CHAPTER I.

THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN.

[Sidenote: The dawn of history.]

When St. Paulinus came to preach Christianity to the people of Northumbria, King Eadwine (so runs the legend) being minded to hear him, and wishing that his people should do so too, called together a council of his chief men and asked them whether they would attend to hear what the saint had to tell; and one of the king’s thanes stood up and said, ‘Let us certainly hear what this man knows, for it seems to me that the life of man is like the flight of a sparrow through a large room, where you, King, are sitting at supper in winter, while storms of rain and snow rage abroad. The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and straightway out again at another is, while within, safe from the storm; but soon it vanishes out of sight into the darkness whence it came. So the life of man appears for a short space; but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are all ways ignorant.’[1] This wise and true saying of the Saxon thane holds good too for the human race as far as its progress is revealed to us by history. We can watch this progress through a brief interval--for the period over which real, continuous authentic history extends; and beyond that is a twilight space, wherein, amid many fantastic shapes of mere tradition or mythology, here and there an object or an event stands out more clearly, lit up by a gleam from the sources of more certain knowledge which we possess.

To draw with as much accuracy as may be the outline of these shapes out of the past is the business of the prehistoric student; and to assist him in his task, what has he? First, he has the Bible narrative, wherein some of the chief events of the world’s history are displayed, but at uncertain distances apart. Then we have the traditions preserved in other writings, in books, or on old temple stones--in these the truth has generally to be cleared from a mist of allegory, or at least of mythology. And, lastly, besides these conscious records of times gone by, we have other dumb memorials, old buildings--cities or temples--whose makers are long since forgotten, old tools or weapons, buried for thousands of years, to come to light in our days; and again, old words, old beliefs, old customs, old arts, old forms of civilization which have been unwittingly handed down to us, can all, if we know the art to interpret their language, be made to tell us histories of the antique world. It is, then, no uninteresting study by which we learn how to make these silent records speak. ‘Of man’s activity and attainment,’ Carlyle finely says, ‘the chief results are aeriform, mystic, and preserved in tradition only: such are his Forms of Government, with the Authority they rest on; his Customs or Fashions both of Cloth-habits and Soul-habits; much more his collective stock of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty he has acquired of manipulating nature--all these things, as indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in any way be fixed under lock and key, but must flit, spirit-like, on impalpable vehicles from Father to Son; if you demand sight of them they are nowhere to be met with. Visible Ploughmen and Hammermen there have been, even from Cain and Tubalcain downwards; but where does your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic and other Manufacturing SKILL lie warehoused? It transmits itself on the atmospheric air, on the sun’s rays (by Hearing and by Vision); it is a thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite spiritual sort.’

How many of these intangible spiritual possessions must man have acquired before he has learned the art of writing history, and so of keeping a record of what had gone before: how much do we know that any individual race of men has learned before it brings itself forward with distinctness in this way! For as a first condition of all man must have learned to write; and writing, as we shall hereafter see, is a slowly developing art, which man acquired by ages of gradual experiment. His language, too, must ere this have reached a state of considerable cultivation; and it will be our object in the course of these pages to show through what a long history of its own the language of any nation must go before it becomes fit for the purposes of literature--through how many changes it passes, and what a story it reveals to us by every change. And then, again, before a nation can have a history it must _be_ a nation, must have a national life to record; that is to say, the people who compose it must have left the simple condition of society which belongs to a primitive age, the state of a mere hunter or fisher, even the state of being a mere shepherd, the pastoral and nomadic life which precedes the knowledge of agriculture. He must have drawn closer the loose bonds which held men together under the conditions of patriarchal life, and have constituted a more permanent system of society. Whether under pressure from without, the pressure of hostile nationalities, or only from the growth of a higher conception of social life, the nation has had to rise from out of a mere collection of tribes, until the head of the family has become the king--the rude tents of early days have grown into houses and temples, and the pens of their sheepfolds grown into walled cities, such as Corinth or Athens or Rome. Such changes as these must be completed before history comes to be written; and with such changes as these, and with a thousand others, changes and growths in Art, in Poetry, in Manufactures, in Commerce, and in Laws, the pre-historical student has to deal. On all these subjects we shall have something to say.

Before, however, we enter upon any one of these it is right that we remind the reader--and remind him once for all--that our knowledge upon all these points is but partial and uncertain, and never of such a character as will allow us to speak with dogmatic assurance. Our information can necessarily never be direct; it can only be built upon inferences of a higher or lower degree of probability. It is, however, a necessity of our minds that from whatever information we possess we must form an unbroken panorama--imagination has no place for unfilled blanks; and we may form our picture freely and without danger of harm, so long as we are ready to modify or enlarge it when more knowledge is forthcoming. As the eye can in a moment supply the deficiencies of some incompleted picture, a landscape of which it gets only a partial glance, or a statue which has lost a feature, so the mind selects from its knowledge those facts which form a continuous story, and loses those which are known only as isolated fragments.

Set a practised and an unpractised draughtsman to draw a circle, and we may witness how differently they go to work. The second never takes his pencil off the paper, and produces his effect by one continuous line, which the eye has no choice but at once to condemn as incomplete. The wiser artist proceeds by a number of short consecutive strokes, splitting up, as it were, his divergence over the whole length of the figure he is drawing, and so allows the eye, or perhaps one should rather say the mind, by that faculty it has, to select the complete figure which it can conceive more easily than express. No one of the artist’s strokes is the true fraction of a circle, but the result is infinitely more satisfactory than if he had tried to make his pencil follow unswervingly the curve he wished to trace. Or again, notice how a skilful draughtsman will patch up by a number of small strokes any imperfect portion of a curve he is drawing, and we have another like instance of this selective faculty of the eye or of the mind. Just in the same way is it with memory. Our ideas must be carried on continuously, we cannot afford to remember _lacunæ_, mere blank spaces.

In the Bible narrative, for example, wherein, as has before been said, certain events of the world’s history are related with distinctness, but where as a rule nothing is said of the times which intervened between them, we are wont to make very insufficient allowance for these unmentioned periods, and form for ourselves a rather arbitrary picture of the real course of things, fitting two events on to one another which were really separated by long ages. To correct this view, to enlarge the series of known facts concerning the early history of the human race, comes in pre-historic inquiry; and again, to correct the picture we now form, doubtless fresh information will continue to pour in. All this is no reason why we should pronounce our present picture to be untrue; it is only incomplete. We must be always ready to enlarge it, and to fill in the outlines, but still we can only remember the facts which we have already acquired, if we look at them, not as fragments only, but as a complete whole.

In representing, therefore, throughout the following chapters, the advance of the human race in the discovery of all those arts and faculties which go to make up civilization in the light of a continuous progress, it will not be necessary to pause and remind the reader in every case that these steps of progress which seem to spread themselves out so clearly before us have been made in an uncertain manner, sometimes rapidly, sometimes very slowly and painfully, sometimes by immense strides, sometimes by continual haltings and goings backwards and forwards. It will be enough to say here, once for all, that our history must be thought of as a history of events rather than a strictly chronological one; just as the geological periods are not measured by days and years, but by the mutations through which our solid-seeming earth has passed.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The earliest traces of man.]

First we turn to what must needs be our earliest inquiry--the search after the oldest traces of man which have been found upon the earth. It has been said that one of the first fruits of knowledge is to show us our own ignorance; and certainly in the early history of the world and of man there is nothing which science points out so clearly as the vast silent periods whereof until recently we had no idea. It is difficult for us of the present age to remember how short a time it is since all our certain knowledge, touching the earth on which we live, lay around that brief period of its existence during which it had come under the notice and the care of man.

When all we knew of Europe, and especially of our own islands, belonged to the comparatively short time during which they have been known to history, we had in truth much to wonder at in the political changes these countries were seen to have undergone; and our imaginations could be busy with the contrast between the unchanged features of our lands and seas and the ever-varying character of those who dwelt upon or passed over them. It is interesting to think that on such a river bank or on such a shore Cæsar or Charlemagne have actually stood, and that perhaps the grass or flowers or shells under their feet looked just the same as they do now, that the waves beat upon the strand in the same cadence, or the water flowed by with the same trickling sound. But when we open the pages of geology, we have unrolled before us a history of the earth itself, extending over periods compared with which the longest epoch of what is commonly called history seems scarcely more than a day, and of mutations in the face of nature so grand and awful that as we reflect upon them, forgetting for an instant the enormous periods required to bring these changes about, they sound like the fantastic visions of some seer, telling in allegorical language the history of the creation and destruction of the world.

Of such changes, not the greatest, but the most interesting to the question we have at present in hand, were those vicissitudes of climate which followed upon the time when the formation of the crust of the earth had been practically completed. We learn of a time when, instead of the temperate climate which now favours our country, these islands, with the whole of the north of Europe, were wrapped in one impenetrable sheet of ice. The tops of our mountains, as well as of those of Scandinavia and the north of continental Europe, bear marks of the scraping of this enormous glacier, which must have risen to a height of two or three thousand feet. Not a single green thing, therefore, might be seen between our latitudes and the pole, while the ice-sheet, passing along the floor of the North Sea, united these islands with Scandinavia and spread far out into the deep waters of the Atlantic. For thousands of years such a state of things endured, but at last it slowly passed away. As century followed century the glacier began to decrease in size. From being colder than that of any explored portion of our hemisphere, the climate of northern Europe began to amend, until at last a little land became visible, which was covered first with lichens, then with thicker moss, and then with grass; then shrubs began to grow, and they expanded into trees and the trees into forests, while still the ice-sheet went on decreasing, until now the glaciers remained only in the hills. Animals returned from warmer climates to visit our shores. The birds and beasts and fishes of the land and sea were not much different from those which now inhabit there; the species were different, but the genera were for the most part the same. Everything seemed to have been preparing for the coming of man, and it is about this time that we find the earliest traces of his presence upon earth.[2]

We may try and imagine what was the appearance of the world, and especially of Europe--for it is in Europe that most of these earliest traces of our race have as yet been found, though all tradition and likelihood point out man’s first home to have been in Asia--when we suppose that man first appeared upon these western shores. At this time the continent of Europe stood at a higher level than it does now. The whole of the North Sea, even between Scotland and Denmark, is not more than fifty fathoms, or three hundred feet deep, while the Irish Sea is not more than sixty fathoms; and at this period undoubtedly the British Isles, besides being all joined together, formed part of the mainland, not by being united to France only, but by the presence of dry land all the way from Scotland to Denmark, over all that area now called the German Ocean. Our Thames and our other eastern rivers were then but tributaries of one large stream, which bore through this continent, and up into the northern seas, their waters united with those of the Rhine, and perhaps of the Weser and the Elbe. The same upheaval turned into land a portion of the Atlantic Ocean, all that bed probably which now extends from Spain and Africa as far as the Azores and the Canaries. The north of Africa was joined on to this continent and to Spain, for the narrow Straits of Gibraltar had not yet been formed; but a great sea stood where we now have the Great Sahara, and united the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, while a great Mediterranean Sea stood in Central Asia, and has left no more than traces in the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral.

We have to look at a map to see the effect of these changes in the appearance of Europe; and there were no doubt other internal changes in the appearances of the countries themselves. The climate still was much more extreme than it is now. The glaciers were not yet quite gone. And the melting of these and of the winter snows gave rise to enormous rivers which flowed from every hill. Our little river the Ouse, for instance, which flows out through Norfolk into the Wash, was, when swollen by these means, probably many miles broad. Vast forests grew upon the banks of the rivers, and have left their traces in our peat formations; and in these forests roamed animals unknown to us. Of these the most notable was the mammoth (_Elephas primigenius_, in the language of the naturalists), a huge, maned elephant, whose skeleton and gigantic tusks are conspicuous in some of our museums, and who has given his name to this the earliest age of man’s existence: it is called the Mammoth Age of man. With the mammoth, too, lived other species of animals, which are either now extinct, or have since been driven from our latitudes; the woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion, the cave bear, the Lithuanian bison, the urus, the reindeer, and the musk-ox. It is with the remains of these animals, near the ancient banks of these great rivers, that we find the earliest tools and weapons manufactured by human hands.

[Sidenote: Implements of the river drift.]

The earliest of all the known remains of human-kind are the implements which are found deposited in the ancient beds of rivers. Now flooded by melting snow into huge lakes and now again drained off by the sudden bursting of a bound, it was natural that these great streams should often change their course, and often dig out huge areas of soil from the land upon their banks. In doing so they sometimes dug out the implements which earlier generations of men had left behind them on the surface of the soil, and which a few years would be enough to cover with mould and hide from sight. Then carrying along these implements of flint, they have deposited them in great beds of sand and gravel, somewhere in their ancient course.

We have no means of measuring the time which may have elapsed since these stone weapons and tools were made. And we need not speak here of the geological changes which must have passed over the surface of the earth since they were deposited upon it. All we know is that, after the great streams flowing through wide valleys have dug these implements from under the earth which time had heaped over them, carried them along and deposited them once more amid sand and pebbles in a bed upon some point of its course, the river must through long subsequent years have cut so much deeper into the valley through which it flowed, and at the same time probably so shrunk in its bed, that these river drifts, as they are called, stand in many cases fifty, eighty, a hundred feet above the level of the present stream. It is because they are found in the beds made by the ancient rivers, that the implements of this period are called _drift implements_.

The river Ouse, of which we spoke just now, which, though to-day a small river, drains a large and level country as it runs through the counties of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Cambridge, has been one of the most prolific in this class of pre-historic remains. Another river which still better deserves to be remembered in this respect is the Somme in the north of France. For it was in the beds of this stream, by Abbeville and Amiens, that the drift implements were first discovered, or first recognized for what they really are, the earliest traces of human labour; and it was here that the foundation was laid for this branch of pre-historic study by M. Boucher de Perthes. This was forty-one years ago, in 1847.

These _drift implements_, then, form a class apart--apart even from all other stone implements made by man, and probably earlier than any other class. Very simple and rude are these drift implements. It would require a skilled eye to detect any difference between most of them and a flint which had only been chipped by natural means. But the first thing to remember is, that the makers of these implements had nothing but other still ruder materials to help them in this manufacture of theirs. Metals of all kinds were as yet utterly unknown to man.

We who are so habituated to the employment of metal, either in the manufacture or the composition of every article which meets our eye, can scarcely realize that man lived long ages on the earth before the metals and minerals, its hidden treasures, were revealed to him. This pen I write with is of metal, or, were it a quill, it would still have been shaped by the use of steel; the rags of which this paper is made up have been first cut by metal knives, then bleached by a mineral (chlorine), then torn on a metal cylinder, then thrown into a vat which was either itself of metal or had been shaped by metal tools, then drawn on a _wire_-cloth, etc. And so it is with everything which is made nowadays. We can scarcely think of any single manufacture in which is not traceable the paramount influence of man’s discoveries beneath the surface of the ground. But primitive man could profit by no such inherited knowledge, and had only begun to acquire some powers which he could transmit to his own descendants. For his tools he must look to the surface of the earth only; and the hardest substances he could find were stones. Not only during the period of which we are now speaking, but for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years lasted man’s ignorance of the metals, ignorance therefore of all that the metals could produce for him. The long age of this state of ignorance is distinguished in pre-history by the name of the Stone Age, because the hardest things then known to mankind were stones, and the most important of his implements and utensils had therefore to be made of stones.

There can be no harm if we so far anticipate our second chapter as to say that this Stone Age is distinguished by pre-historic students into two main periods: (1) the age in which all the stone implements were made exclusively by chipping, (2) the age in which grinding or polishing was brought in to supplement the use of chipping. Wherefore the first age is also called the Unpolished Stone Age, the second is called the Polished Stone Age. Not that by any means all the implements in the later age were made of polished stone; far from it. Only that, contemporaneously with the stone implements still made by chipping merely, others of polished stone were used. But of this more hereafter. Lastly, the two epochs are also distinguished more simply as the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age--or, turned into Greek, the Palæolithic Era and the Neolithic Era.

Now we go back to speak of the Palæolithic Era only. And in this we have as yet got no further than the implements of the river drifts. It is not to be supposed that at any time of his history man used implements of stone and no others; for wood and bone must have been always as ready to his hand as stone was, and for many purposes bone and wooden utensils would serve better than stone ones. But the stone implements would always deserve to be accounted the most important; because by means of them the others of softer material must have been shaped. As regards the drift deposits, here the remains of man’s work _are_ exclusively stone implements, but probably only because all that were made of some softer substance have perished, or remain as yet undiscovered. And most primitive these stone tools or weapons are. By the rudeness and uniformity of their shapes as contrasted even with other classes of stone implements, they testify to the simplicity of those who manufactured them. They have for the most part only two or three distinctive types: they are either of a long, pear-shaped make, narrowed almost to a point at the thin end, and adapted, we may suppose, for boring holes, while the broad end of the pear was pressed against the palm of the hand; and secondly, of a sort of oval form, chipped all round the edge, capable of being fitted into a wooden haft, a cleft stick or whatever it might be, to form an implement which might be used for all sorts of cutting or scraping. A variety of this last implement, of rather a tongue-like shape, was called by the French workmen who worked under M. Boucher de Perthes, _langue-de-chat_. These might serve the purpose of spear-heads. Some have supposed that stones of this last form were used, as similar ones are used by the Esquimaux to this day, in cutting holes in the ice for the purpose of fishing: we must not forget that during at any rate a great part of the early stone age the conditions of life were those of arctic countries at the present time. A third variety of stone implements is made of thinner flakes, and capable of being used as a knife.[3]

We cannot determine all the uses to which primitive man must have put his rude and ineffective weapons; we can only wonder that with such he was able to maintain his existence among the savage beasts by which he was surrounded; and we long to form to ourselves some picture of the way in which he got the better of their huge strength, as well as of his dwelling-place, his habits, and his appearance. Rude as his weapons are, and showing no trace of improvement, it seems as though man of the drift period must have lived through long ages of the world’s history. These implements are found associated with the remains of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, animals naturally belonging to the arctic or semi-arctic climate which succeeded the glacial era; but like implements are found, associated with the remains of the bones of the lion, the tiger, and the hippopotamus, all of which, and the last especially, are rarely found outside the torrid zone. This would imply that the drift implements lasted through the change from a rigid to a torrid climate, and probably back again to a cold temperate one.

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[Sidenote: Implements of the caves.]

Contemporary very likely with some portion of the drift period are another series of deposits which contain still more interesting traces of early man. These are what are called the _cave_ deposits--a remarkable series of discoveries made in caves in various parts of Europe which appear to carry us down farther in the history of human development.

These caves are natural caverns, generally formed in the limestone rocks, and at present the most remarkable ‘finds’ have been obtained from the caves of Devonshire, of the Department of the Dordogne in France, from various caves in Belgium, and from a very remarkable cavern in the Neanderthal, near Düsseldorf, in Germany. But there is scarcely any country in Europe where some caves containing human bones and weapons have not been opened. The rudest drift implements seem older than almost any of those found in caves; and, on the whole, the cave-remains seem to give us a picture of man in a more civilized condition than the man of the drift.

Let us pause for one moment before these cave remains. For, simple as they are, they open a little bit the veil which hides from us the lives of the earliest of men. We call the things which we have found _implements_. For we cannot really tell whether they should be called tools or weapons. Nay, and this is a thing worth remembering, in the most primitive conditions of society man’s tools are his weapons and his weapons are almost his only tools. Man’s first condition of life is the _venatory_ condition. He is at first a mere hunter (or _trapper_) and fisherman. He begins without the use of any domestic animal. He has not even the dog, at first, to help him in his hunting; much less has he cattle or sheep to vary his occupation in life. With the rest of the animal creation he is constantly at war. He preys upon other animals, and other animals, if they can, prey upon him. Wherefore, as I have said, his earliest tools are likewise his weapons, his weapons are his tools; and the arts of peace and war are undistinguishable.

The next distinct stage of life is the pastoral stage. Man has now his domesticated animals; he has cattle and sheep and horses maybe. Tending his flocks and herds is now his chief occupation. But this tending implies _protecting_ them and himself. And still, though some of his implements are for peaceful use--his crooks, his goads, his lassoes, his bridles, his hurdles and sheep-pens, or, again, his needles for sewing together the hides which form his clothes--still _most_ are for war. Yet, if any distinction is possible, his weapons should now be those of defence rather than those of offence.

The third great stage is the agricultural--a stage of life at which all civilized nations and many which can hardly be called civilized have arrived; when man ploughs and sows, and reaps, plants vines and orchards. Then most of the implements used in these industries, the implements on which therefore his nourishment depends, are wholly distinct from the weapons of war, and the peaceful existence has become (as the phrase is) _differentiated_ from the warlike. This is the token of a higher civilization.

At present we are far from such a stage of progress in the history of man. The cave-dwellers were, we may be sure, in the hunting and fishing stage of civilization; and we cannot really tell, among a large proportion of their weapons, which were designed to serve against animals for the purposes of the chase, and which against their fellow-men. We can hardly distinguish among some of their weapons whether they were to be used in hunting or fishing. They had stone axes and spear-heads, and they also had what we may call harpoons. But harpoons are merely lances attached to a thong, and may be used with equal success against animals or against the larger fish, salmons or whales. These harpoons are barbed. They are made of wood and of bone. A curious and close inquiry has discovered that the bones of animals found among the human remains in the caves have been scored in such a way as to suggest that the sinews were cut from them--to be used, no doubt, as thongs to the harpoons, as lines for fishing, as threads for sewing garments, etc. The cave men had also barbed hooks--fishing-hooks we may call them; though they too may sometimes have been employed against animals or even _birds_. It is most probable that these primitive men did _not_ know the use of the bow and arrow, and that the name arrow-heads sometimes given to certain of their weapons is a misnomer; that they should be called javelin-heads. Bone awls have been found, no doubt for the sake (chiefly) of piercing the scraped skins of animals, which might afterwards be sewn together into garments: bone knives, pins, and _needles_ have also been found--the last a most important form of implement--in considerable numbers.

What is still more interesting than all these discoveries, we here find the rudiments of art. Some of the bone implements, as well as some stones, are engraved, or even rudely sculptured, generally with the representation of an animal. These drawings are singularly faithful, and really give us a picture of the animals which were man’s contemporaries upon the earth; so that we have the most positive proof that man lived the contemporary of animals long since extinct. The cave of La Madeleine, in the Dordogne, for instance, contained a piece of a mammoth’s tusk engraved with an outline of that animal; and as the mammoth was probably not contemporaneous with man during the latter part even of the old-stone age, this gives an immense antiquity to the first dawnings of art. How little could the scratcher of this rough sketch--for it is not equal in skill to drawings which have been found in other caves--dream of the interest which his performance would excite thousands of years after his death! Not the greatest painter of subsequent times, and scarcely the greatest sculptor, can hope for so near an approach to immortality for their works. Had man’s bones been only found in juxtaposition with those of the mammoth and his contemporary animals, this might possibly have been attributed to chance disturbances of the soil, to the accumulation of river deposits, or to many other accidental occurrences; or had the mammoth’s bone only been found worked by man, there was nothing positive to show that the animal had not been long since extinct, and this a chance bone which had come into the hands of a later inhabitant of the earth, just as it has since come into our hands; but the actual drawing of this old-world, and as it sometimes seems to us almost fabulous, animal, by one who actually saw him in real life, gives a strange picture of the antiquity of our race, and withal a strange feeling of fellowship with this stone-age man who drew so much in the same way as a clever child among us might have drawn to-day.[4]

It is worth while to look well at these cave-drawings. They are of various degrees of merit, for some are so skilful as to excite the admiration of artists and the astonishment of archæologists. And it is a curious fact that during ages which succeeded those of the cave-dwellers, all through the polished stone period and the age of bronze--of which we shall have to speak anon--no such ambitious imitative works of art seem to have been attempted. So far as we can tell, these after generations of men aimed at no such thing as a drawing of an animal or even of a plant. They confined themselves to ornamental _patterns_, to certain arrangements of points and lines. The love of imitation is doubtless one of the rudimentary feelings in the human mind; as we may see by watching children. But, rudimentary as it is, it springs from the same root as the highest promptings of the intellect--that is to say, from the wish to _create_--to fashion something actually ourselves. This is sufficient to explain the origin of these carvings; yet we need not suppose that when the art of making them was once known they were used merely for amusement. Long afterwards we find such drawings and representations looked upon as having some qualities of the things they represent; as, for instance, where in an ancient grave at Mæshow, in the Orkney islands, we find the drawing of a dragon, which had been supposed to watch over the treasures concealed therein. Savages in the present day often think that part of them is actually taken away when a drawing of them is made, and exactly a similar feeling gave rise to the superstition so prevalent in the Middle Ages, that witches and magicians could make a figure in wax to imitate the one on whom they wished to wreak their vengeance, and that all the pains inflicted upon this waxen antitype were reproduced in the body of the victim. On such confusion of ideas do all idolatries rest. So may we not, without too bold a flight, imagine that some superstitious notions, touching the efficacy of these drawings, was a spur to the industry of our first forerunners on the earth, and contributed to their wonderfully acquired skill in their art? May they not have thought that their representations gave them some power over the animals they represented: that the lance-head carved with a mammoth would be efficient against the mammoth’s hide; that the harpoon containing the representation of a deer or a fish was the weapon best adapted for transfixing either?[5]

However this may be, we cannot close our eyes to the interest which attaches to the first dawnings of art in the world. Nor is this interest confined altogether to its æsthetic side--the mere beauty and value of art itself--great though this be. Not only does drawing share that mysterious power of imparting intense pleasure which belongs to every form of art, but it was likewise, after human speech, the first discovered means of conveying an idea from one man to another. As we shall come to see in a later chapter, the invention of drawing bore with it the seeds of the invention of writing, the greatest step forward, in material things at any rate, that man has ever made.

There is one other fact to be mentioned, and then the information which our cave discoveries can give us concerning the life of man in those days is pretty nearly exhausted. Traces of fires have been found in several caves, so that there can be no doubt that man had made this important discovery, the discovery of fire, also. It seems to us impossible to imagine a time when men could have lived upon the earth without this all-useful element, when they must have devoured their food uncooked, and only sheltered themselves from the cold by the thickness of their clothing, or at night by huddling together in close underground houses. We have certainly no proof that man’s existence was ever of such a sort as this; but yet it is clear that the art of making fires is one not discoverable at first sight. How long man took to find out that method of ignition by friction of two sticks--the method employed in different forms by all the less cultivated nations spread over the globe, and one which we may therefore fairly take to be the most primitive and natural--we shall never know. We have only the negative evidence that he had discovered it at that primæval time when he began to leave his remains within the caves.

Thus have we completed the catalogue of facts upon which we may build up for ourselves some representation of the life of man in the earliest ages of his existence upon earth. It must be confessed that they are meagre enough. We should like some further facts which would help us to picture the man himself, his size, his appearance, what race he most resembled of any of those which now inhabit our globe. Unfortunately we have little that can assist us here. Human remains have been found--on one or two occasions a skeleton in tolerably complete preservation--but not yet in sufficient numbers to allow us to draw any certain conclusions from them, or even to hazard any very probable conjecture.

[Sidenote: Human remains.]

Among these discoveries of human skeletons, none excited more interest at the time it was made than the Neanderthal skeleton, so-called from the place in which it was found. The discovery was made in 1857 by Dr. Fuhlrott of Elberfeld; and when the skull and other parts of the skeleton were exhibited at a scientific meeting at Bonn, in the same year, doubts were expressed as to the human character of the remains. These doubts, which were soon dissipated, arose from the very low type of the head, which was pronounced by many to be the most ape-like skull that they had ever seen. The bones themselves indicated a person of much the same stature as a European of the present day, but with such an unusual thickness in some of them as betokened a being of very extraordinary strength. This discovery, had it been supported by others, might have seemed to indicate a race of men of a type inferior even to the most savage races of our present globe. But it has not been so supported. On the contrary, another skull found at Engis, near Liége, not more than seventy miles from the cave of the Neanderthal, was proved after careful measurements not to differ materially from the skulls of individuals of the European race--a fact which prevents us from making any assertions respecting the primitive character in race or physical conformation of these cave-dwellers. Indeed, in a very careful and elaborate paper upon the Engis and Neanderthal skulls, Professor Huxley places an average skull of a modern native of Australia about half-way between those of the Neanderthal and Engis caves; but he also says that after going through a large collection of Australian skulls, he ‘found it possible to select from among these crania two (connected by all sorts of intermediate gradations), the one of which should very nearly resemble the Engis skull, while the other should somewhat less closely approximate to the Neanderthal skull in form, size, and proportions.’ And yet as regards blood, customs, or language, the natives of Southern and Western Australia are as pure and homogeneous as almost any race of savages in existence. This shows us how difficult would have been any reasoning founded upon the insufficient data we possess. In fact, it would no doubt be possible to find in Europe among persons of abnormal under-development, such as idiots, skulls of a formation which would match that of the Neanderthal.

This class of evidence is therefore merely negative. We certainly cannot pronounce that man of the old stone age was of a lower type than low types of savages of the present day; we cannot even say that he was as undeveloped as are the Lapps of modern Europe; but in this negative evidence there is a certain amount of satisfaction. We might be not unwilling to place on the level of the Eskimo or the Lapp the fashioners of the rudest of the stone implements, but the _artists_ of the caves we may well imagine to have attained a higher development. And there is nothing at all unreasonable or opposed to our experience of Nature in supposing a race of human beings to have flourished in Europe in these old times, to have been possessed of a certain amount of civilization, but not to have advanced from that towards any very great improvement before they were at last extinguished by some other race with a greater faculty for progress. As we shall come to see later on, there is some reason for connecting man of the later stone age as regards race with the Eskimo or Lapp of to-day. Yet even if this be admitted, we must look upon the latter rather as the dregs of the races they represent. It is not always the highest types of any particular race, whether of men, of animals, or of plants, which live the longest. Species which were once flourishing are often only represented by stunted and inferior descendants; just as the animals of the lizard class once upon a time, and long before the coming of man upon the earth, had their age of greatest development and reached proportions which are unknown in these days.

So we may imagine man spreading out at various times and in many different streams from his first home in Asia. The earlier races to leave this nursing-place did not, we may suppose, contain sufficient force to carry them beyond a low level of culture; very likely they sank in civilization and in the end got pushed on one side by more energetic people who came like a second wave from the common source. When, in the history of the world, we come to speak of races of whom we know more, we shall see strong reasons to believe that this was the rule followed; nay, it is even followed at the present day, where European races are spreading over all the world, and gradually absorbing or extinguishing inferior members of the human family. We must, therefore, in our present state of ignorance, be content to look upon palæolithic man merely as we find him, and not to advance vague surmises whether he gradually advanced to the use of better stone weapons, and at last to metals, or whether he was extinguished by subsequent races who did thus advance.

[Sidenote: The life of palæolithic man.]

Taking, then, this race as we find it, without speculating upon its immediate origin or future, we may endeavour to gather some notion of man’s way of life in these primitive times. It was of the simplest. We may well suppose, for some proofs to the contrary would otherwise most likely have been discovered, that his life was that of the hunter, which is, it has been said, generally the earliest phase of human society, and that he had not yet learned to till the ground, or to keep domestic animals for his use. No bones of animals like the sheep or dog are found among palæolithic remains, and therefore it seems probable that palæolithic man had not yet entered upon the next and higher phase, the pastoral life. He had probably no fixed home, no idea of nationality, scarcely any of obligations beyond the circle of his own family, in that larger sense in which the word ‘family’ is generally understood by savages. Some sort of family or tribe no doubt held together, were it only for the sake of protecting themselves against the attacks of their neighbours. For the rest, their time was spent, as the time of other savages is spent, out of doors in fighting and hunting, within doors in preserving their food and their skins, in elaborately manufacturing their implements of stone and bone. In the inclement seasons they were crowded together in their caves, perhaps for months together, as the Eskimo are in winter, almost without moving. As appears from the remains in the caves, they were in the habit at such times of throwing the old bones and the offal of their food into any corner (the Eskimo do so to this day), without taking the smallest trouble to obviate the unpleasant effects produced by the decay of all this animal matter in an atmosphere naturally close. Through the long winter nights they found time to perfect their skill in those wonderful bone carvings, and to lay up a store of weapons which they afterwards--anticipating the rise of commerce--exchanged with the inhabitants of some other cave for _their_ peculiar manufacture; for in one of the caves of the Dordogne we find the remains of what must have been a regular manufactory of one sort of flint-knife or lance-head, almost to the exclusion of any other of the ordinary weapons, while another cave seems to have been devoted as exclusively to the production of implements of bone.

Man had no doubt a hard life, not only to obtain the food he needed, but to defend himself against the attacks of many wild animals by whom he was surrounded, animals whose particular species have in many cases become extinct, and whose classes have long ceased to inhabit Europe. Such are the cave lion, cave bear, cave hyæna, brown bear, grizzly bear, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, urus, bison, and such rarities (with us) as the reindeer, the Irish elk, and the beaver.

Some people have thought that they discovered in the traces of fires which had been sometimes lighted before caves in which were found human skeletons, the indication of sepulchral rites, and that these caves were used as burial-places. But these suppositions are too vague and uncertain to be relied upon. It may, however, be said that we have evidence pointing to the fact that even in the drift period men buried their dead, and it is hardly possible to believe that they did so without paying some obsequies to the remains. On this interesting subject of sepulchral rites we must forbear to say anything until we come to speak of the second stone age. Our knowledge of the early stone-people must close with the slight picture we have been able to form of their life; of their death, of their rites of the dead, and the ideas concerning a future state which these might indicate, we cannot speak.

This, then, is all we know of man of the first stone age, and it is not probable that our knowledge will ever be greatly increased. New finds of these stone implements are being made almost every day, not in Europe only, though at present chiefly there, but in many other parts of the globe. But the new discoveries closely resemble the old, the same sort of implements recur again and again, and we only learn by them over how great a part of the globe this stage in our civilization extended. Further information of this kind may change some of our theories concerning the duration or the origin of this civilization, but it will not add much to our knowledge of its nature. Yet it cannot be denied that the thought of man’s existence only, though we know little more than this, a contemporary of the mammoth at the time which immediately succeeded the glacial period, or perhaps before the glacial period had quite come to an end, is full of the deepest interest for us. The long silent time which intervenes between the creation of our first parents and those biblical events whereof the narration is to a certain extent continuous and consecutive, till the dawn of history in the Bible narrative in fact, is to some small extent filled in. We shall see in the next chapter how the second stone age serves to carry the same picture further. In rudest outline the life of man is placed before us, and if we have no more than this, we have at any rate _something_ which may occupy our imaginations, and prevent them, as they otherwise would do, as, of old, men’s minds did, from leaping almost at a bound from the Creation to the Flood, and from the Flood to the time of Abraham.