Part 5

The philosopher Hobbes taught that the natural condition of man in society is one of perpetual warfare with his neighbors. This grim theory is sadly attested by a study of savage life. The wretched Fuegians, the miserable Australians, with really nothing worth living for, let alone dying for, fall to cutting each other’s throats the moment that tribe encounters tribe. So it has been in all ages, so it has been in all stages of culture. The warrior, the hero, is the one who wins the hearts of women by his fame, and the devotion of men by his prowess. Civilization helps not at all. In no century of the world’s history have such destructive battles been fought as in the nineteenth; at no former period have the powers of the earth collected such gigantic armies and navies as to-day.

This love of combat at once separates and unites nations. To destroy the common foe, the bonds of national or tribal unity are drawn the tighter; and the aversion to the enemy tends to the preservation of the ethnic type.

In spite of the countless miseries which follow in its train, war has probably been the highest stimulus to racial progress. It is the most potent excitant known of all the faculties. The intense instinct of self-preservation will prompt to an intellectual energy which nothing else can awake. The grandest works of imagination, the immortal outbursts of the poets, from Homer to Whitman, have been under the stimulus of the war-cry ringing in their ears.

The world-conquerors and the holy wars, Alexander and Napoleon, the Crusades and the Mohammedan invasions, have been landmarks in history, a destruction of the effete, an introduction of the new and the viable. Guizot’s bold statement that in the decisive battles of the world it has been, not the strongest battalions, but the truest idea which has conquered, may be a profound ethnologic truth. Certain it is that in weighing the psychical elements of man’s nature and their influence on the past history of the species, we must assign to his combative instincts a most prominent place as stimulants, and we must recognize, amid all the miseries which they have brought upon him, the part they have played in his development. That they have always resulted in promoting the “survival of the fittest,” it is hard to believe, and there is much to make us doubt; but that a great deal of the unfit has thus been destroyed, we may reasonably accept.

What has been true always, is true to-day. It is force, might, which forever exercises “the right of eminent domain;” and this principle is as necessary as it is indestructible. Proudhon was logical, when, in his treatise on _War and Peace_, he placed war and the duty of waging war at the basis of all society, and defended it as the necessary condition of civilization, inasmuch as it alone is the highest form of judicial action, the last appeal of the oppressed. Never, we may be sure, will the human species be ready or willing to forego this, the greatest of all their privileges.

LECTURE III.

THE BEGINNINGS AND SUBDIVISIONS OF RACES.

CONTENTS.--The origin of Man. Theories of monogenism and polygenism; of evolution; heterogenesis. Identities point to one origin. Birthplace of the species. The oldest human relics. Remains of the highest apes. Question of climate. Negative arguments. Darwin’s belief that the species originated in Africa confirmed; but with modifications. Quaternary geography of Europe and Africa. Northern Africa united with Southern Europe. Former shore lines. The Sahara Sea. The quaternary continents of “Eurafrica,” and “Austafrica.” Relics of man in them. Man in pre-glacial times. The Glacial Age. Effect on man. Scheme of geologic time during the Age of Man. His development into races. Approximate date of this. Localities where it occurred. The “areas of characterization.” Relations of continents to races. Theory of Linnaeus; of modern ethnography. Classification of races. General ethnographic scheme. Sub-divisions of races; branches; stocks; groups; peoples; tribes; nations. Other terms; ethnos and ethnic; culture; civilization. Stadia of culture.

In the rapid survey contained in the previous lectures you have seen in how many points the races differ. No wonder that the question has often been seriously mooted by scientific men, Could they all have been derived from one common ancestral stock? This is the old debate about “the unity of the human race,” still surviving under the more learned terms of _monogenism_ or _polygenism_.

As to that other question, whether man came into being as such by a gradual development, evolution, or transformation, from some lower mammal, this may be regarded as the only hypothesis now known to science, and must, therefore, be accepted, at least provisionally, until some better is proposed. It is the only theory consistent with man’s place in the zoölogical world, and is borne out by numerous anatomical analogies, which have been referred to in my first lecture.

In fact, we are driven to it by necessity. No other origin of species than by transformation of earlier forms has been suggested, even by those who reject it. I do not speak of specific creation, for that supposition does not belong to science, but to an obscurant mysticism, which is the negative of all true knowledge.

But within the limits of the transformation theory there is more than one method by which varying forms are produced, and one of these may prove applicable to man, in whose earliest remains we have so far found no positive indications of a lower physical character than he now has.[36] So far, the “missing link” is as much out of sight as ever it was; so far, man appears to have been always what he is to-day.

May he not, as a species, have come into being through a short series of well-marked varieties, each produced by what is called “heterogenesis,” that is, the birth of children unlike their parents? All children are unlike their parents, more or less; and though at present this unlikeness is strictly within the limits of the several races, it is the opinion of some who have studied the matter, that in earlier geologic epochs changes in organic forms were more rapid and more profound than at present.

I am aware that this suggestion of heterogenesis looks like a return to the ancient doctrine called _generatio equivoca_, which, in its old form, is certainly obsolete. But there is no question that in many existing plants and animals we find singular evidence that from a given form another may arise, widely different in structure, and perpetuate itself indefinitely. I am convinced that the importance of these facts has never been properly appreciated by students of the origin of species, and of the origin of men in particular.

This, or any hypothesis of evolution, renders the supposition quite needless that the various races had distinct ancestral origins. Any evolutionist who accepts the view that man is but a differentiation from some anthropoid ape, is straining at a gnat after swallowing the camel, if he hesitates to believe that the comparatively slight differences between the races may not have originated from like influences. Furthermore, the resemblances between the various races are altogether too numerous and exact to render it likely that they could have been acquired through several ancestries running back to various lower zoological forms; a consideration greatly strengthened by the fact that man is the only species of his genus, and there is even no genus of his class closely related to himself. The chances that such a perfected animal should have been twice or oftener developed from the apes, monkeys or lemurs--his nearest cousins--are so small that we must dismiss the supposition.

It seems to me, indeed, that any one who will patiently study the parallelisms of growth in the arts and sciences, in poetry and objects of utility, throughout the various races of men, cannot doubt of their psychical identity. Still more, if he will acquaint himself with the modern science of Folk-lore, and will note how the very same tales, customs, proverbs, superstitions, games, habits, and so on, recur spontaneously in tribes severed by thousands of leagues, he will not think it possible that creatures so wholly identical could have been produced by independent lines of evolution.

_The Birthplace of the Species._--Accepting the theories therefore of the evolutionists and the monogenists as the most plausible in the present state of science, it is quite proper to inquire where primeval man first appeared, and what were his social conditions and personal appearance.

To some it may seem premature to put such questions. They are needlessly timid. It is never too soon to propound any question in science; always too soon to declare that any has been finally and irrevocably answered.

Beginning our search for the birthplace of the species, we may consider that it will be indicated by the cumulative evidence of three conditions. We may look for it, (1) where the oldest relics of man or his industries have been found; (2) where the remains of the highest of the lower mammals, especially the man-like apes, have been exhumed, as it is assumed that man himself descended from some such form; and (3) where we know from palæontologic evidence a climate prevailed suited to man’s unprotected early conditions.

The first of these lines of investigation leads us to the science of “pre-historic archæology.” We shall discover that a study of this branch of learning is indispensable not only in this connection, but to solve many other questions in ethnography. Here its answer is unexpected. We have been taught by long tradition and venerable documents to look for the first home of primeval man “somewhere in Asia,” as Professor Max Müller generously puts it. He is inclined to think that from the highlands of that continent the tribes dispersed in various directions, some going to the extreme north, and then southward into Europe. Others would have it that the species itself came into life in the boreal regions, in that epoch when a mild climate prevailed there.

Such dreams meet no countenance from pre-historic archæology. The oldest remains of man’s arts, the first rude flints which he shaped into utensils and weapons, have not been discovered in Asia, and do not occur at all in the northern latitudes of either continent. They have been exhumed from the late tertiary or early quaternary deposits of southern England, of France, of the Iberian peninsula, and of the valleys of the Atlas in northern Africa. They have been searched for most diligently but in vain in Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, Siberia, and Canada. Not any of the older types of so-called “palæolithic” implements have been reported in early deposits in those countries.[37] But in the “river drift” of the Thames, the Somme, the Garonne, and the Tagus, quantities of rough stone implements have been disinterred, proving that in a remote epoch, at a time when the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, the African elephant and the extinct apes, found a congenial home near the present sites of London, Paris and Lisbon, man also was there. These relics, especially those found in Portugal, Central Spain and Southern France, are the very oldest proofs of the presence of man on the earth yet brought to light.

Where, now, do we find the remains of the highest of the lower animals? By a remarkable coincidence, in the same region. Of all the anthropoid apes yet known to the palæontologist, that most closely simulating man is the so-called _Dryopithecus fontani_, whose bones have been disinterred in the upper valleys of the Garonne, in Southern France. Its height was about that of a man, its teeth strongly resembled those of the Australians, and its food was chiefly vegetables and fruits. Other remains of a similar character have been found in Italy.[38]

It is well known to geologists that the apes and monkeys or Simiadæ were abundant and highly developed in Southern Europe in the pliocene and early pleistocene, just the time, as near as we can fix it, that man first appeared there. These facts answer the third of our inquiries--that for a climate suitable to man in an unprotected early condition, when he had to contend with the elements and the parsimony of nature, ill-provided as he is with many of the natural advantages possessed by other animals. At that date Southern Europe and Northern Africa were under what are called sub-tropical conditions, possessing a climate not wholly tropical, but yet singularly mild and equable. This we know from the remains, both animal and vegetable, preserved in the deposits of that epoch.

A series of negative arguments strengthens this conclusion. Where we find no remains of apes or monkeys of the higher class, we cannot place the scene of man’s ancestral evolution. This excludes America, where no tailless and no narrow-nosed (catarhine) monkeys and no large apes have been found; it excludes Australia, and all portions of the Old World north of the Alps and the Himalayas.

In view of such facts, Darwin reached the conclusion that it is most probable that our earliest progenitors lived on the African continent. There to this day we find on the one hand the human beings most closely allied to the lower animals, and the two species of these, the gorilla and the chimpanzee, now man’s nearest relations among the brutes.[39]

Darwin was disturbed in this conclusion by the presence of the large apes to whom I have referred in Southern Europe in late tertiary times. This, however, merely requires a modification in his conclusion, the general tenor of which, to the effect that man was first developed in the warm regions of the western or Atlantic portion of the Old World, somewhere within the present or ancient area of Africa, and not in Asia, has been steadily strengthened since the great evolutionist wrote his remarkable work on the _Descent of Man_.

_Quaternary Geography of Europe and Africa._--The modification which I refer to is the obvious fact that since the late tertiary epoch, and especially during and after the glacial epoch, some material changes have taken place in the physical geography of Europe and Africa. To these I must now ask your particular attention, as they controlled not only the scene of man’s origin, but the lines of his early migrations.

When primal man, with no weapon or tool but one chipped from a stone flake, roamed over France, England and the Iberian peninsula, along with the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the elephant, the coast lines of Europe and North Africa were quite unlike those of to-day. England and Ireland were united to the mainland, and neither the Straits of Dover nor St. George’s Channel had been furrowed by the waves. Huge forests, such as can yet be traced near Cromer, covered the plains which are now the bottom of the German Ocean. In the broad shallow sea to the north, the mountainous regions of Scandinavia rose as islands, and between them and the Ural Mountains its waters spread uninterruptedly.

To the south, Northern Africa was united to Southern Europe by two wide land-bridges, one at the Straits of Gibraltar, one connecting Tunis with Sicily and Italy. The eastern portion of the Mediterranean was a contracted fresh-water lake, pouring its waters into a broad stream which connected the Atlantic with the Indian Oceans. This stream covered most of the present desert of the Sahara, the delta of Egypt, and a large portion of Arabia and Southern Asia. Its northern beach extended along the southern base of the Atlas Mountains from the River Dra on the Atlantic to the Gulf of Gabes in the Mediterranean; thence northward between Malta and Sicily to the Straits of Otranto; by the Ionian islands easterly till it intersected the present coast-line near the mouth of the Orontes; northeasterly to about Diarbekir, whence it trended south and east along the foot of the Zagros mountains to the Persian Gulf. From that point it followed the present coast-line to the mouth of the Indus, and thence pursued the base of the great northern mountain range to the mouth of the Ganges, covering the north of Hindustan, while the southern elevations of that spacious peninsula, as well as a large part of southern and western Arabia, rose as extensive irregular islands above the water. Toward them the mainland of equatorial Africa extended much nearer than at present. It included in its area the island of Madagascar, and reached far beyond into the Indian Ocean. Toward the north, peninsulas and chains of islands, now the summits of the plateaus and mountains of the central Sahara, reached nearly or quite to the present shore-line of the Mediterranean, about Tripolis.[40]

This disposition of the water left two great land areas in the old world, probably not actually united though separated only by narrow straits, one between the modern Tripolis and Tunis, and another on the northern Syrian coast. I represent these areas on the accompanying map, not indeed minutely, but approximately.

The general accuracy of the contours delineated are now fully recognized by geologists. They are attested by the remaining beach-lines of this primitive ocean, by the geographical distribution of its contemporary fauna and flora, and by the proofs of elevation and submergence along the shores and in the bottom of the adjacent seas and oceans. The “great sink” of the western Sahara, the vast “schotts,” or shallow saltwater ponds south of the Atlas, the salt Dead Sea at the bottom of a profound depression, prove that the drying up of the ancient ocean is scarcely yet complete.

So familiar have these ancient continental areas become to geological students that they have been named like a newly-discovered island or cape. The northern continent has been called _Eurasia_, compounded of the words Europe and Asia, and the southern _Indo-Africa_, from a supposed union of India and Africa.[41]

Neither of these names is quite acceptable. The former leaves out of account the connection of Europe with Africa, which is of the first importance in the study of early man; and the latter assumes a geographic union between India and Africa, which is not likely to have existed in the period of man’s life on earth. I prefer the two names which I have inserted on the map; _Eurafrica_, indicating the connection between Europe and Africa, and _Austafrica_, designating the whole of the continent south of the ancient dividing sea. The name _Asia_ should be confined to the Central Asian plateau and the regions watered by the countless streams which flow from it toward the north, east and south.

_Relics of Man._--Such was the configuration of land in the Eastern hemisphere when man first appeared. We know he was there at that time. I have referred to his rude stone (palæolithic) implements exhumed from the river-drift of the Thames and the Somme, a deposit which dates from a time when the hippopotamus bathed in those rivers; still older seem some rough implements discovered in gravel layers near Madrid, Spain, deposited by some large river in early quaternary times. The worked flints near Lisbon were manufactured when a wide fresh-water lake existed where now not a trace of it is visible on the surface, and according to some archæologists, are the most ancient manufactured products yet discovered.[42]

In numerous parts of North Africa, as near Tlemcen in the province of Oran, and in Tunisia, the oldest forms of stone implements have been found in place beneath massive layers of quaternary travertin,[43] and in some of the most barren portions of the Libyan desert, now utterly sterile, the travertin contains abundant remains of leaves and grasses, along with chipped flints, proving that at the recession of this diluvial sea not only was the vegetation luxuriant, but man was then on the spot, as a hunter and fisher.[44]

Not less certain is it that he was a most ancient occupant of Austafrica. Chert implements of the true “river-drift” type have been discovered “in place” in quaternary stratified gravels near Thebes, and elsewhere in the Nile valley; and in the diamond field of the Cape of Good Hope, palæolithic forms have been exhumed from diluvial strata forty or fifty feet below the surface of the soil.[45]

From similar evidence we know that man spread widely over the habitable earth in that remote time. It is known to archæologists as the earliest period of the Stone Age, and the implements attributed to it are singularly alike in size and form. They seem to indicate a race of beings who were unprogressive, lacking perchance the stimulus of necessity in their mild climate and with their few needs.

_The Glacial Age._--But a wonderful change took place in their conditions of life. Slowly, from some yet unexplained cause, mighty ice-sheets, thousands of feet in thickness, gathered around the poles, and collected on the flanks of the northern mountains. With silent but irresistible might they advanced over land and sea, crushing beneath them all animal and vegetable life, changing the perennial summer of Eurafrica to an Arctic winter, or at best to an Alpine climate. The tropical animals fled, the plants perished, and under the enormous weight of the ice-mass, the ocean bottom in the north was depressed a thousand feet or more. This in turn brought about material oscillations in the land levels to the south. The bed of the Mediterranean sank, that of the Sahara Sea slightly rose, leaving the latter little more than a swamp, while the former assumed the shape which we now see.

These alterations in the land areas and climatic conditions exerted the profoundest influence on the destiny of man. When with the increasing cold the other animals native to warm regions had fled or perished, he remained to encounter with undaunted mind the rigors of the boreal climate. Instead of depressing or extinguishing him, these very obstacles seem to have been the spurs to his intellectual progress.

Men were still in the lower stages of culture, with no knowledge of metal, not capable of polishing stones, without a domestic animal or trace of agriculture. Yet everywhere these artisans possessed skill and sentiments far above that of the highest anthropoid ape described by the zoölogist. They knew the use of fire, they constructed shelters, they dwelt together in bands, they possessed some means of navigating streams, they ate both vegetable and animal food, they decorated themselves with colored earth and ornaments, they wielded a club, they twisted fibres into ropes and strings, if occasion required they fastened together skins for clothing. All this is proved by a careful study of what tools and implements they have left us.

_Development into Races._--Whatever may have been the physical type of men at their beginning, in culture they were upon the same level for a long while after they had dispersed over the globe.

When, where and how did they develop into the several distinct races that we now know?

We can answer these questions, not fully, but to some extent.

Man developed into certain strongly marked sub-species or races long before the dawn of history. More than six thousand years ago the racial traits of the black, the white, and the yellow races, and even of their subdivisions, were as pronounced and as ineffaceable as they are to-day. This we know from the representations on the Egyptian monuments of the third and sixth dynasties, from the comparative study of ancient skulls, and from the uniform testimony of the earliest writings, wherever we find them.