The existence of Man in the geological period that preceded the one we live in, in his full anthropoid reality, possessing a mind, self conscious, radiant with powers of creation, of language, of inquisition, has been established. Man, vested with his essential attributes and physiologically and psychologically erect, as a peculiar dissonant and discrete living thing lived and died in the Quarternary Day of this Earth. The proof is incontestible. The fact is fixed to-day in the records of scientific assertion and discovery.

Doubtfully realized at first, it has been slowly established through the heaping up of successive proofs, that in the waning years of that geological section of time called the Ice Age, man had begun this slow conquest of the earth.

All geological periods are text book accidents, or professional conveniences. The diorama of geological change was a continuous evolution of physics and topography, the rolling ages did not halt at sectional points, the mechanism of Creation did not stop at intervals to permit the introduction of a new set of designs and preparations, a new web of structural fancies and ideas, a new modus operandi and a new modus vivendi.

Neither can we contend for moments of catastrophic intervention and the sudden release of Omnipotent mandates, sweeping away what had previously lived, and inundating the regions of life with irruptions of new forms.

The movement of life beginning within the recesses of ArchÆan time went on in its progress from a few centres of creation, until as age succeeded age, and the first utterances of life began to fill the voids of ocean and land, the kingdoms of animal being slowly possessed the earth.

And yet it is also true that the course of organic evolution in the records of palÆontology expresses an Intention accomplishing its purpose under resistance. It conforms in the phenomena it presents to the conception of a Mind pursuing a purpose with an accelerated motion as that purpose was approached. For what is that record of extinct life?

From the first scintillations of life in the Cambrian era to the last contributions of Zoic energy in the Tertiaries, we see a succession of ascending stages of life, a series of zoological platforms which are linked together by a stairway of organisms passing from one to the next, and separated by a disappearance of forms which never reappear. Resistance is periodically overcome, but by it the intention of a Supreme Mind to produce the highest and widest and deepest life is forced into a display of creative energy.

In the earlier ages—the PalÆozoic—the invertebrates appear in greater numbers, and the lower orders of plants, and only the preparatory groups of the vertebrates force their prophetic outlines in view, the invertebrates and plants begin in more generalized forms, and advance to the more specialized, which are the higher.

As the intention is to embrace higher zoological and structural ideas, this again awakens resistance, and we see its gradual repulse. These periodic floodings or gushes of forms of life, as the brachiopods in the Silurian, the trilobites in the upper Potsdam, and crustacea in modern seas, the bivalves in the Devonian, the crinoids in the Lower Carboniferous, the echinoids in the Cretaceous, the cephalopods and reptiles in the Jurassic, the gastropods and mammals in the Tertiaries, are the wide escape of a propulsive intention as it overcomes resistance, which it has undermined or repelled by processes of development, slowly and unintermittently inaugurated long before.

Premonitions of these outbursts are found before they come, in the genera and orders of the preceding era. So striking is this that it has led M. Naudin, a French naturalist, with no theological hobbies or convictions, to propound, on the evidence, the analogous idea, that a force of variation or origination of forms has acted rhythmically or unintermittently, because each movement was the result of the rupture of an equilibrium, the liberation of a force which till then was retained in a potential state, by some opposing force or obstacle, overcoming which, it passes to a new equilibrium, and so on.

Hence stages of dynamic activity and static repose, of origination of species and types, alternated with periods of stability or fixity. The time-piece does not run down regularly, but “la force procede par saccades; et par pulsation d’autant plus energiques que la nature etait plus prÈs de son commencement.”

Now, it is a remarkable circumstance, strengthening the Doctrine of Intention, that the vast length of time involved in the progress of the PalÆozoic Ages was employed in establishing the kingdoms of invertebrate life, and that as at its close, the vertebrate type was reached (in which resided the potential power of the highest development) the Supreme Will rose swiftly to its object—Man, his powers and destiny!

Resistance accumulated against the flow of that intention, and by obstruction attempted to close its exit into the pregnant channel of vertebrate forms. This resistance was slowly dissipated through the prolific avenues of invertebrate life. And the Intending Mind, having ushered in the vertebrates, thence proceeds with rapidity through its evolving phases to complete its organic purpose, creating Man, and pushing in upon the world’s stage the vast psychic consequences of this supreme result.

And Man is reached—When! How! Where! The figures of men are observed stealing along the banks of the swollen Somme, in northern France, in the twilight of an Arctic day. The river, exasperated by the continuous contributions of cold streams rushing from distant summits that still retain the remnants of the shrinking burden of the northern ice sheet, washes the high levels with its turbid waves. Squalid shelters hide the rude domesticities of these skin-coated and tangle-haired aborigines of the earth, these mysterious tenants of the unconquered virgin world in whose crania lies the potency of art and science. Through the long mist of time they move like spectral groups presented to us, as dumb figures mechanically manipulated upon a distant stage. They use the motions of men engaged in play, in fishing, in mending nets, in repelling enemies, in rude wrestling, in working points of stone, or carving ivory, in erecting low-roofed houses, in cleaning skins, in felling trees and engaging in rapid navigation on the calamitous and groaning stream before them. Women are seen here and there amongst them, and children; faces stir with laughter, gesticulation accompanies the dumb motion of their lips. It is an imaginative kinetoscope wherein sound has vanished, and motion only, articulate throughout with human adaptibility, remains before our eyes. We are watching the pre-Adamites.

Again we see men moving in scattered bands along the banks of the Delaware, in New Jersey. The river, widely extended, has invaded the outlying country in broad, lake-like arms, and only at narrowing throats between cliffs and resistant ledges does the confined flood raise a murmur of expostulation as it churns in flying spray against its gneissoid barriers. Ice, in broad, deep cakes, or low piled up hummocks, or occasional castellated ice hills carrying stones upon their surface, appear over the wave-scurried waters, and now and then from some concealed inlet, a rude dug-out moves cautiously, piloted by strong arms, crossing between the struggling fragments of ice to gain, in a series of hesitating advances, the opposite shore. Human figures disembark, they climb up the bank by a half-worn escalade of steps rudely dug into the frozen gravel and sand, and disappear in the black opening of a cave excavated in the cliff faces, and overhung by the projecting angles of an irregular boulder of rock, half imbedded and half exposed, in the morainal mass of earth and pebbles, sand and stone.The country for leagues about is desolate; in its denuded state it exposes to the scowling sky its torn areas, furrowed with gulches, heaped up cairns, plains strewn with loosened stones, while stranded along a distant coast line and gleaming in titanic splendor, far beyond on remote terraces, are icebergs. They are tumbling in decay before a sun more southern than their origin, and contributing a hundred rivulets, spreading fan-like in lines of silver over the flat declines about them, meandering to the gray shores, deserted by an ebbing tide.

The rigors of the Ice Age in its extremest form have passed, and here, in its lingering epoch of control, man, inventive, apt, procreative and vocal, holding the augury of the civilized ages advancing towards him, is seen.

Seen amid a waste of which he is a part, but from which by no conceivable dream of transformation was he evolved. The moment of his birth on earth was more propitious. Nature cradled him somewhere beneath other skies, warmer suns and blossoming life. He has survived the Ice Age. His adaptive nature has met it, as it crept like some continental torpor over the fair world it supplanted. He has lived through and out of it. He has kept alive on earth in the awful desolation of this menace and assassination, his inherited flame of intelligence, and the primal instincts of man. Before the Ice Age, man was.Again in the broad savannahs of the Mississippi Valley man is discovered, where its waters, confluent with the broad streams flowing from Missouri and Ohio, spread in sluggish lake-like expanses, stirred by the river flow into movement, around archipelagoes of low islands. The waves of this water met the retreating frontier of the ice-cap, vociferous with the fall of shivered icebergs, and washed on one hand the lowlands of Appalachia, yet glistening from snow-buried crests, and the emergent domes of the Rocky Mountains, on the other, yet flecked with scattered citadels of ice, resisting extermination in valley-bowls and precipice-lined declivities.

The scene wears a softened aspect. The low islands have retained a cheerful growth of trees, and amongst them flowering bushes and patches of keen-colored flowers invite rest and dreams. Glades pass across the larger domains of insulated land; white beeches shine beneath trees, whose shadows are thrown in meshes of crossing lines and figures upon them, and a blazing sun, set in the zenith, administers to the wide expanse a temperate splendor. And here man again moves across the foreground of our vision. He is less weirdly strange and aboriginal, less dumb and impenetrable, and, as he stands alone upon a projecting tip of sand, with an erect beauty, a touch of decoration in his dress shows he has outgrown the dogged stupor of animal life. The charms of emotion have also awakened him; we hear, over the waters, the long musical halloo of a calling voice, and somewhere rising from the tufted wilderness answering voices in sweet sopranos return the salutation.

He turns to the meridian sun, and fear clouds his face. Across the sunlight a darkening blot has arisen. Its whirling and tempestuous shapes change from second to second—a murmur in the air, made visible by a thousand increasing ripples on the blinded water, tells of some approaching storm. The man has dropped upon his knees, the struggling lines of his face, as he watches the black cloud, deepen into a rigid expression of terror. Now the waves roll heavily upon the beach, the light is extinguished, and there descends a rain of dust. It thickens until the air is impenetrable, the man, prostrate upon his face, is lost to sight. The verdurous islands disappear, and the descending Loess dust extinguishes the sun.

It is another phase of human life in the vast backward of time, when the dust and dirt deposits of the Mississippi, and its tributary valleys, were accumulating as the ice fled northward. Again Man comes into our view, the same identity of thought and form, which makes the hero and the lover, the fundamental consciousness developed, as in you and me.

We move westward to where the Sierra Nevada Valley Mountains breast the Sacramento Valley, and nod to the answering summons of the Coast Range, where the rays that empurple the sawed edges of the Sierras dip the peaks of the coast in roseate halos.

A sunburst from the gathered edges of a thunderstorm reveals upon a platform of rock, that sticks out from the mountain side like a lozenge from a cake, a group of sunburnt men and women. Somewhat higher up and behind them a circle of low covers made of boughs, woven together and rudely thatched, indicates their simple homes. The place of their sojourn has been propitiously, even tastefully chosen. It is a somewhat scattered woodland, made up of colossal cone-bearing trees, that seem located at such even distances apart that their contact creates over the ground beneath them a softened twilight, though the sun at its zenith pours over their motionless and dependent boughs its full effulgence. The spot forms a terrace upon the ascending areas of a great mountain chain whose highest and peaked ridges glisten from distant snowfields.

Before this group of silent people, far below them in the broad valley of the present Sacramento, a scene of incomparable interest and beauty is displayed. They seem absorbed in its contemplation, and to their eyes perchance its varied features appeal with a force symptomatic of all the intense delight the poet or the artist would to-day feel before the return of its exciting and marvellous incidents.

It is a critical moment in the vast drama of orogenic change, which has built the continent; one act in that procession of acts, which moulded the surface of the earth into habitable forms, and etched its surface with the beauty of design.

The broad physiographic trough upon which these mountain denizens are gazing has become an area of conflict. The volcanic forces of the earth are even now engaged in making monumental deformations, and here below them they watch the splendid crisis of an engagement between the lava-rock welling from the furnaces of the earth’s interior, and the flashing currents of foam-filled water. Let us trace the picture.

On one side of the broad depression, filled to its farthest marge with intermittent forest-land, broad backs of alluvial sand, and seamed with sparkling rivers, rise the myriad summits of a long range of mountains torn by time and deeply bitten into picturesque contrasts of ravine, gorge, canyon, buttes and facetted pinnacles of stone. Far over the wide valley, scarcely seen, but still like a shadow upon the horizon, is the western limit of this quarternary basin, another line of hills, less wonderful, younger, and rather monotonously low.

The landscape disappears northward in bare regions that are hidden in clouds of mist, and far southward, and to the west, spectators just discern the limits of the Salt Sea. But it is upon the marvels beneath them that their eyes are fixed, eyes that are yet more quickly arrested by sensation, by the brusque struggles of natural forces, than by the alluring distance, shimmering hot beneath the noon-day sun.

Almost immediately beneath their feet, though on the level of the general valley, is a river bed, which, deserted by its former tenant, still holds dwindling lakes of water, somewhat connected, like a string of opal dishes, by filaments of thin and feeble rivulets. At a point north of them and fixed to their attention upon the mountain side by a dull murmurous succession of detonations, and splintering gashes in the rock, a pasty exudation of molten rock slips down in black lines or faintly rubescent streaks, and, uniting in an invading tongue of slaggy fusion, has entered the river valley, which is now, at its first courses, filled from rim to rim with half liquid scoria.

The lithic tide is carried on in a sluggish simulation of water currents, rolling over in its advance, or spurting in sudden liquid torrents from swelling concretions; now caught by the asperities of the channel, and now flowing faster at its unimpeded centre, dragged out in liguous coils and ropes of lava, and again, down some steeper declivity, tumbling in a shaggy cataract of braids, tortuous links, and vermiculate confusion. Beneath the mute group the igneous outburst has reached a pond, one of the derelict lakes along the river’s deserted way, and it is the fierce conflict thus begun which holds them in a rapt posture, like modelled images. As the flowing rock enters the lake with slow and even step, or spills into it, in flocks of bubbling slag, from its higher decrepitating surfaces, explosion follows explosion; the water is ejected in spurts of spray, and falling backward over the hot and half consolidated magma, flashes into steam. Rising clouds of vapor conceal the exact limits of the invasion, and points of contact, but the coarse rumble, the intermittent gushes of water upward, the far away reverberations of the earth’s opening crust, and the quivering pulsations that shake the table rock on which our spectators are standing, announce the new geological chapter in the world’s making, the last catastrophe before the earth lies quiet and smiling at the feet of men.

As they turn away in frightened dismay, the sunlight flashes from their tawny necks, their girdled arms and ankles, and from the bunched tresses of their dark hair, flashes from gold. They are the gold ornaments formed in naive and curious ways which these early children of the earth filched from the stream beds, that soon, before their gaze, from shore to shore, will be wedged tight with black dikes of rock, holding down the sealed bonanzas, until in Time’s own time the life of a later day shall search the primeval sands again, and dress its beauty too with the same entrancing glitter.

The picture disappears, but we are standing where the Calaveras Skull, the discovery of human implements beneath the Table Mountains of California have proven that Man was a witness of these geognostic changes in the great internal valley of that state.

Shall we pursue the western trail of men’s birth, bending our eyes upon the mysterious regions of southeastern Asia, where perhaps a too inquisitive scrutiny will reveal the very beginnings of the human tribe?

We have no reason to go further. We have observed the changing aspect of man from the edges of the ice sheet in western Europe and eastern North America, his ameliorated habits in the loess valley of the Mississippi and Missouri. In the far west where the contemporaneous climatic conditions were milder, or even conjoined with phases that were semi-tropic we have found him, at the same time that farther north, and pervasively to the east, frigid or boreal aspects prevailed.

It is with the story of Love, told of these strange and remote periods of Time, that we are now concerned, and we place the Woman of the Ice Age far in the West, somewhere not exposed to the extreme arctic vicissitudes of a glacial imprisonment, although not quite beyond the rumors and tokens of its partial survival, nor quite within the lassitudes of a southern and perennial summer, but at a possible point of such picturesque contrasts, of such organic fascination, of such compromises in physical expression, that we may discern in her the elements of poetry, elements born of her response to Nature’s vitality and variousness, and with them elements of passion born of her inheritance of blood instincts, which had formed in her ancestors, under the same diversity of natural features. In Her, prehistoric and primal, the type of all women since, we shall find the instinct of love, evincing its supremacy over her nature, holding her before the mirror of her own vanity, rousing her to the extremest verge of her emotional design and activity, nursing her on the breast of its satisfaction, and filling her life with the currents of its amorous expectations.