those known since the discovery of America in 1492, but in so far as we can determine their earlier condition with the aid of archæological evidence. The student of the history of the North American nations cannot indeed altogether overlook the undoubted fact that Columbus was not the first of European voyagers within the Christian era to enter on the colonisation of the western hemisphere; whatever value he may attach to the legends and traditions of more ancient explorers.
The part played by the Scandinavian stock in European history proves their abundant aptitude to have been the organisers of a Northland of their own in the New World. The Northmen lingered behind, in their first home in the Scandinavian peninsula, while Goth, Longobard, Vandal, Suevi, Frank, Burgundian, and other tribes from the Baltic first wasted and then revolutionised the Roman world. But they were nursing a vigorous youth, which ere long, as pagan Dane, and then as Norman, stamped a new character on mediæval Europe. Their presence in the New World rests on indubitable evidence; but the very definiteness of its character in their inhospitable northern retreat helps to destroy all faith in any mere conjectural fancies relative to their settlement on points along the Atlantic seaboard which they are supposed to have visited.
Runic inscriptions on the Canadian and New England seaboard would, if genuine, give an entirely novel aspect to our study of Pre-Columbian American history, with all its possibilities of older intercourse with the eastern hemisphere. But it is the same whether we seek for traces of colonisation in the tenth or the fifteenth century, in so far as all native historyis concerned. They equally little suffice to furnish evidence of relationship, in blood, language, arts or customs, between any people of the eastern hemisphere and the native American races. We are indeed invited from time to time to review indications suggestive of an Asiatic or other old-world source for the American aborigines; and in nearly every system of ethnical classification they are, with good reason, ranked as Mongolidæ; but if their pedigree is derived from an Asiatic stock, the evidence has yet to be marshalled which shall place on any well-established basis the proofs of direct ethnical affinity between them and races of the eastern hemisphere. The ethnological problem is, here as elsewhere, beset by many obscuring elements. Language, at best, yields only remote analogies, and thus far American archæology, though studied with unflagging zeal, has been able to render very partial aid.
It cannot admit of question that the compass of American archæology,—including that of the semi-civilised and lettered races of Central and Southern America,—is greatly circumscribed in comparison with that of Europe. But the simplicity which results from this has some compensating elements in its direct adaptation to the study of man, as he appears on the continent unaffected by the artificialities of a forced civilisation, and with so little that can lend countenance to any theory of degeneracy from a higher condition of life. In the modern alliance between archæology and geology, and the novel views which have resulted as to the antiquity of man, the characteristic disclosures of primitive art, alike among ancient and modern races, have given a significance to familiar phases of savage life undreamt of till very recently. The student who has by such means formed a definite conception of primeval art, and realised some idea of the condition and acquirements of the savage of Europe’s Post-Pliocene era, turns with renewed interest to living races seemingly perpetuating in arts and habits of our own day what gave character to the social life of the prehistoric dawn. This phase of primitive art can still be studied on more than one continent, and in many an island of the Pacific and the Indian ocean; but nowhere is the apparent reproduction of such initial phases of the history of our race presented in so comprehensive an aspect as on the American continent. There man is to be found in no degreesuperior in arts or habits to the Australian savage; while evidence of ingenious skill and of considerable artistic taste occur among nomads exposed to the extremest privations of an Arctic climate; and with no more knowledge of metallurgy than is implied in occasionally turning to account the malleable native copper, by hammering it into the desired shape; or, in their intercourse with Arctic voyagers and Hudson’s Bay trappers, acquiring by barter some few implements and weapons of European manufacture. The arts of the patient Eskimo, exercised under the stimulus of their constant struggle for existence amid all the hardships of a polar climate, have, indeed, not only suggested comparisons between them and the artistic cave-dwellers of Central Europe in its prehistoric dawn; but have been assumed to prove an ethnical affinity, and direct descent, altogether startling when we fully realise the remote antiquity thereby assigned to those Arctic nomads, and the unchanging condition ascribed to them through all the intervening ages of geographical and social revolution.
But whatever may be the value ultimately assigned to the Eskimo pedigree, a like phenomenon of unprogressive humanity, perpetuating through countless generations the same rudimentary arts, everywhere presents itself, and seems to me to constitute the really remarkable feature in North American ethnology and archæology. We find, not only in Canada but throughout the whole region northward from the Gulf of Mexico, diversified illustrations of savage life; but nearly all of them unaffected by traces of contact with earlier civilisation. From the northern frontiers of Canada the explorer may travel through widely diversified regions till he reach the cañons of Mexico and the ruined cities of Central America; and all that he finds of race and art, of language or native tradition, is in contrast to the diversities of the European record of manifold successions of races and of arts. There within the Arctic circle the Eskimo constructs his lodge of snow, and successfully maintains the battle for life under conditions which determine to a large extent the character of his ingenious arts and manufacture. Immediately to the south are found the nomad tribes of forest and prairie, with their téepees of buffalo-skin, or their birch-bark wigwams and canoes: wandering hunter tribes of the great North-West; type of the red Indian of the whole northerncontinent. The Ohio and Mississippi valleys abound with earthworks and other remains of the vanished race of the Mound-Builders: of old the dwellers there in fortified towns, agriculturalists, ingenious potters, devoted to the use of tobacco, expending laborious art on their sculptured pipes, and with some exceptionally curious skill in practical geometry; yet, they too, ignorant of almost the very rudiments of metallurgy, and only in the first stage of the organised life of a settled community. The modifying influences of circumstances must be recognised in the migratory or settled habits of different tribes. The Eskimo are of necessity hunters and fishers, yet they are not, strictly speaking, nomads. In summer they live in tents, constantly moving from place to place, as the exigencies of the reindeer-hunting, seal-hunting, or fishing impel them. But they generally winter in the same place for successive generations, and manifest as strong an attachment to their native home as the dwellers in more favoured lands. Their dwelling-houses accommodate from three or four to ten families; and the same tendency to gather in communities under one roof is worthy of notice wherever other wandering tribes settle even temporarily. A drawing, made by me in 1866, of a birch-bark dwelling which stood among a group of ordinary wigwams on the banks of the Kaministiquia, shows a lodge of sufficiently large dimensions to accommodate several families of a band of Chippewas, who had come from the far West to trade their furs with the Hudson’s Bay factor there. The Haidahs, the Chinooks, the Nootkas, the Columbian and other Indian tribes to the west of the Rocky Mountains, all use temporary tents or huts in their frequent summer wanderings; but their permanent dwellings are huge structures sufficient to accommodate many families, and sometimes the whole tribe. They are constructed of logs or split planks, and in some cases, as among the Haidahs of Queen Charlotte Islands, they are elaborately decorated with carving and painting.
The gregarious habits thus manifested by many wandering tribes, whenever circumstances admit of their settling down in a permanent home, may be due mainly to the economy of labour which experience has taught them in the construction of one common dwelling, instead of the multiplication of single huts or lodges. But far to the southward are the ancient pueblos,the casas grandes, the cliff dwellings, of a race not yet extinct: timid, unaggressive, living wholly on the defensive, gathered in large communities like ants or bees; industrious, frugal, and manifesting ingenious skill in their pottery and other useful arts; but, they too, in no greatly advanced stage. Still farther to the south we come at length to the seats of an undoubted native American civilisation. The comparative isolation of Central America, and the character of its climate and productions, all favoured a more settled life; with, as genuine results, its architecture, sculpture, metallurgy, hieroglyphics, writing, and all else that gives so novel a character to the memorials of the Central American nations. But great as is their contrast with the wild tribes of the continent, the highest phases of native civilisation will not compare with the arts of Egypt, in centuries before Cadmus taught letters to the rude shepherds of Attica, or the wolf still suckled her cubs on the Palatine hill.
If this is a correct reading of American archæology, its bearings are significant in reference to the whole history of American man. In Europe the student of primitive antiquity is habitually required to discriminate between products of ingenious skill belonging to periods and races widely separated alike by time and by essentially diverse stages of progress in art. For not only do its Palæolithic and Neolithic periods long precede the oldest written chronicles; but even its Aryan colonisation lies beyond any record of historic beginnings. The civilisation which had already grown up around the Mediterranean Sea while the classic nations were in their infancy, extended its influences not only to what was strictly regarded as transalpine Europe, but beyond the English Channel and the Baltic, centuries before the Rhine and Danube formed the boundary of the Roman world. Voltaire, when treating of the morals and spirit of nations, says: “It is not in the nature of man to desire that which he does not know.” But it is certainly in his nature, at any rate, to desire much that he does not possess; and the cravings of the rudest outlying tribes of ancient Europe must have been stimulated by many desires of which those of the New World were unconscious till the advent of Europeans in the fifteenth century brought them into contact with a long-matured civilisation.
The archæology of the American continent is, in this respect, at least, simple. Its student is nowhere exposed to misleading or obscuring elements such as baffle the European explorer from the intermingling of relics of widely diverse eras, or even such a succession of arts of the most dissimilar character as Dr. Schliemann found on the site of the classic Ilium. The history of America cannot repeat that of Europe. Its great river-valleys and vast prairies present a totally different condition of things from that in which the distinctive arts, languages, and nationalities of Europe have been matured. The physical geography of the latter with its great central Alpine chain, its highlands, its dividing seas, its peninsulas, and islands, has necessarily fostered isolation; and so has tended to develop the peculiarities of national character, as well as to protect incipient civilisation and immature arts from the constant erasures of barbarism. The steppes of Asia in older centuries proved the nurseries of hordes of rude warriors, powerful only for spoliation. The evidence of the isolation of the nations of Europe in early centuries is unmistakable. Scarcely any feature in the history of the ancient world is more strange to us now than the absence of all direct intercourse between countries separated only by the Alps, or even by the Danube or the Rhine. “The geography of Greek experience, as exhibited by Homer, is limited, speaking generally, to the Ægean and its coasts, with the Propontis as its limit in the north-east; with Crete for a southern boundary; and with the addition of the western coast of the peninsula and its islands as far northwards as the Leucadian rock. The key to the great contrast between the outer geography and the facts of nature lies in the belief of Homer that a great sea occupied the space where we know the heart of the European continent to lie.”[40]To the early Romans the Celtic nations were known only as warlike nomads whose incursions from beyond the Alpine frontier of their little world were perpetuated in the half-legendary tales of their own national childhood. To the Greek even of the days of Herodotus no more was known of the Gauls or Germans than the rumours brought by seamen and traders whose farthest voyage was to the mouth of the Rhone.
It is, indeed, difficult for us now, amid the intimate relations of the modern world, and the interchange of products of the remotest east and west, to realise a condition of things when the region beyond the Alps was a mystery to the Greek historian, and the very existence of the river Rhine was questioned; or when, four centuries later, the nations around the Baltic, which were before long to supplant the masters of the Roman world, were so entirely unknown to them that, as Dr. Arnold remarks, in one of his letters: “The Roman colonies along the Rhine and the Danube looked out on the country beyond those rivers as we look up at the stars, and actually see with our own eyes a world of which we know nothing.” Yet such ignorance was not incompatible with indirect intercourse; and was so far from excluding the barbarians beyond the Alps or the Baltic from all the fruits of the civilisation which grew up around the Mediterranean Sea, that the elements of the oldest runic epigraphy of the Goths and Scandinavians are traced to that source; and the stamp of Hellenic influence is apparent in the later runic writing. Moreover the elucidation of European archæology has owed its chief impediment to the difficulty of discriminating between arts of diverse eras and races of northern Europe, intermingled with those of its Neolithic and Bronze periods; or of separating them from the true products of Celtic and classic workmanship.
It is altogether different with American archæology. Were there any traces there of Celtic, Roman, or mediæval European art, the whole tendency of the American mind would be to give even an exaggerated value to their influence. Superficial students of the ruins of Mexico and Central America have misinterpreted characteristics pertaining to what may not inaptly be designated instincts common to the human mind in its first efforts at visible expression of its ideas; and have recognised in them fancied analogies with ancient Egyptian art, or with the mythology and astronomical science of the East. Had, indeed, the more advanced nations of the New World borrowed the arts of Egypt, India, or Greece, the great river highways and the vast unbroken levels of the northern continent presented abundant facilities for their diffusion, with no greater aid than the birch-bark canoe of the northern savage. The copper of Lake Superior was familiar to nationson the banks of the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the Delaware. Nor was the influence of southern civilisation wholly inoperative. Reflex traces of the prolific fancy of the Peruvian potter may be detected in the rude ware of the mounds of Georgia and Tennessee; and the conventional art of Yucatan reappears in the ornamentation of the lodges of the Haidahs of Queen Charlotte’s Islands, and in the wood and ivory carvings of the Tawatin and other tribes of British Columbia. Already, moreover, the elaborate native devices which give such distinctive character to the ivory and claystone carvings of the Chimpseyan and Clalam Indians, have been largely superseded by reproductions of European ornamentation, or literal representations of houses, shipping, horses, fire-arms, and other objects brought under the notice of the native artist in his intercourse with white men. We are justified, therefore, in assuming that no long-matured civilisation could have existed in any part of the American continent without leaving, not only abundant evidence of its presence within its own area, but also many traces of its influence far beyond. Yet it cannot be said of the vanished races of the North American continent that they died and made no sign. Their memorials are abundant, and some of their earthworks and burial mounds are on a gigantic scale. But they perpetuate no evidence of a native civilisation of elder times bearing the slightest analogy to that of Europe through all its historic centuries. The western hemisphere stands a world apart, with languages and customs essentially its own; and with man and his arts embraced within greatly narrower limits of development than in any other quarter of the globe, if we except Australia. The evolutionist may, indeed, be tempted by the absence not only of the anthropoid apes, but by all but the lowest families of thePrimates, to regard man as a recent intruder on the American continent. But in this, as in the archæologist’s deductions, the term “recent” is a relative one. To whatever source American man may be referred, his relations to the old-world races are sufficiently remote to preclude any theory of geographical distribution within the historic period.
It is not, therefore, adequate time that is wanting for the growth of a native American civilisation. The only satisfactory indication of the affiliation of the American races to thoseof Asia or Europe, or of Africa, must be sought for in their languages. But any trace of this kind, thus far observed, is at best obscure and remote. The resemblance in physical traits points to affinity with the Asiatic Mongol, and the agglutinate characteristics common to many languages of the continent, otherwise essentially dissimilar, is in harmony with this. But Asiatic affinities are only traceable remotely, not demonstrable on any definite line of descent; and all the evidence that language supplies points to a greatly prolonged period of isolation. The number of languages spoken throughout the whole of North and South America has been estimated to considerably exceed twelve hundred; and on the northern continent alone, more than five hundred distinct languages are spoken, which admit of classification among seventy-five ethnical groups, each with essential linguistic distinctions, pointing to its own parent stock. Some of those languages are merely well-marked dialects, with fully developed vocabularies. Others have more recently acquired a dialectic character in the breaking up and scattering of dismembered tribes, and present a very limited range of vocabulary, suited to the intellectual requirements of a small tribe, or band of nomads. The prevailing condition of life throughout the whole North American continent was peculiarly favourable to the multiplication of such dialects, and their growth into new languages, owing to the constant dismemberment of tribes, and the frequent adoption into their numbers of the refugees from other fugitive broken tribes, leading to an intermingling of vocabularies and fresh modifications of speech.
But, by whatever means we seek to account for the great diversity of speech among the communities of the New World, it is manifest that language furnishes no evidence of recent intrusion, or of contact for many generations with Asiatic or other races. On any theory of origin either of race or language, a greatly prolonged period is indispensable to account for the actual condition of things which presents such a tempting field for the study of the ethnologist. Among the various races brought under notice, the Huron-Iroquois of Canada and the neighbouring states most fitly represent the North American race east of the Rocky Mountains. Their language, subdivided into many dialects, furnishes indicationsof migrations throughout the greater portion of that area eastward between the Mississippi and the Atlantic seaboard, and its affinities have been sought for beyond the American continent. Mr. Horatio Hale, an experienced philologist familiar with the races and languages most nearly akin to those of the New World, in hisIndian Migrations, as evidenced by Language, after remarking that there is nothing in the languages of the American Indians to favour the conjecture of an origin from Eastern Asia, thus proceeds: “But in Western Europe one community is known to exist, speaking a language which in its general structure manifests a near likeness to the Indian tongues. Alone of all the races of the old continent the Basques or Euskarians, of northern Spain and south-western France, have a speech of that highly complex and polysynthetic character which distinguishes the American languages.” But to this he has to add the statement that “there is not, indeed, any such positive similarity in words or grammar as would prove a direct affiliation. The likeness is merely in the general cast and mould of speech, but this likeness is so marked as to have awakened much attention.”[41]
Assuming the affinity thus based on a general likeness in cast and mould of speech to be well founded, there need be no surprise at the lack of any positive similarity in words or grammar; for, used only as a test of the intervening time since Basque and Red Indian parted, it points to representatives of a prehistoric race that occupied Europe before the advent of Celtic or other Aryan pioneer, long prior to the historic dawn. And if the intervening centuries between that undetermined date and the close of the fifteenth century, when intercourse was once more renewed between the Iberian peninsula and the transatlantic continent, sufficed for the evolution of all the classic, mediæval, and renaissance phases of civilisation in Europe, what was man doing through all those centuries in this New World? A period of time would appear to have transpired ample enough for the development of a native civilisation; but neither the languages nor the arts of the Indian nations found in occupation of the northern continent reveal traces of it; nor does archæology disclose to us evidence of civilised precursors. Whatever their origin may have been,the Red Indian appears to have remained for unnumbered centuries excluded by ocean barriers from all influence of the historic races. But on this very account an inquiry into the history of the nations of the American continent, in so far as this may be recoverable from archæological or other evidence, may simplify important ethnical problems, and contribute results of some value in reference to the condition and progress of primeval man elsewhere.
In Europe man can be studied only as he has been moulded by a thousand external influences, and by the intermixture of many dissimilar races. The most recent terms of ethnological classification, the Xanthocroi and Melanochroi, are based on the assumed interblending of widely dissimilar races in times long anterior to any definite chronology. There was a time, as is assumed, when the sparsely peopled areas of Europe were occupied by a population still imperfectly represented by the Finns, the Lapps, and the Basques. Those are supposed to be surviving fragments of a once homogeneous population in prehistoric centuries. On this the great Aryan migration intruded in successive waves of Celtic, Slavic, Hellenic and Teutonic invaders, not without considerable intermixture of blood. Such is the great ethnical revolution by which it is assumed that Europe was recolonised from the same source from whence India and Persia derived their ancient civilised and lettered races. The Finnic hypothesis, and the once favoured idea of an Asiatic cradleland for the whole so-called Aryan races, have been greatly modified by later research. Community of language is no longer accepted as necessarily involving a common ethnic origin. But the results in no way affect the general conclusion as to the displacement of a succession of barbarous races by the historic races of Europe long before the Christian era.
The year 1492 marks the beginning of an analogous ethnical revolution by which the Aryan, or Indo-European stock intruded, in ever-increasing numbers, on the aboriginal populations of the New World. The disparity between the first Celtic or other Aryan immigrants into Europe and the aborigines whom they encountered there was probably less than that which separated the first American colonists from the Red Indian savages whom they displaced. In both casesit was the meeting of cultured races with rude nomads whom they were prone to regard with an aversion or contempt very different from the repellent elements between conquering and subject nations in near equality to each other. The disparity, for example, between the native Briton and the intruding Saxon, or between the later Anglo-Saxon and the intruding Dane or Northman, was sufficiently slight to admit of ready intermixture, ultimately, in spite of their bitter antagonism. Nor was even the civilised Roman separated by any such gulf from the Gaul or German who bowed to the Imperial yoke, and exchanged their independence for Roman citizenship. But other elements have also to be kept in view. The pioneers of emigration are not, as a rule, the most cultured members of the intruding race; while the disparity in the relative numbers of the sexes inevitably resulting from the conditions under which any extensive migration takes place forms an effective counterpoise to very wide ethnical differences. In every case of extensive immigration, with the excess of males and chiefly of hardy young adventurers, the same result is inevitable. On the American continent it has already produced a numerous race of half-breeds, descendants of white and Indian parentage, apart from that other and not less interesting “coloured race,” now numbering upwards of six millions in the United States alone, the descendants of European and African parentage. In the older provinces of Canada, the remnants of the aboriginal Indian tribes have been gathered on suitable reserves; and on many of these, so far are they from hastening to extinction, that during the last quarter of a century the returns of the Indian Department show a steady numerical increase. In the United States, under less favourable circumstances, similar results are beginning to be recognised. In a report on “Indian Civilisation and Education,” dated Washington, November 24, 1877, it is set forth as more and more tending to assume the aspect of an established fact, “that the Indians, instead of being doomed to extinction within a limited period, are, as a rule, not decreasing in numbers; and are, in all probability, destined to form a permanent factor; an enduring element of our population.” Wherever the aborigines have been gathered together upon suitable reserves, and trained toindustrious habits, as among the Six Nation Indians, settled on the Grand river, in the Province of Ontario; or where they have mingled on terms of equality with the white settlers, as within the old Hudson’s Bay territory on the Red river, they have after a time showed indications of endurance. It is not a mere intermingling of white and Indian settlers, but the increase of the community by the growth of a half-breed population; and when this takes place under favourable circumstances, as was notably the case so long as the hunter tribes of the prairies and the trappers of the Hudson’s Bay Company shared the great North-West as a common hunting-ground, the results are altogether favourable to the endurance of the mixed race. On a nearly similar footing we may conceive of the admixture of the earliest Aryans with the Allophylians of Europe, resulting in some of the most noticeable types of modern European nationalities. The growth in the territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company of a numerous half-breed population, assuming the status of farming hunters, distinct alike from the Indians and the Whites, is a fact of singular interest to the ethnologist. It has been the result of alliances, chiefly with Indian Cree women, by the fur trappers of the region. But these included two distinct elements: the one a Scottish immigration, chiefly from the Orkney Islands; the other that of the French Canadians, who long preceded the English as hunters and trappers in the North-West. The contrasting Scottish and French paternity reveals itself in the hybrid offspring; but in both cases the half-breeds are a large and robust race, with greater powers of endurance than the pure-blood Indian. They have been described to me by more than one trustworthy observer as “superior in every respect, both mentally and physically,” and this is confirmed by my own experience. The same opinion has been expressed by nearly all who have paid special attention to the hybrid races of the New World. D’Orbigny, when referring to the general result of this intermingling of races says: “Among the nations in America the product is always superior to the two types that are mixed.” Henry, a traveller of the last century, who spent six years among the North American Indians, notes the confirmatory assurance given to him by a Cristineaux chief, that “the children borneby their women to Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.” Finally, of the hardy race of the Arctic circle Dr. Kane says: “The half-breeds of the coast rival the Esquimaux in their powers of endurance.” There is also a fine race in Greenland, half Danes; and Dr. Rae informs me that numerous half-breed Eskimo are to be met with on the Labrador coast. They are taller and more hardy than the pure-blooded Eskimo; so that he always gave the preference to them as his guides. The Danish half-breeds are described by Dr. Henry Rink, in hisTales and Traditions of the Eskimo, as dating back to the earliest times of the colonisation of Greenland. The mixed marriages, he says, “have generally been rich in offspring. The children for the most part grow up as complete Greenlanders”; but the distinction between them and the native Eskimo is unmistakable, although individuals of the hybrid offspring represent the mixture of European and native blood in almost every possible proportion.
From the conquest of Mexico in 1520, and of Peru in 1534, this admixture of races of the Old and the New World has been going on in varying ratio according to the relative circumstances under which they meet. In Mexico and in the more civilised portions of South America the half-breeds are estimated to constitute fully one-fifth of the whole population, while the so-called “coloured people,” the descendants of European and African parentage, now number not less than fifteen millions throughout the mainland and the Islands of North and South America.
Throughout the northern, southern, and western states of America, on the Pacific slope, and in Canada, the growth of a mixed race of White and Indian blood has everywhere taken place in the first period of settlement, when the frontier backwoodsman and the hunter were brought into contact with the native tribes. Along the borders of every frontier state a nearly exclusive male population is compelled to accept the services of the Indian women in any attempt at domestic life. The children grow up to share in perfect equality the rude life of their fathers. The new generation presents a mixed race of hardy trappers, mingling the aptitudes of both races in the wild life of the frontier. With the increase of population, and the more settled life of the clearing, the traces of mixed blood arelost sight of; but it is to a large extent only a repetition of what appears to have marked the advent of the Aryan immigrants into Europe. The new, but more civilised race predominated. Literal extermination, no doubt, did its work, and the aborigines to a large extent perished. But no inconsiderable remnant finally disappeared by absorption into the general stock; not without leaving enduring evidence of the process in the Melanochroi, or dark whites—the Iberians, or Black Celts, as they are sometimes styled,—of Western Europe; as well as in the allied type, not only of the Mediterranean shores, but of Western Asia and Persia. A process has thus been going on on the American continent for four centuries, which cannot fail to beget new types in the future; even as a like process is seen to have produced them under analogous conditions in ancient Europe.
Viewed in this aspect, the archæology and ethnology of the New World presents in some important respects a startling analogy to pre-Aryan Europe. Assuredly the status of the Allophylian races of Europe can scarcely have been inferior to that of some, at least, of the aborigines of America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Probably the Aryan pioneers were fully equal to its first European immigrants. But if the ethnical characteristics of American man are simple, and the aspect of his social life appears to realise for us a living analogy to that of Europe’s Neolithic, if not in some respects to that of its Palæolithic era, the question of his antiquity acquires a new interest; for it thus becomes apparent that man may remain through countless ages in the wild hunter stage, as unprogressive as any other denizen of the wilderness propagating its species and hunting for its prey. But the whole question of the antiquity of man has undergone a marvellous revolution. The literature of modern geology curiously illustrates its progress, from the date of the publication of Dean Buckland’sReliquiæ Diluvianæ, in 1823, to the final edition of Sir Charles Lyell’sPrinciples of Geology, in 1872, and the latest embodiment of his conclusions on the special question involved in hisAntiquity of Man.
The determination of a Palæolithic period for Europe, with its rude implements of flint or stone, chipped into shape without the aid of any grinding or polishing process, andbelonging to an era when man was associated with animals either extinct or known only throughout the historic period in extreme northern latitudes, has naturally stimulated the research of American archæologists for corresponding traces on this continent. Nor is the anticipation of the possible recovery of the traces of man’s presence in post-glacial, or still earlier epochs in unhistoric areas, limited to either continent. If it be accepted as an established fact that man has existed in Europe for unnumbered ages, during which enormous physical changes have been wrought; upheaval and denudation have revolutionised the face of the continent; the deposition of the whole drift formation has been effected; the river-valleys of Southern England and the north of France have been excavated, and the British Islands detached from the neighbouring continent: it cannot be regarded as improbable that evidence may yet be found of the early presence of man in any region of the globe. Nevertheless some of the elements already referred to tend to mark with a character of their own the investigations alike of the archæologist and the geologist into the earliest traces of human art in what we have learned habitually to speak of as a New World. In Europe the antiquary, familiar already with ancient historic remains, had passed by a natural transition to the study of ruder examples of primitive art in stone and bronze, as well as to the physical characteristics of races which appeared to have preceeded the earliest historic nations. The occupation of the British Islands, for example, successively by Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans, was so familiar to the popular mind that the problem of a sequence of neolithic, bronze, and the ruder iron implements with their correlated personal ornaments, pottery, etc., was universally solved by referring them to Celtic, Roman, and Scandinavian art. Erroneous as this interpretation of the evidence proves to have been, it had, nevertheless, sufficient accordance with truth to prepare the way for the ultimate reception of more accurate inductions. The fact of the occurrence of successive phases of art, and their indication of a succession of races, were undoubted; and researches directed to the solution of the problem of European archæology were unhesitatingly followed up through mediæval, classical, Assyrian and Egyptian remains, to the very thresholdof that prehistoric dawn which forms the transitional stage between geological and historical epochs. A significant fact, in its bearing on the recent disclosures of the river-drift in France and England, is that some of the most characteristic flint implements, such as a large spear head found along with the remains of a fossil elephant in Gray’s Inn Lane, London, and implements of the same type obtained from the drift of the Waveney Valley, in Surrey, underlying similar fossil remains, had been brought under the notice of archæologists upwards of a century before the idea of the contemporaneous existence of man and the mammals of the Drift found any favour; and they were unhesitatingly assigned to a Celtic origin. The first known discovery of any flint implement in the quaternary gravels of Europe is the one already noted which stands recorded in the Sloane catalogue as “A British weapon found, with elephant’s tooth, opposite to black Mary’s, near Grayes Inn Lane.”
A just conception of the comprehensiveness even of historical antiquity was long retarded in Europe by an exclusive devotion to classical studies; but the relations of America to the Old World are so recent, and all else is so nearly a blank, that for it the fifteenth century is the historic dawn, and everything dating before the landing of Columbus has been habitually assigned to the same vague antiquity. Hence historical research has been occupied for the most part on very modern remains, and the supreme triumph long aimed at has been to associate the hieroglyphics of Central America, and the architectural monuments of Peru, with those of Egypt. But we have entered on a new era of archæological and historical inquiry. The palæolithic implements of the French Drift have only been brought to light in our own day; and, though upwards of half a century has elapsed since the researches of Mr. J. MacEnery were rewarded by the discovery of flint implements of the earliest type in the same red loam of the Devonshire limestone caves which embedded bones of the mammoth, tichorhine rhinoceros, cave-bear and other extinct mammals, it is only recently that the full significance of such disclosures has been recognised.
America was indeed little behind Europe in the earlier stages of cavern research. A cabinet of the British Museumis filled with fossil bones obtained by Dr. Lund and M. Claussen from limestone caverns in Brazil, embedded in a reddish-coloured loam, under a thick stalagmitic flooring, and including, along with remains of genera still inhabiting the American continent, those of extinct monkeys. Human bones were also found in the same caves, but superficially, and seemingly of the present Indian race. But a fresh interest and significance have been given to such researches by the novel aspect of prehistoric archæology in Europe. The relations now established between the earliest traces of European man and the geological aspects of the great Drift formation, have naturally led to the diligent examination of corresponding deposits of the continent of America, in the hope of recovering similar traces there. Until recently, however, any supposed examples of American palæolithic art have been isolated and unsatisfactory. Colonel Charles C. Jones, in hisAntiquities of the Southern Indians, notes the discovery in the Nacoochee valley, in the State of Georgia, of flint implements from the gravel and boulders of the drift, and in material, manner of construction, and appearance closely resembling the rough hatchets belonging to the Drift type. Other more or less trustworthy examples of a like kind have been reported; among which may be noted a large specimen, now in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, found at Lewiston, in the State of New York, at a great depth, when sinking a well. Implements of neolithic character, and even of modern type, have been produced, not only from Kansas and California gold-diggings, but from the volcanic tufa of the Pacific coast, overlaid by repeated volcanic deposits. In a terrace of modified drift, near Little Falls, Minnesota, an accumulation of quartz chips have been found; the supposed refuse of an ancient workshop. More definitely, Professor Aughey reports the discovery of rudely chipped flint arrow heads in the loess of the Missouri valley, beneath the bones of the mastodon; and the loess gravels of Ohio and Indiana, belonging unquestionably to the last glacial age, have disclosed what seem to be genuine palæoliths, pointing to the presence of the rational tool-maker during the close of the quaternary epoch of the North American continent.
Some of those assumed illustrations of American palæolithicart cannot be accepted. One implement, for example, from the Californian gravel-drift, is a polished stone plummet perforated at one end, and not only modern in character, but as a genuine discovery in the gold-bearing gravels, tending to discredit the palæolithic origin assigned to ruder implements found under similar circumstances. But the most startling examples of this class are of minor importance when compared with reported discoveries of human remains in the Californian drift. In 1857, Dr. C. F. Winslow produced a fragment of a human skull found eighteen feet below the surface in the “pay drift” at Table Mountain, associated with remains of the mastodon and fossil elephant. From beds underlying the lava and volcanic tufa of California, from time to time other evidences of the assumed ancient presence of man and traces of his art are produced. But the manifestly recent character of some of the latter prove the disturbance of these deposits by subsequent influences. In 1869 Professor J. D. Whitney exhibited, at the Chicago meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a complete human skull, recovered at a depth of 130 feet in the auriferous gravel of Calaveras County, California, underlying five successive beds of lava and volcanic tufa, and vouched for its geological antiquity. The gravel which adhered to the relic found imbedded in it is referred by him to the Pliocene age; and Dr. J. W. Foster remarks of it, in hisPrehistoric Races of the United States: “This skull, admitting its authenticity, carries back the advent of man to the Pliocene epoch, and is therefore older than the stone implements of the drift-gravel of Abbeville and Amiens, or the relics furnished by the cave-dirt of Belgium and France.” In reality, however, the authenticity of the skull as a pliocene relic cannot be admitted. Like that of Guadaloupe, those found by Dr. Lund in the Brazil caves, and other fossil skulls of the American continent, it proved, according to the trustworthy report of Dr. Wyman, to be of the ordinary Indian type; though to some minds that only confirms the genuineness of the discovery. A human skull recovered from the delta of the Mississippi at New Orleans, and estimated by Dr. Dowler—on what, “to avoid all cavil,” he claimed to be extremely moderate assumptions,—as not less than 57,000 years old, is grouped with others foundby Dr. Lund in one of the Brazil caves, at Logoa Santa, and thus commented on: “Numerous species of animals have been blotted from creation since American humanity’s first appearance. The form of these crania, moreover, proves that the general type of races inhabiting America at that inconceivably remote era was the same which prevailed at the Columbian discovery”;[42]and so the authors ofTypes of Mankindarrived at the conclusion that with such evidence of the native American type having occupied the continent in geological times, before the formation of the Mississippi alluvia, science may spare itself the trouble of looking elsewhere for the origin of the American race! The high authority of Professor Agassiz was adduced at the time in support of this and other equally crude assumptions; but they have ceased to receive the countenance of men of science.
Meanwhile the progress of European discovery has familiarised us with the idea of the rude primeval race of its Palæolithic era, so designated in reference to their characteristic implements recovered from the river-drift of France and England, and from the sedimentary accumulations of their rock shelters and limestone caves. That flint and stone implements of every variety of form abound in the soil of the New World, has been established by ample proof; and if mere rudeness could be accepted as evidence of antiquity, many of them rival in this respect the rudest implements of the European drift. But it has to be kept in view that the indigenous tribes of America have scarcely even now abandoned the manufacture of implements of obsidian, flint, and stone, or of bone and ivory. So striking, indeed, is the analogy between the simple arts of the palæolithic cave-men of Southern France, and those still practised by the Eskimo, that Professor Boyd Dawkins inferred from this conclusive evidence of a pedigree for the Arctic aborigines little less ancient than that which Dr. Dowler long ago deduced from his discovery in the delta of the Mississippi. The implements and accumulated debris of the ancient hunters of the Garonne, the contemporaries of the mammoth and other extinct mammals, and of the reindeer, musk-sheep, cave-bear, and other species known only within the historic period in extreme northern latitudes, undoubtedly suggest interestinganalogies with the modern Eskimo. Only under similar climatic conditions to those in which they now live, could such accumulations of animal remains as have been found in the caves of the valley of the Vésère be possible in places habitually resorted to by man. But such analogies form a very slender basis on which to found the hypothesis that the race of the Mammoth and Reindeer period in the remote Post-Pliocene era of Southern France has its living representatives within the Arctic circle of the American continent.
The students of modern archæology have become familiar with startling disclosures; and the supposed identification of living representatives of the race of the pleistocene river beds or cave deposits is too fascinating a one to be readily abandoned by its originator. The men of the River-Drift era are assumed to have been a race of still older and ruder savages than the palæolithic cave-men, who were more restricted in their range, and considerably in advance of them in the variety and workmanship of their weapons and implements. The elder ruder race has vanished; but the cave-race of that indefinite but vastly remote era of pliocene, or post-pliocene Europe, is imagined to still survive within the Arctic frontiers of Canada.
In discussing the plausible hypothesis which thus aims at recovering in the hyperboreans of America the race that before the close of Europe’s Pleistocene age, hunted the mammoth, the musk-sheep, and the reindeer in the valleys of the Garonne, Professor Dawkins reviewed the manners and habits of the Eskimo as a race of hunters, fishers, and fowlers, accumulating round their dwellings vast refuse heaps similar to those of the ancient cave-men. Both were ignorant of the metallurgic arts, were excluded to a large extent by a like rigorous climate from access to stone or flint; while they habitually turned to account the available material, resulting from the spoils of the chase: bone, ivory, and deer’s horn, in the manufacture of all needful tools. The implements and weapons thus common to both do unquestionably prove that their manner of life was in many respects similar. Professor Dawkins also notes, what can scarcely seem surprising in any people familiar with the working in bone, namely, the use at times by the Eskimo of fossil mammoth ivory for the handles of theirstone scrapers, and adds: “It is very possible that this habit of the Eskimos may have been handed down from the late pleistocene times.” But what strikes him as “the most astonishing bond of union between the cave-men and the Eskimo is the art of representing animals”; and, after noting those familiar to both, along with the correspondence in their weapons, and habits as hunters, he says: “All these points of connection between the cave-men and the Eskimos can, in my opinion, be explained only on the hypothesis that they belong to the same race.”[43]
As to the ingenious imitative art of the Cro-Magnon cave-dwellers, it is by no means peculiar to them and the modern Eskimo; but, on the contrary, is common to many savage races; though by no modern savage people has a like degree of artistic ability been shown. Professor Dawkins says truly of the cave-man: “He possessed a singular talent for representing the animals he hunted; and his sketches reveal to us that he had a capacity for seeing the beauty and grace of natural form not much inferior to that which is the result of long-continued civilisation in ourselves, and very much higher than that of his successors in Europe in the Neolithic age. The hunter who was both artist and sculptor, who reproduced, with his imperfect means, at one time foliage, at another the quiet repose of a reindeer feeding, has left behind him the proof of a decided advance in culture, such as might be expected to result from the long continuance of man on the earth in the hunter state of civilisation.”[44]All this is correct in reference to the art of the Vézère carvers and draughtsmen; but it would be gross exaggeration if applied to such conventional art as the Eskimo arrow-straightener which Professor Dawkins figures, with its formal row of reindeer and their grotesque accessories. The same criticism is equally applicable to numerous other specimens of Eskimo art, and to similar Innuit, or western Eskimo representations of hunting scenes, such as those figured by Mr. William H. Dall, in hisAlaska, which he describes as “drawings analogous to those discovered in France in the caves of Dordogne.”[45]
The identity, or near resemblance between harpoons, fowlingspears, marrow spoons, and scrapers, of the ancient cave-race of pleistocene France, and implements of the modern Eskimo, is full of interest; as is much also of a like kind between savage races of our own day in the most widely severed regions of the globe; but it is a slender basis on which to found such far-reaching deductions. The old race that lived on the verge of the great glaciers in Southern France gave the preference to bone and ivory over flint or stone, because the climatic conditions under which they lived rendered those most accessible to them; and we see in the familiar types of flint arrow heads, stone hammers, and the like primitive tools of savage man, both in ancient and modern times, how naturally the workman, with the same materials and similar necessities, shapes his few and simple weapons and implements into like form. As to the absence of pottery, alike among the ancient cave-dwellers and the modern Eskimo, in which another element of resemblance is traced, it proves no more than that both had to work under climatic conditions which rendered clay, adequate fuel, and nearly all other appliances of the potter, even less available than flint and stone.
But the caves of the Vézère have furnished examples not only of skulls, but of complete skeletons of an ancient race of cave-dwellers, whether that of the ingenious draughtsmen and reindeer hunters or not; and had those, or the underlying debris, yielded traces of the Eskimo type of head, there would then be good reason for attaching an exceptional value to any evidence of correspondence in arts and habits. But the cerebral capacity of this Cro-Magnon race amply accords with the artistic skill, and the sense of beauty and grace of natural form, ascribed to the ancient draughtsmen; and their well-developed skulls and large bones present the most striking contrast to the stunted Eskimo. The strongly marked physiognomy of the former bears no resemblance to the debased Mongolian type of the latter. No doubt it may be argued with sufficient plausibility that in the slow retreat of the palæolithic race, whether eastward by the river-valleys of Europe, and across the steppes of Asia, to Behring Strait; or over submerging continents, since engulfed in the ocean; and in the vast æons of their retreat to their latest home in another hemisphere, on the verge of thepole, any amount of change may have modified the physical characteristics of the race. But if so, the evidence of their pedigree is no longer producible. The Eskimo may be related by descent to the men of the French Reindeer period, as we ourselves may be descendants of palæolithic man; but, as Professor Geikie has justly remarked: “When anthropologists produce from some of the caves occupied by the reindeer hunters a cranium resembling that of the living Eskimo, it will be time enough to admit that the latter has descended from the former. But, unfortunately for the view here referred to, none of the skulls hitherto found affords it any support.”[46]In truth, the plausible fancy that the discoveries of the last twenty-five years have tended to confirm the identification of the cave-men with the Eskimo, only requires the full appreciation of all that it involves, in order that it shall take its place with that other identification with the red man of the present day of “Dr. Dowler’s sub-cypress Indian who dwelt on the site of New Orleans 57,000 years ago.”
The received interpretation of the imperfect record which remains to us of the successive eras of geological change with the accompanying modifications of animal life, down to the appearance of man, and the deciphering of geological chroniclings as a coherent disclosure of the past history of the earth, are largely due to Sir Charles Lyell. In 1841 he visited America, and then estimated with cautious conservatism some of the evidences adduced for the assumed antiquity of American man. But subsequent observations led him to modify his views; and at length, in 1863, he “read his recantation” of earlier opinions; and—so far at least as Europe is concerned,—gave the full weight of his authority to the conclusions relative to the antiquity of man based on the discovery of flint implements associated with bones of extinct mammalia at Abbeville and in the valley of the Thames. The peculiar geological conditions accompanying the earliest evidence of the presence of palæolithic man in Europe proved, when rightly interpreted, to be no less convincing than the long-familiar sequence of more recent archæological indices by which antiquarian speculation has proceeded step by step back towards that prehistoric dawn in which geology and archæology meeton common ground. The chalk and the overlying river-drift, abounding with flint nodules, left no room for question as to the source of the raw material from which the primitive implements were manufactured. The flint is still abundant as ever, in nodules of a size amply sufficient for furnishing the largest palæoliths, in the localities both of France and England where such specimens of primitive art have been recovered by thousands. But there also other disclosures tell no less conclusively of many subsequent stages of progress, alike in prehistoric and historic times.
Sir John Evans, in hisAncient Stone Implements of Great Britain, purposely begins with the more recent implements, including those of the Australian and other modern savage races, and traces his way backward, “ascending the stream of time,” and noting the diverse examples of ingeniously fashioned and polished tools of the Neolithic age which preceded that palæolithic class, of vast antiquity and rudest workmanship, which now constitute the earliest known works of man; if they are not, indeed, examples of the first infantile efforts of human skill. But alike in Britain, and on the neighbouring continent, a chronological sequence of implements in stone and metal, with pottery, personal ornaments, and other illustrations of progressive art, supplies the evidence by means of which we are led backward—not without some prolonged interruptions, as we approach the Palæolithic age,—from historic to the remotest prehistoric times.