CHAPTER VII.

TOOLS.

MAN THE ARTIFICER—THE LAW OF REASON—INDIGENOUS RACES—MAN’S CAPACITY FOR DETERIORATION—WHAT IS A STONE-PERIOD?—MATERIALS OF PRIMITIVE ART—SUCCESSION OF RACES—INDICATIONS OF ANCIENT TRADE—THE SHOSHONE INDIAN—TEXAS IMPLEMENTS—MODES OF HAFTING— DEER’S-HORN SOCKETS—STONE KNIVES—THLINKETS OF ALASKA—METALS OF A STONE PERIOD—ARTS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC—MALAYAN INFLUENCE —FIJIAN CONSTRUCTIVE SKILL—FIJIAN POTTERY—SLOW MATURITY OF RACES—THE FLINT-EDGED SWORD—THE LEAGUE OF THE FIVE NATIONS— IROQUOIS PREDOMINANCE—WORK IN OBSIDIAN AND FLINT—HONDURAS FLINT IMPLEMENTS—SOURCES OF THE MATERIAL—COLLISION OF RACES— FATE OF INFERIOR RACES.

As the type of oceanic migration, the canoe claims a prominent place among the primitive arts of man. In it we see the germs of commerce, maritime enterprise, and much else that is indispensable to any progress in civilisation. But the primitive ship implies the existence of tools; and, as we have seen, probably owed its earliest fashioning to the useful service of fire. Intelligent design was working out the purposes of reason by processes which, even in their most rudimentary stage, reveal the characteristics of a new order of life, compared with which the tool-born ant, the spider, and the bee, seem but as ingenious self-acting machines, each made to execute perfectly its one little item in the comprehensive plan of creation.

As industrial artificers, the creatures so far beneath us in the scale of organisation seem often to put to shame our most perfect workmanship; yet provided with no other instruments than the eye and the hand, but guided by that intelligent reason which distinguishes man from the brutes, we see him, even as an artificer, presenting characteristics which are altogether wanting in the lower animals. Labour is for them no sternly imposed necessity, but an inevitable process, having only one possible form of manifestation; producing in its exercise the highest enjoyment the labourer is capable of; and in its results leading our thoughts from the wise, unerring, yet untaught worker, to Him whose work it is, and of whose wisdom and skill the workmanship, not less than the workman, appears a direct manifestation. It is not so with man. The capacity of the workman is a divine gift, but the work is his own, and too often betrays, in some of its most ingenious devices and results, anything rather than a divine origin.

If ours be not the latest stage of being, but is to be succeeded by “new heavens and a new earth,” marvellous indeed are the revelations which posthistoric strata have yet to disclose. But even they will scarcely suffice to reveal the most striking characteristics of a being on whom the economy of nature reacts in a way it never did on living being before; in whom all external influences are subordinated to an inner world of thought, by means of which he is capable of searching into the past, anticipating the future, of looking inward, and being a law unto himself. His nature embraces possibilities of the widest conceivable diversity, for his is no longer the law of instinct, but of reason: law, therefore, that brings with it conscious liberty, and also conscious responsibility.

But an important and seemingly conflicting element arises out of the capacity of man for moral progression, to which some ethnologists fail to give due weight. A suggestive thought of Agassiz, relative to certain real or supposed analogies between the geographical distribution of species of simiæ, and especially the anthropoid apes, and certain inferior types of man, sufficed as the nucleus of Gliddon’s elaborate monkey-chart, in the _Indigenous Races of the Earth_, illustrative of the geographical distribution of monkeys in relation to that of certain types of men. Notwithstanding the very monkeyfying process to which some of the illustrations of inferior human types have been subjected in this pictorial chorography, the correspondences are not such as to carry conviction to most minds. But, assuming, as a supposed _reductio ad absurdum_, the descent of all the diverse species of monkeys from a single pair, Mr. Gliddon thus sums up his final observations: “I propose, therefore, that a male and female pair of the ‘species’ _Cynocephalus Hamadryas_, be henceforward recognised as the anthropoid analogues of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet; and that it must be from these two individuals that, owing to transplantation, together with the combined action of aliment and climate, the fifty-four monkeys represented on our chart have originated. It is, notwithstanding, sufficiently strange, that, under such circumstances, this ‘primordial organic type’ of monkey should have so highly improved in Guinea, and in Malayana, as to become _gorillas_ and _chimpanzees_, _orangs_ and _gibbons_; whereas on the contrary, the descendants of ‘Adam and Eve’ have, in the same localities, actually deteriorated into the most degraded and abject forms of humanity.” In reality, however, whatever may be said about the possibility of such simian development, possible human deterioration is an inevitable attribute of the rational, moral free-agent man: capable of the noblest aspirations and of wondrous intellectual advancement, but also with a capacity for moral degradation such as belongs to him alone. The one characteristic, no less than the other, separates man from all those other living creatures that might appear in some respects gifted with endowments akin to his own.

Man, as a tool-using artificer, seems to have a rival in the beaver, felling its timber, carrying its clay, and building its dam; in the spider weaving its web, more perfect than any net of human fisher; and even in the squirrel with its provident hoard of well-secured winter store, or the monkey employing the cocoa-nut and other shell-fruit as missiles. But in such artificial appliances there is nothing obsolete, nothing inventive, nothing progressive; whereas the child born amid the most highly developed civilisation,—the son of a Watt, a Stephenson, a Brunel,—if reared from infancy to manhood without any knowledge of mechanical science or the industrial arts, would start anew from the rudimentary instincts of the tool-using animal, and expend his ingenuity, not perhaps without some traces of hereditary mechanical genius, on the primitive materials of flint, stone, horn, or shell.

Man depends for all on his teachers; and when moral and intellectual deterioration return him to the toolless condition of the uncivilised nomad, he is thrown back on the resources of his infantile reason and primary instincts, and reaches that point from which the primeval colonist has had to start anew in all lands, and work his way upwards, through stone, and bronze, and iron periods, into the full co-operation of a civilised community, treasuring the experience of the past, and making for itself a new and higher future.

The subdivisions of the archæologist designated =The Stone Period=, THE BRONZE PERIOD, and THE IRON PERIOD, have been brought into some discredit, in part by what, as a general system, must be regarded only as a hypothesis, being assumed as involving facts of no less indisputable and universal application than the periods of the geologist. In part, also, their non-acceptance is due to wilful errors of their impugners; and to the want of appreciation of the inevitable characteristics which pertain to transitional periods, such as chiefly come under the European archæologist’s observation. So far as the American Indian is concerned, the New World is in the first transitional stage still: that of a stone-period, very partially affected by the introduction of foreign-wrought weapons and implements; and scarcely indicating, among the numerous tribes of North America, any traces of the adoption of a superinduced native metallurgy. Such therefore appears to be a condition of things, the comparison of which with traces of a corresponding stage in the early ages of Britain, may be of use in clearing the subject from much confusion.

The special characteristics of the native civilisation which the early Spanish adventurers found already existing in Mexico and Central America, will come under review at a later stage; but it cannot admit of question that throughout the whole Red Indian forest-area metallurgic arts were unknown, as they still are among the Indians of the North-west after an intercourse of upwards of three centuries and a half with Europeans. Copper, indeed, was wrought among them, but it was used without any application of fire, and as what maybe most fitly designated a mere malleable stone. In Britain, as I have already observed, “the working of gold may have preceded the age of bronze, and in reality have belonged to the Stone Period. If metal could be found capable of being wrought and fashioned without smelting or moulding, its use was perfectly compatible with the simple arts of the Stone Period. Masses of native gold, such as have been often found both in the Old and the New World, are peculiarly susceptible of similar application by the workers in stone; and some of the examples of Scottish gold personal ornaments fully correspond with the probable results of such an anticipatory use of the metals.”[68] The idea thus formed from an examination of some of the most artless examples of primeval British goldsmiths’ work, has been amply confirmed by observing the mode of using the native copper, and the traces of its former working, among the American Indians. Even now their highest attainment in metallurgic skill extends only to grinding the iron hoops with which the Hudson’s Bay fur-traders supply them, into knives, arrow-heads, and the like substitutes for the older implements chipped out of flint, or ground from the broken stone. Further opportunities will occur for illustrating this subject; which is full of interest to the ethnologist, from the light it throws on the rate of progress of a barbarous people towards civilisation; or rather on the capacity of man in a certain undeveloped stage, for witnessing the most remarkable products of the useful arts, without evincing any desire to master them.

After centuries devoted to the elucidation of Roman remains, and the assignment to Roman artificers of much which more discriminating classification now awards to totally different workmen: the discovery of weapons and implements of stone, shell, or bone, in nearly every quarter of the globe, has at length excited a lively interest among the archæologists of Europe. Made, as these primitive relics are, of the most readily wrought materials, and by what may be styled the constructive instincts, rather than the acquired skill of their rude artificers, they belong to one condition of man, in relation to the progress of civilisation, though pertaining to many periods of the world’s history, and to widely separated areas. In one respect, however, those relics possess a peculiar value to the ethnologist. The materials employed in their manufacture have within themselves, most frequently, the evidence of their geographical origin, and in some of them also of their era. The periods to which numerous European relics pertain may frequently be determined, like those of older strata, by the accompanying imbedded or buried fossils. The bones of the _Bos primigenius_ have been found indented with the stone javelin of the aborigines of Northern Europe, and dug up even in places of regular British sepulture. Those of the _Megaceros Hibernicus_ seem, in like manner, to be traced to a period of ancient Irish colonisation, when flint-knives and stone hatchets prove the simple character of the native arts; though even then they furnished the material for constructing one of the earliest musical instruments. Yet other evidence shows that the same gigantic Irish deer was contemporary with the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, and the fossil carnivora of the caverns. The _Bos longifrons_, doubtless, traces its descent from an ancestry not less ancient; but from its wild herds the native Briton derived his domesticated cattle, and its most recent relics pertain to an era later than the Roman times. The ornamented tusks of the wild boar, the bones of the brown bear, the teeth and skulls of the beaver, carvings wrought from the walrus ivory, skates formed from the metatarsal and metacarpal bones of the red-deer and small native horse, with numerous kindred relics of palæontology within the era of the occupation of the British Islands by man, all serve to assign approximate dates to the examples of his ancient arts which they accompany.

Thus within the historic period, as in prior geological eras, the progress of time is recorded by the extinction of races. The advent of man was speedily marked by the disappearance of numerous groups of ancient life which pertain to that transitional era where archæology begins; though the most recent discoveries of works of art along with the fossil mammals of the drift, confirm, by new and striking evidence, the fact that man entered on this terrestrial stage, not as the highest in an entirely new order of creation, and belonging to an epoch detached by some overwhelming catastrophe from all preceding periods of organic life: but as the last and best of an order of animated beings whose line sweeps back into the shadows of an unmeasured past.

The disclosures of British tumuli, along with rarer chance deposits, show that the Celtic Briton was an intruder upon older allophylian occupants; while the presence of the Roman is recorded for us by the extinction of an ancient fauna, as well as of whole British tribes. What the Roman partially accomplished, the Saxon, the Dane, and the Norman completed: displacing the Briton everywhere but from the fastnesses of Wales; and gradually extirpating all but such animals as are either compatible with the development of social refinement, or are worthy of protection as a means of ministering to man’s pleasures. And as it has been in the Old World, so it is in the New. The progress of the European colonists not only involves the extirpation alike of the wild animals and the forests which formed their haunts; but also the no less inevitable disappearance of the aborigines who made of them a prey. Thus the grave-mound of the Red Indian, and the relics of his simple arts, become the memorials of an extinct order of things no less clearly defined than the post-tertiary fossils of the drift.

But while the remains of extinct species thus serve to determine the periods at which certain eras had their close, the traces of living or extinct fauna are no less valuable as fixing the geographical origin of the ancient colonists, amid whose relics they are found: just as the elephants, the camels, the monkeys, and baboons of the Nimrod obelisk, or the corresponding sculptures on the walls of Memphis or Luxor, indicate the countries whence tribute was brought, or captives were carried off, to aggrandise their Assyrian or Egyptian conquerors. Among relics which help to fix the geographical centres of ancient arts, the sources of early commerce, or the birthplaces of migrating races, might be noted the tin and amber of the Old, and the copper of the New World. So also the Mexican obsidian, the clay-slate of Columbia, the favourite red pipe-stone, or _Catlinite_, of the Couteau des prairies, and the pyrulæ and conch-shells of the Gulf of Florida, indicate varied sources of ancient trade or barter, and lines of migration extending over fully twenty degrees of latitude. Objects wrought in the favourite materials brought from such remote sources have been found mingling with relics of ancient tribes in the islands and on the north shores of the great Canadian lakes, along the southern slope of the same water-shed whence the Moose and the Abbitibbe pour their waters into the frozen sea of Hudson’s Bay.

The designation of any primitive stage of industrial arts as a Stone Period signifies, as has been already sufficiently indicated, that condition in which, in the absence of metals, and the ignorance of the simplest rudiments of metallurgy, man has to find materials for the manufacture of his tools, and the supply of his mechanical requirements, in the commoner objects which nature places within his reach.

Nothing can well be conceived much more artless than some of the stone implements still in use among savage tribes of America. Yet it is worthy of note that it is not amid the privations of an Arctic winter, but in southern latitudes, with a climate which furnishes abundant resources for savage man, that the crudest efforts at tool-making are found. In the report of the United States Geological Survey for 1872, which embraces Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah, Professor Joseph Leidy furnishes an interesting account of numerous implements of art, rude as any found in the drift, met by him during a survey of the Bridgers Basin at the base of the Unitah Mountains, in Southern Wyoming. “In some places the stone implements are so numerous, and at the same time are so rudely constructed, that one is constantly in doubt when to consider them as natural or accidental, and when to view them as artificial.”[69] But with them are mingled implements of the finest finish. The Shoshones who haunt the region have no further knowledge of them than is indicated in their belief that they were a gift of God to their ancestors. But many are sharp, and fresh in appearance, as if recently worked from the parent block; and though others are worn, and decomposed on the surface, Professor Leidy does not assume more than a date of “centuries back” for the oldest of them. For, indeed, he found that the Shoshone Indians had in use a stone implement of so simple a character that he says, “had I not observed it in actual use, and had noticed it among the materials of the buttes, or horizontal strata of indurated clays and sandstone, I would have viewed it as an accidental spawl. It consists of a thin segment of a quartzite boulder, made by striking the stone with a smart blow. It is called a _teshoa_, and is employed as a scraper in dressing buffalo skins.” Subsequently he discovered a precisely similar implement, together with some perforated tusks of the elk, in an ancient Indian grave.

No such rude implements are found among the productions of the arctic tool-makers. The necessities of the Esquimaux, in their clothing and hunting, beget systematic habits of industry and matured skill. The elaborate decorations of their skin and fur dresses, the carving of their ivory and bone implements, and the ingenuity lavished upon their children’s toys, all prove how thoroughly the æsthetic, as well as the industrial arts, are developed by the stimulus which man’s necessities create. In Fig. 53, an axe, or war-club, is shown, procured from the Indians of the Rio Frio, in Texas. The blade is a piece of trachyte, so rudely chipped that it could scarcely attract attention as having been subjected to any artificial working, but for the club-like haft into which it is inserted. I am indebted to Mr. Evans for the use of the woodcut. He describes the haft as formed of some indigenous wood, which has evidently been chopped into shape by means of stone tools. Nothing ruder has been brought to light among the earliest disclosures of drift or cave deposits. Another Texas implement in the Smithsonian collection at Washington is a roughly shaped flint blade, which, as shown of the full size in Fig. 54, closely resembles a familiar class of oval implements of the river-drift. It is curious, indeed, to note the undesigned correspondence between the implements of races equally widely separated by time and space. Several examples of stone celts or hatchets attached to their handles have been recovered in British and Irish bogs, and in the submerged lake-dwellings of Switzerland.

All alike show a wooden haft pierced so as to admit of the insertion of the stone blade, which must have been secured by a withe or thong tightly bound round it, according to a fashion still practised in America, and among the islands of the Pacific. But in spite of this ligature, the wedge-like form of the axe must have had a tendency to cleave the haft, and so to loosen its hold. The experience of the ancient Lake-dwellers led them to counteract this by inserting the stone blade in a socket of deer’s-horn, the end of which is usually cut into a squared tenon designed to fit into a mortice in the handle. This must have accomplished the desired purpose, as examples of such deer’s-horn sockets are common on the sites of lake-dwellings. During the last visit of Professor Agassiz to his native Swiss Canton, and the village parsonage of Concise where his early years were passed, he obtained from Lake Neuchâtel a valuable collection of stone implements, along with pottery and other illustrations of the arts and habits of the Lake-dwellers, already referred to. Some of those are specially interesting as examples of the mode of hafting implements of flint and stone.

Fig. 55 shows a perforated deer’s-horn socket with a chisel of greenstone inserted in it. The exposed part of the blade measures nearly two inches in length. It must have been secured in its haft by a strong cement, such as some of the Pacific Islanders employ at the present day in fastening their axe-heads to bone and wooden handles. In some cases a tine of the deer’s antler has been left so as to form the handle of the hammer or hatchet. A rare example of this type is described by Dr. Clement, among numerous varieties recovered from different localities on Lake Neuchâtel. The horn of the stag was also at times converted into a formidable weapon by retaining the brow-antler as the offensive weapon, and detaching the rest, so as to leave only the main portion of the horn as a handle. Fig. 56, also from Lake Neuchâtel, may be described as a stone knife. The blade, which is of polished serpentine, measures 3½ inches in the exposed part, and is still secure in its horn haft. In the collection of Mr. J. H. Blake of Boston are flint implements recovered from an ancient Peruvian tomb on the Bay of Chacota, attached to their hafts by a tough green cement.

It is remarkable to notice how rarely the simple process of perforating the blade for the reception of the handle was resorted to, even where the workmen were in the habit of perforating both bone and stone implements for other purposes. This was no doubt partly due to the frangible character of much of the material in which they wrought; but even after the primitive metallurgist had mastered the art of alloying and casting his bronze, it seems to have been long before he learned to fit a handle to his axe or hammer by perforating the blade or hammer-head. Some of the most usual modes of attaching the axe or hatchet to a haft of wood or bone, in use among the islanders of the Pacific, are shown in a group of implements from the collection of the Scottish Antiquaries, Fig. 57. They bear a close resemblance to others described by Mr. William H. Dall as pertaining to the Thlinkets, a coast tribe of Alaska, not far to the south of Behring’s Strait.[70] But tools and weapons of stone, as well as of native copper, are already becoming rare among the tribes of the North Pacific Coast, owing to the introduction of iron by the Russian and Hudson’s Bay traders. Previous to this change, the Alaskans knew metal only in the form of cold-wrought native copper, as among all the native tribes north of the Mexican Gulf. Such a recognition of some convenient uses to which the malleable native metals could be applied as substitutes for stone, can scarcely be regarded as even an initial step in the transition towards the first true metallurgic period. This cannot be considered to have been introduced until the native copper-worker had perceived the wonderful transformations which could be wrought by fire, and had learned at least to melt the pure metal, and to mould the weapons and implements he required; if not to harden it with alloys, and to quarry and smelt the unfamiliar ores. To this stage the savage tribes of the New World have not even now attained, after intercourse with Europeans for more than three centuries and a half. There, on the contrary, the Indians, who originally possessed only weapons, implements, and personal ornaments of bone, shell, flint, and stone, or at most of native copper rudely hammered into shape, are still seen after an interval of upwards of three centuries of European colonisation and traffic, without the slightest acquired knowledge of working in metals. They do, indeed, possess numerous metal implements and weapons, which, as their greatest treasures, they freely lavish on the loved or honoured dead; but such traces of metallurgy afford no proof of acquired native art. The copper kettles of the ancient Huron graves on the Georgian Bay, or the Chinook coffin-biers on the Columbia river, were brought, not from the copper regions of Lake Superior, but from France, London, or Liverpool, along with the beads, knives, hatchets, and other objects of barter, by means of which the fur-traders still carry on their traffic with the Indian hunter. At most this only proves that a race, still in its stone-period, and possessing no greater skill than is required to grind an iron hoop into lance or arrow-heads, has been brought into contact with a civilised people, familiar with metallurgy and many acquired arts, such as the musket and the rifle may most aptly symbolise.

The same diversity of inventive power and artistic skill is discernible among the Indians of North America as has been already referred to in comparing the arts of other uncivilised races. In some constructive skill predominates, while others manifest a peculiar aptitude for imitative art. The powers of imitation common to the barbarous and the civilised nations of the New World, are specially worthy of note; and will again come under review when referring to the pipe manufacture, so curiously typical of American art. But meanwhile an equally instructive illustration of what may thus be designated æsthetic and constructive instincts may be selected from the diversely gifted islanders of the Southern Pacific. On the extreme western verge of the Polynesian archipelago lie the Fiji Islands, occupied by a people remarkable among the islanders of the Pacific alike for physical and intellectual peculiarities. The Fijian physiognomy is described as presenting general characteristics of debasement, when compared with that of the true Polynesian, and the entire proportions and contour of their figure are markedly inferior to those of the Friendly and Navigator islanders. This is the more remarkable in a people dwelling in the midst of abundance, and enjoying an unusual variety of choice articles of food. Their ferocious and treacherous habits, however, and the hideous customs of cannibalism and systematic parricide, with attendant crimes inevitable in such a social condition, have rendered the Fijian Islands, which seem fitted by nature to be abodes of happiness, among the most wretched scenes of moral degradation. Nevertheless it is in this strange island-group that the arts of the South Pacific have their highest development.

The Papuans, or Negrillos, appear to be the true inventive race, from whom the Fijians, who are unquestionably allied to them in blood, acquired, elaborated, and greatly improved many applications of art and skill. The Papuans of New Caledonia, though superior in physical characteristics to other islanders of the Negrillo type, present some curious analogies to the Australian, especially in their mode of sepulture. Fig. 58 is an example of their ingenuity in adapting a simple stone chisel to its haft, so as to serve as a boat-carpenter’s adze. But the ingenious Negrillo is altogether unsocial and prone to isolation, and the Fijians manifest an equally strong disinclination to leave their island-home. It required, therefore, the intervention of a migratory or aggressive race to diffuse their acquired knowledge and skill; and this is supplied by the Malayans, who are found in contact with many nations, and are of a roving disposition, the proper children of the sea. “Naturally,” says Dr. Pickering, “the most amiable of mankind, they are free from antipathies of race, are fond of novelty, inclined rather to follow than to lead, and in every respect seem qualified to become a medium of communication between the different branches of the human family.” Such an impressible race of mediators being found, a curious light is thrown on the diffusion of knowledge and the primitive arts throughout the widely-scattered island groups of the Southern Pacific, where almost every Polynesian art, it is said, can be distinctly traced to the Fiji Islands, while the Fijian himself is so averse to roam.

Mr. Wallace, in reviewing the races of the Malay archipelago, dwells on the marked differences, physically, intellectually, and morally, between the Papuan and the Malay. The central home of the Papuans is New Guinea and some of the adjacent islands; but the same ethnical characteristics are traceable over the islands to the east of New Guinea, as far as the Fijis. “The Papuan,” Mr. Wallace remarks, “has a greater feeling for art than the Malay. He decorates his canoe, his house, and almost every domestic utensil, with elaborate carving; a habit which is rarely found among tribes of the Malay race.” In the affections and moral sentiments, on the contrary, the Papuans compare unfavourably with the Malays, who are gentle and passive in all their social relations. But this is properly traced to their listless, apathetic character; while the vigour of the uncivilised Papuan manifests itself in the unrestrained display of every emotion and passion, even among the women and children, and in violent collisions, inevitable in the social life of this savage race. Among such a people the best and the worst characteristics are often strangely intermingled. The Fiji Islanders use the bow and throw the javelin with great dexterity; but their peculiar and distinguishing weapon is a short missile club, which all habitually wear stuck in the belt, the symbolic national instrument of assassination. Many analogies of history tend, however, to refute the error of assuming the occurrence of moral degradation, even when manifested in parricide, cannibalism, and systematic treachery and assassination, to be necessarily incompatible with such intellectual development as distinguishes the Fijians from the Malays or other islanders of the Pacific. Of all the aborigines of the Pacific, the ferocious New Zealander has proved most capable of civilisation; and is found moreover to possess a traditional poetry and mythical legends of a highly striking and peculiar character. And turning from still undeveloped races of the world, we have only to study deeds perpetrated by the pagan Saxon, the Hun, or the later Dane and Norseman, to see in what hideous aspects the energies of a rude people may be manifested, who are nevertheless capable of becoming leaders in the civilisation of Europe. To judge by the monkish chronicles, no Fiji cannibal could surpass, either in savage atrocity or in hideousness of aspect, the Hungarian or Northman from whom the proudest of Europe’s nobles claim descent. The chroniclers of Germany, France, and Italy, dwell on the savage fury of the Huns; and the liturgy of the Gallican Church of the ninth century preserves the memorial of the pagan Northmen’s ravages, in the supplication added to its litany: _A furore Normannorum libera nos_.

It is obvious therefore that the savage vices of the Fijians are perfectly compatible with considerable skill in such arts as pertain to their primitive and insular condition. Their musical instruments are superior to those of the Polynesians, and include the Pan-pipe and others unknown in the islands beyond their range. Their pottery also exhibits great variety of form, and includes examples of vessels combined in groups, presenting a curious correspondence to similar productions of Peruvian art. Their fishing-nets and lines are remarkable for neat and skilful workmanship, and they carry cultivation to a considerable extent. “Indeed,” remarks the ethnologist of the United States Expedition, in summing up the characteristics of the Fijians, “we soon began to perceive that the people were in possession of almost every art known to the Polynesians, and of many others besides. The highly-finished workmanship was unexpected, everything being executed until recently, and even now for the most part, without the use of iron. In the collection of implements and manufactures brought home by the Expedition, the observer will distinguish in the Fijian division something like a school of arts for the other Pacific islands.” Fig. 59 shows two characteristic specimens of their pottery selected from the Smithsonian collections at Washington. They are extremely well burnt, and finished with a bright glaze. One of them illustrates a class of double vessels suggestive of certain analogies with a familiar style of Peruvian pottery; and the prevailing characteristics of the whole collection confirm the superiority ascribed to the Fijian artificer. In such a strangely-gifted savage race we see the degradation of which human nature is susceptible; and at the same time recognise germs of a constructive and artistic capacity capable of development into many marvellous manifestations, if once subjected to such influences as those which changed the merciless pirate of the northern seas into the refined Norman, the chivalrous crusader, and the imaginative troubadour.

The native races of America are neither devoid of energy nor ingenious artistic skill; and the progress attained by the Mexicans and Peruvians, as well as by the nations of Central America, proved their capacity for advancement in the arts of civilisation. But the fate which has everywhere befallen the Red Indians when brought into direct contact with European settlers, shows how impossible it is to abruptly bridge over the gulf which separates the infancy of nations from a maturity like that to which the rude Saxon and Northman attained through the schooling of many centuries. The Aztecs at the time of the Mexican conquest were probably not ruder than the first Angle and Saxon colonists. They were certainly no crueler than the Northmen of the eighth century. But they were far in advance of the northern tribes from which, according to Aztec traditions, they traced their descent.

Among the barbarous races of the northern continent, the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy, though scarcely rising above the hunter stage, offer a subject of study of peculiar value in reference to the ethnology of the New World. In the great valley of the St. Lawrence, at the period of earliest European contact with its native tribes, we find this confederacy of Indian nations in the most primitive condition as to all knowledge of progressive arts; but full of energy, delighting in military enterprise, and amply endued with the qualities requisite for effecting permanent conquests over a civilised but unwarlike people. Nor did the primitive arts of the Iroquois prevent the development of incipient germs of civilisation among them. Agriculture was systematically practised; and their famous league, wisely established, and maintained unbroken through very diversified periods of their history, exhibits a people advancing in many ways towards the initiation of a self-originated civilisation, when the intrusion of Europeans abruptly arrested its progress, and brought them in contact with elements of foreign progress pregnant for them only with sources of degradation and final destruction.

The historian of the Iroquois,[71] when describing their simple arts and manufactures, remarks, that in the western mounds rows of arrow-heads or flint-blades have been found lying side by side, like teeth, the row being about two feet long. “This has suggested the idea that they were set in a frame, and fastened with thongs, thus making a species of sword.”[72] In this description we cannot fail to recognise the _mahguahuitl_, or native sword of Mexico and Yucatan. In the large canoe with its armed crew, first met off the latter coast, Herrera tells us the Indians had “swords made of wood, having a gutter in the forepart, in which were sharp-edged flints strongly fixed with a sort of bitumen and thread.” Among the Mexicans this toothed blade was armed with the _itzli_, or obsidian, capable of taking an edge like a razor; and the destructive powers of this formidable weapon are frequently dwelt upon by the early Spaniards. Among the ruins of Kabah, in Yucatan, the attention of Stephens was attracted by the protruding corner of a huge sculptured slab, the basso-relievos on which consist of an upright figure having a lofty plume of feathers falling to his heels; while another figure kneels before him holding in his hands the very same weapon, with its flint or obsidian blades projecting from the wooden socket. The idea it suggests is not necessarily that assumed by Stephens: that the sculptors and architects of the great ruins of Central America and Yucatan were the same people whom the Spaniards found there on their landing. The sculpture may be of a greatly older date. On its lower compartment is a row of hieroglyphics; and the suppliant attitude of the armed figure is rather suggestive of a record of conquest over some barbarian chief of Mexican or more northern tribes, of whom the flint-edged sword-blade was the most typical characteristic. Nevertheless, there is a singular interest in the simple chain of evidence, thus confirmatory of the Aztec traditions of original migration, and the subjugation of the elder civilised race of Anahuac by northern warriors: which leads us, step by step, from such rude arts as those of the Iroquois, and relics of other barbarous tribes in western sepulchral mounds, to the Mexican armature of the era of the conquest, and artistic records of the lettered architects of Yucatan.

The history of the Iroquois and their simple arts, illustrates with peculiar aptness the unwritten chronicles of the New World. In their rude state they achieved a remarkable civil and military organisation, and acquired more extensive and enduring influence than any nation of native American lineage, excepting the civilised Mexicans and Peruvians. Their own traditions pointed to an era when they migrated from the northern shores of the St. Lawrence into that region to the south and east of Lake Ontario, where they dwelt through all the period of their authentic history; though two members of the league, the Senecas and Onondagas, claimed to be autochthones, sprung from the soil of that Iroquois territory. The league embraced the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Mohawks, all united in a strictly federal union; and to this the Tuscaroras were admitted, on their expulsion from North Carolina in 1715. The claim of a common origin advanced by a people occupying territory so far to the south, throws an interesting light on the migrations of Indian tribes. It is confirmed by the character of their language, and received practical recognition in the assignment of a portion of the Oneida territory for their occupation. In the seventeenth century the Iroquois were the great aggressive nationality of the continent to the north of Mexico. In the very beginning of that century, Captain John Smith, the founder of Virginia, encountered their canoes on the upper part of the Chesapeake Bay, bearing a band of them to the territories of the Powhattan confederacy. The Shawnees, Susquehannocks, Nanticokes, Miamis, Delawares, and Minsi, were, one after another, reduced by them to the condition of dependent tribes. Even the Canarse or Long-Island Indians found no protection from them in their sea-girt home beyond the Hudson; and their power was felt from the St. Lawrence to Tennessee, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

How long before the discovery of this vast region by Europeans, it had been in occupation by those who claimed to be its autochthones, we have no other knowledge than their own traditions of migration. But so far as arts are any evidence of national progress, they were then in their infancy. The region they occupied offered no advantages for the inauguration of a copper or bronze era, such as those of Lake Superior or the Southern Andes supplied to their ancient possessors. Of working in metals they knew nothing; and only supplemented their primitive implements, wrought in stone, flint, horn, bone, and wood, by barter with the European intruders. Nevertheless, for nearly two centuries, the Indians of the Five Nations, as they were called before the addition of the Tuscaroras, presented a sturdy and unbroken front to the encroachments alike of Dutch, French, and British colonists. But their hostility was concentrated in opposition to the French nation; and as the rival colonies of France and England were long nearly balanced, it is not unjustly affirmed by the historian of the Iroquois, that France owed the final overthrow of her magnificent schemes of colonisation in North America to their uncompromising antagonism.

Among the Mexicans the arts of a true stone-period had been carried to the highest perfection, along with a development of those of their bronze age. On the northern frontier of Mexico, towards the head-waters of the Great Barauca, is the Cerro de Navajas, the “Hill of Knives,” where, before the conquest, obsidian was mined for manufacturing purposes: like the chert and hornstone of the Flint Ridge pits of Kentucky and Ohio. Examples of elaborately-worked obsidian and flint, and of polished implements and ornaments of stone, executed by Mexican artificers, rival the finest specimens recovered among the relics of Europe’s neolithic period. The Christy collection is specially rich in objects of this class. One flame-shaped arrow-head chipped with the nicest art, is evidently executed as a display of lapidary skill. Another fine spear-blade, made of a semi-opalescent chalcedony which occurs as concretions in the trachytic lavas of Mexico, measures eight inches long, and is supposed to have served as a state halberd, as it is much too delicate for actual warfare. But it is obvious that a finer material than usual frequently tempted the worker in flint or obsidian to an unwonted display of his art. In various private collections in Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, I have seen choice specimens of spear and arrow-heads, and other objects, made of jasper, milky-quartz, and rock crystal; some of them wrought into fantastic or purely ornamental forms.

A state battle-axe in the Christy collection made of green quartzose avanturine, measures 11 inches in length. It is a thick wedge, with the upper part carved as the head of a Mexican idol or king, and the arms outlined on the blade. Jade, green serpentine, grey granite, agate, and obsidian of different colours, were all worked into various shapes for ornament or use, with a care often prompted by the attractive character of the material, and with a skill no longer known to the native Mexican artificers.

In the southern continent also examples of mastery in the manufacture of flint and stone implements survive, in some cases as the sole memorials of races which have perished; and traces of the arts of savage tribes in the primitive condition of a purely stone-period lie everywhere outside of the remarkable centres of Peruvian civilisation. Three such relics from the Bay of Honduras are deserving of special notice, from their unusually large size and peculiar forms. They were found, along with other implements, about the year 1794, in a cave between two and three miles inland. One of them is now preserved in the British Museum, and the others have been repeatedly exhibited at meetings of the Archæological Institute. The accompanying illustrations will best convey an idea of their peculiar forms. One (Fig. 60) is a serrated weapon, pointed at both ends, and measuring sixteen and a half inches long. Another (Fig. 61), in the form of a crescent, with projecting points, measuring 17 inches in greatest length, may have served as a weapon of parade, like the state partisan or halberd of later times. The third, which is imperfect, is shown in Fig. 62. The whole are examples of flint implements of unusually large proportions, and chipped with extraordinary regularity and skill. A well-executed head of a warrior, in terra-cotta, obtained about the same period, if not indeed along with these implements, was presented to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1798, and is figured on a subsequent page. The unwonted size of those Honduras implements attracted special notice when first produced; but this ceases to excite surprise when it is seen that blocks of flint or hornstone adequate for the largest of them are readily procurable throughout extensive regions of North America, as in Ohio and Kentucky. To the north of Ohio, where the material is rare, flint implements and weapons are mostly of small size. The larger implements are of stone; and among the Iroquois, the Hurons, the Chippewas, and other tribes on the shores of the great lakes, the copper of Lake Superior seems to have been recognised, and sought for, as a fitter material for large hatchets and spear-heads.

In this respect we see the very privations of those Indian tribes forcing on their notice the resources of the copper region, which might, among so energetic a people as the Iroquois proved themselves to be, have at length led to such a mastery of the metallurgic arts as was achieved by the nations of Mexico and Peru. But their energies were diverted into far different channels by the very advent of races already familiar with all the highest acquirements of civilisation; and whatever time might have developed out of the Iroquois confederacy, akin to the native civilisation which had already taken root beyond the verge of their southern conquests, they had little to hope from the triumph of either of the European aggressors between whom they so long held the balance. In the rivalry of the French and English colonists the insular race proved the victors; and when at a later date England and her American colonies came into collision, the nations of the League took different sides, and the Hodenosaunee[73] finally ceased to be the ideal rallying-point of a united people. They had run their destined course; and now the poor scattered remnants of the once-famous Indian federation serve only to illustrate how irreconcilable are the elements of high civilisation with the most vigorous and progressive energy of a people only maturing the first stage in the progress of nations. They lacked the qualities which protect an inferior race from extinction when brought into contact with a long matured civilisation. Passive and naturally submissive races, like the Malay or the Negro, survive the intrusion of a dominant race, and are protected by their docility, as the natural serfs of the intruders. But an energetic people, who find their chief employment in war and the chase, can be subjected to no useful servitude. They are separated by too wide a gulf from their rivals to claim any equality in the rights of civilisation. The only alternative left for them is to drive out the intruder, or to be exterminated by him like the bear and wolf. Stone, Bronze, and Iron Periods are not indispensable steps in the advancement of the human race; but all experience proves that when such extreme social conditions are abruptly brought into contact as stone and iron periods aptly symbolise, the tendency is towards the degradation and final extinction of the less advanced race.

[68] _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, 2d Ed. vol. i. p. 331.

[69] _U. S. Geological Survey_, 1872, p. 652.

[70] _Alaska and its Resources_, p. 418.

[71] Lewis H. Morgan: _League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois_.

[72] See footnote 71.

[73] _Ho-dé-no-sau-nee_, or People of the Long House, expressive of the numerous assembly in the Council of the Confederacy.