PalÆolithic Celt of Quartzite from Natal, South Africa. (Quatrefages.) In fact the area over which these evidences of man's existence have been found may be best defined by the negative, where they have not been found, as there is every probability that it will eventually be proved that, with a few exceptions, wherever man could have existed during the Quaternary period, there he did exist. The northern portions of Europe which were buried under ice-caps are the only countries where considerable search has failed to discover palÆolithic implements, while nearly all Asia, Africa, and America, and vast extents of desert and forests remain unexplored. The next point to observe is, that throughout the whole of the Quaternary period there has been a constant progression of human intelligence upwards. Any theory of human origins which says that man has fallen and not risen is demonstrably false. How do we know this? The time scale of the Quaternary as of other geological periods is determined partly by the superposition of strata, and partly by the changes of fauna. In the case of existing rivers which have excavated their present valleys in the course of ages, it is evident that the highest deposits are the oldest. If the Somme, Seine, or Thames left remains of their terraces and patches of their silts and gravels at heights 100 feet or more above their present level, it is because they began to run at these higher levels, and gradually worked their way downwards, leaving traces of their floods ever lower and lower. In the case of deposits in caves or in still water, or where glacial moraines and dÉbris are superimposed on one another, the case is reversed, and the lowest are the oldest and the highest the most recent. In like manner if the fauna has changed, the remains found in the highest deposits of rivers and lowest, of caves will be the oldest, and will become more modern as we descend in the one case or ascend in the others. This is practically confirmed by the coincidence of innumerable observations. The oldest Quaternary fauna is characterized by a preponderance of three species, the mammoth (Elephas primigenius), the woolly rhinoceros (Rhinoceros tichorinus), and the cave-bear (Ursus spelÆus). There are a few survivals from the Pliocene, as the gigantic elephant (Elephas antiquus) and a few anticipations of later phases, as the reindeer, horse, and ox, but the three mentioned are, with palÆolithic man, the most characteristic. Then comes a long period when a strange mixture of northern and southern forms occurs. Side by side with the remains of Arctic animals such as the mammoth, the glutton, the musk ox, and the lemming, are found those of African species adapted only for a warm climate, the lion, panther, hyena, and above all the hippopotamus, not distinguishable from the existing species, which could certainly not have lived in rivers that were frozen in winter. The intermixture is most difficult to account for. No doubt Africa and Europe were then united, and the theory of migration is invoked. The Arctic animals may, it is said, have moved south in winter and the African animals north in summer, and this was doubtless the case to some extent. But there are some facts which militate against this theory; for instance, the hyena caves, which seem to show a continuous occupation by the same African species for long periods. Nor is it easy to conceive how the hippopotamus could have travelled every summer from Africa to Yorkshire, and retreated every autumn with the approach of frost. Such instances point rather to long inter-glacial periods with vicissitudes of climate, enabling now a northern, and now a southern fauna to inhabit permanently the same region. Be this as it may, the fact is certain that this strange intermixture of northern and southern species is found in almost all the European deposits of the Quaternary age, until towards its close with the coming on of the second great glacial period, when the southern forms disappear, and the reindeer, with an Arctic or boreal flora and fauna, become preponderant, and extend themselves over Southern France and Germany up to the Alps and Pyrenees. The Quaternary period is therefore roughly divided by geologists into three stages: 1st, that of the mammoth and cave-bear, there being some difference of opinion as to which came first, though probably they were simultaneous; 2nd, the middle stage of the mixed fauna; 3rd, the latest stage, that of the reindeer. Now to these stages there is an exact correspondence in the character of the human implements found in them. In the earliest, those of the oldest deposits and of the oldest animals, we find the rudest implements. They consist almost exclusively of native stones, chipped roughly into a few primitive shapes: celts, which are merely lumps of flint or other hard stone with a little chipping to supplement natural fractures in bringing them to a point or edge, while the butt-end is left rough to be grasped by the hand; scrapers with a little chipping to an edge on one side; very rude arrow-heads without the vestige of a barb or socket; and flakes struck off at a blow, which may have served for knives. As we ascend to later deposits we find these primitive types constantly improving. The celts are chipped all over and the butt-ends adapted for haftings, so also are the other implements and weapons, and the arrow-heads by degrees acquire barbs. But the great advance occurs with the use of bone, which seems to have been as important a civilizing agent for palÆolithic as metals were for neolithic man. This again seems to have been due to the increasing preponderance of the reindeer, whose horns afforded an abundant and easily manipulated material for working into the desired forms by flint knives. At any rate the fact is, that as we trace palÆolithic man upwards into the later half of the Quaternary period when the reindeer became abundant, we find a notable advance of civilization. Needles appear, showing that skins of animals were stitched together with sinews to provide clothing. Barbed arrows and harpoons show that the arts of war and of the chase had made a great advance on the primitive unhafted celt. And finally we arrive at a time when certain tribes showed not only an advance in the industrial arts, but a really marvellous proficiency in the arts of sculpture and drawing. In the later reindeer period, when herds of that animal and of the wild horse and ox roamed over the plains of Southern France and Germany, and when the mammoth and cave-bear, though not extinct, were becoming scarce, tribes of palÆolithic savages who lived in the caves and rock shelters of the valleys of Southern France and Germany, and of Switzerland and Belgium, drew pictures of their chases and of the animals with which they were surrounded, with the point of a flint on pieces of bone or of schist. They also carved bones into images of these animals, to adorn the handles of their weapons or as idols or amulets. Both drawings and sculptures are in many cases admirably executed, so as to leave no doubt of the animal intended, especially in the case of the wild animals, for the rare portraits of the human figure are very inferior. Most of them represent the reindeer in various attitudes, but the mammoth, the cave-bear, the wild horse, the Bos primigenius, and others, are also represented with wonderful fidelity. With the close of the reindeer age we pass into the Recent period and from palÆolithic to neolithic man. Physically there is no very decided break, and we cannot draw a hard-and-fast line where one ends and the other begins. All we can say is, that there is general evidence of constantly decreasing cold during the whole post-glacial period, from the climax of the second great glaciation until modern conditions of climate are fairly established, and the existing fauna has completely superseded that of the Quaternary, the older characteristic forms of which having either become extinct or migrated. How does this affect the most characteristic of all Quaternary forms, that of man? Can we trace an uninterrupted succession from the earliest Quaternary to the latest modern times, or is there a break between the Quaternary and Recent periods which with our present knowledge cannot be bridged over? And did the division of mankind into distinct and widely different races, which is such a prominent feature at the present day and ever since the commencement of history, exist in the case of the palÆolithic man, whose remains are so widespread? These are questions which can only be answered by the evidence of actual remains of the human body. Implements and weapons may have altered gradually with the lapse of ages, and new forms may have been introduced by commerce and conquest, without any fundamental change in the race using them. Still less can language be appealed to as a test of race, for experience shows how easily the language of a superior race may be imposed on populations with which it has no affinity in blood. To establish distinction of races we consult the anthropologist rather than the geologist or philologist.
PORTRAIT OF MAMMOTH. Drawn with a flint on a piece of Mammoth's ivory; from Cave of La Madeleine, Dordogne, France.
EARLIEST PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH SERPENTS AND HORSES' HEADS. From Grotto of Les Eyzies. Reindeer Period.
REINDEER FEEDING. From Grotto of Thayngen, near Schaffhausen, Switzerland. On what are the distinctions of the human race founded? Mainly on colour, stature, hair, and on the anatomical character of skulls and skeletons. These are wonderfully persistent, and have been so since historical times, intermediate characters only appearing where there has been intercrossing between different races. But the primitive types have continued unchanged, and no one has ever seen a white race of Negroes, or a black one of Europeans. And this has certainly been the case during the historical period, or for at least 7000 years, for the paintings on old Egyptian tombs show us the types of the Negro, the Libyan, the Syrian, and the Copt as distinct as at the present day, and the Negroes especially, with their black colour, long heads, projecting muzzles, and woolly hair growing in separate tufts, might pass for typical photographs of the African Negro of the nineteenth century. Of these indications of race we cannot hope to meet with any of the former class in Quaternary gravel or caves. We have to trust to the anatomical character to be drawn from skulls and skeletons, of which it may be inferred, as a matter of course, that they will be few and scanty, and will become constantly fewer and more imperfect as we ascend the stream of time to earlier periods. It must be remembered also that even these scanty specimens of early man are confined almost entirely to one comparatively small portion of the earth, that of Europe, and that we have hardly a single palÆolithic skull or skeleton of the black, the yellow, the olive, the copper-coloured, or other typical race into which the population of the earth is actually divided. We are confined therefore to Europe for anything like positive evidence of these anatomical characters of prehistoric and primÆval man, and can only draw inferences from implements as to those of other portions of the earth and other races. Fortunately these racial characters are very persistent, especially those of the skull and stature, and they exist in ample abundance throughout the historic, prehistoric, and neolithic ages, to enable us to draw very certain conclusions. Thus at present, and as far as we can see back with certainty, the races which have inhabited Europe may be classified under the heads, tall and short, long-headed and broad-headed, and those of intermediate types, which latter may be dismissed for the present, though constituting a majority of most modern countries, as they are almost certainly not primitive, but the result of intercrossing. Colour, complexion, and hair are also very persistent, though, as we have pointed out, we have no certain evidence by which to test them beyond the historical period. But the form of skulls, jaws, teeth, and other parts of the skeleton remain wonderfully constant in races where there has been little or no intermixture. The first great division is in the form of the skull. Comparing the extreme breadth of the skull with its extreme length from front to back, if the breadth does not exceed three-fourths or 75 per cent. of the length, the skull is said to be dolicocephalic or long-headed; if it equals or exceeds 83 per cent. it is called brachycephalic, i.e. short or broad-headed. Intermediate indices between 75 and 83 per cent. are called sub-dolicocephalic, or sub-brachycephalic, according as they approach one or the other of these extremes, but these are of less importance, as they probably are the result of intercrossing. The prognathism also of the jaws, the form of the eye-orbits and nasal bones, the superciliary ridges, the proportion of the frontal to the posterior regions of the skull, the stature and proportions of the limbs, are also both characteristic and persistent features, and correspond generally with the type of the skull. The controversy as to the origin of the Aryans has led to a great deal of argument as to these ethnological traits in prehistoric and neolithic times, and the interesting volume of Canon Taylor's on the Origin of the Aryans, and Professor Huxley's article on the same subject in the Nineteenth Century for November 1890, give a summary of the latest researches on the subject. We shall have to refer to these more fully in discussing the question as to the place or places of human origins; but for the present it is sufficient to state the general result at which the latest science has arrived. The theory of a common Asiatic centre from which all the races of mankind have migrated is given up as unsupported by the slightest vestige of evidence. When we first know anything of the Aryan and other European races, we find them occupying substantially very much the same regions as at present. There are four distinct European types, two tall and two short, two long-headed and two broad-headed. Of these two were fair, and two dark, and one, apparently the oldest in Western Europe and in the Mediterranean region, and probably represented by the Iberians, and now by the Spanish Basques, was short, dark, and long-headed; a second short, dark, and broad-headed, who are probably represented by the ancient Ligurians, and survive now in the Auvergnats and Savoyards; a third, tall, fair, and long-headed, whose original seats were in the regions of the Baltic and North Sea, and who were always an energetic and conquering race; and the fourth, like the third, tall and fair, but with broad heads, and possibly not a primitive race, but the result of some very ancient intermixture of the third or Northern type with some of the broad-headed races. Now as far back as frequent human remains enable us to form some satisfactory conclusion, that is up to the early neolithic period, we find similar race-types already existing, and to a considerable extent in the same localities. In modern and historical times we find, according to Canon Taylor, "all the anthropological tests agreeing in exhibiting two extreme types—the African, with long heads, long eye-orbits, and flat hair; and the Mongolian, with round heads, round orbits, and round hair. The European type is intermediate—the head, orbits, and sections of hair are oval. In the east of Europe we find an approximation to the Asiatic type; in the south of Europe to the African." More specifically, we find in Europe the four races mentioned above of tall and short long-heads, and tall and short broad-heads. The question is, how far back can any of these races be identified? The preservation of human remains depends mainly on the practice of burying the dead. Until the corpse is placed in a tomb protected by a stone coffin or dolmen, or in a grave dug in a cave, or otherwise sheltered from rains, floods, and wild beasts, the chances of its preservation are few and far between. Now it is not until the neolithic period that the custom of burying the dead became general, and even then it was not universal, and in many nations even in historical times corpses were burnt, not buried. It was connected doubtless with ideas of a future existence, which either required troublesome ghosts to be put securely out of the way, or to retain a shadowy existence by some mysterious connection with the body which had once served them for a habitation. Such ideas, however, only come with some advance of civilization, and it is questionable whether in palÆolithic times the human animal had any more notion of preserving the body after death than the other animals by which he was surrounded. This neolithic habit moreover of burying, though it preserves many relics of its own time, increases the difficulty when we come to deal with those of an earlier age. A great many caves which had been inhabited by palÆolithic man were selected as fitting spots for the graves of their neolithic successors, and thus the remains of the two periods became intermixed. It is never safe to rely on the antiquity of skulls and skeletons found in association with palÆolithic implements and extinct animals, unless the exploration has been made with the greatest care by some well-known scientific observer, or the circumstances of the case are such as to preclude the possibility of later interments. Thus in the famous cavern of Aurignac there is no doubt that it had been long a palÆolithic station, and that many of the human remains date back to this period; but whether the fourteen skeletons which were found in it, and lost owing to the pietistic zeal of the Mayor who directed their burial, were really palÆolithic, is a disputed point, or rather the better opinion is that they were part of a secondary neolithic interment. But to return to undoubted neolithic skulls, we have very clear evidence that the four distinct European races already existed. Thus in Britain we have two distinct forms of barrows or burial tombs, one long, the other round, and it has become proverbial that long skulls go with long barrows, and round skulls with round barrows. The long barrows are the oldest, and belong entirely to the stone age, no trace of metal, according to Canon Greenwell, having ever been found in them. The skulls and skeletons are those of a long-headed, short, and feeble race, who may be identified with the Iberians; while the round barrows contain bronze and finally iron, and the people buried in them were the tall, fair, round-headed Gauls or Celts of early history, or intermediate types between these and the older race. Later came in the tall, fair, and long-headed Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian races, so that we have three out of the four European types clearly defined in the British islands and traceable in their descendants of the present day. But when we attempt to go beyond the Iberians of the neolithic age in Britain, we are completely at fault. We have abundant remains of palÆolithic implements, but scarcely a single undoubted specimen of a palÆolithic skeleton, and it is impossible to say whether the men who feasted on the mammoth and rhinoceros in Kent's cavern, or who left their rude implements in the high-level gravel of the chalk downs, were tall or short, long-headed or round-headed. On the contrary, there seems a great hiatus between the neolithic and the palÆolithic periods, and, as Geikie has shown, this appears to be the case not in England only but in a great part of Europe. It would almost seem as if the old era had disappeared with the last glacial period, and a completely new one had been introduced. But although the skulls and bones of palÆolithic races are wanting in Britain and scarce everywhere, enough of them have been found in other European countries to enable anthropologists not merely to say that different races already existed at this immensely remote period, but to classify them by their types, and see how far these correspond with those of later times. This has been done especially in France and Belgium, where the discoveries of palÆolithic skeletons and skulls have been far more frequent than elsewhere. Debierre in his L'Homme avant l'histoire, published in the BibliothÈque Scientifique of 1888, enumerates upwards of forty instances of such undoubted Quaternary human remains, of which at least twenty consisted of entire skulls, and others of jaws and other important bones connected with racial type. The best and latest conclusions of modern anthropology from these remains will be found in this work of Debierre's, and in Hamy's PalÆontologie humaine, Quatrefages' Races humaines, and Topinard's Anthropologie, and it will be sufficient to give a short summary of the results. The history of Quaternary fossil man is divided, in the Crania Ethnica of Quatrefages and Hamy, into four races: 1st, the Canstadt race; 2nd, the Cro-Magnon race; 3rd, the races of Grenelle and Furfooz; 4th, the race of Truchere. The Canstadt race, so called from the first skull of this type, which was discovered in the loess of the valley of the Rhone near Wurtemburg, though it is better known from the celebrated Neanderthal skull, which gave rise to so much discussion, and was pronounced by some that of an idiot, by others the most pithecoid specimen of a human skull yet known, in fact almost the long-sought-for missing link. A still later discovery, however, has set at rest all doubt as to the reality of this Neanderthal type, and of its being the oldest Quaternary human type known in Western Europe. In the year 1886 two Belgian savants, Messrs. Fraissent and Lohest, one an anatomist, the other a geologist, discovered in a cave at Spy near Namur two skeletons with the skulls complete, which presented the Neanderthal type in an exaggerated form. They were found under circumstances which leave no doubt as to their belonging to the earliest Quaternary deposit, being at the bottom of the cave, in the lowest of three distinct strata, the two uppermost of which were full of the usual palÆolithic implements of stone and bone, while the few found in the lowest stratum with the skeletons were of the rudest description. Huxley pronounces the evidence such as will bear the severest criticism, and he sums up the anatomical characters of the skeletons in the following terms— "They were short of stature, but powerfully built, with strong, curiously curved thigh-bones, the lower ends of which are so fashioned that they must have walked with a bend at the knees. Their long depressed skulls had very strong brow-ridges, their lower jaws, of brutal depth and solidity, sloped away from the teeth downwards and backwards, in consequence of the absence of that especially characteristic feature of the higher type of man, the chin prominence." M. Fraissent says, "We consider ourselves in a position to say that, having regard merely to the anatomical structure of the man of Spy, he possessed a greater number of pithecoid characters than any other race of mankind." And again he says— "The distance which separates the man of Spy from the modern anthropoid ape is undoubtedly enormous; but we must be permitted to point out that if the man of the Quaternary age is the stock whence existing races have sprung, he has travelled a very great way. From the data now obtained, it is permissible to believe that we shall be able to pursue the ancestral type of man and the anthropoid apes still further, perhaps as far as the Eocene and even beyond." This Canstadt or Neanderthal type was widely diffused early in the Quaternary period, having been found in a skull from the breccia of Gibraltar, in skulls from Italy, Spain, Austria, Sweden, and in France, Belgium, and Western Germany; in fact almost everywhere where skulls and skeletons have been found in the oldest deposits of caves and river-beds, notably in the alluvia of the Seine valley near Paris, where three distinct superimposed strata are found, each with different human types, that of Canstadt being the oldest. Wherever explorations have been carefully made it seems to be certain that the oldest race of all in Europe was dolicocephalic, and probable that it was of the Canstadt type, the skulls of which are all low and long, the length being attained by a great development of the posterior part of the head, which compensates for a deficient forehead. This type is also interesting because, although the oldest, it shows occasional signs of survival through the later palÆolithic and neolithic ages down to recent times. The skulls of St. Manserg, a mediÆval bishop of Toul, and of Lykke, a scientific Dane of the last century, closely resemble the Neanderthal skull in type, and can scarcely be accounted for except as instances of that atavism, or reversion to old ancestral forms, which occasionally crops up both in the human and in animal species. It is thought by many that these earliest palÆolithic men may be the ancestors of the tall, fair, long-headed race of Northern Europe; and Professor Virchow states that in the Frisian islands off the North German coast, where the original Teutonic type has been least affected by intermixture, the Frisian skull unmistakably approaches the Neanderthal and Spy type. But if this be so, the type must have persisted for an immense time, for, as Huxley observes, "the difference is abysmal between these rude and brutal savages, and the comely, fair, tall, and long-headed races of historical times and of civilized nations." At the present day the closest resemblance to the Neanderthal type is afforded by the skulls of certain tribes of native Australians. Next in antiquity to the Canstadt type, though still in the early age when the mammoth and cave-bear were abundant, and the implements and weapons still very rude, a totally different type appears, that of Cro-Magnon. The name is taken from the skeleton of an old man, which was found entire in the rock shelter of Cro-Magnon in the valley of the Vezere, near the station of Moustier, which gave the type of some of the oldest and rudest stone implements of the age of the mammoth. The skeleton was found in the inner extremity of the shelter, buried under a mass of dÉbris and fallen blocks of limestone, and associated with bones of the mammoth and implements of the Moustier type, so that there can be no doubt, of its extreme antiquity. The skull, like that of the Canstadt type, is dolichocephalic, but in all other respects totally different. The brow-ridges and generally bestial characters have disappeared; the brain is of fair or even large capacity; the stature tall; the forehead fairly high and well-rounded; the face large; the nose straight, the jaws prognathous, and the chin prominent. This type is found in a number of localities, especially in the south-west of France, Belgium, and Italy, and it continued through the quaternary into the neolithic period, being found in the caves of the reindeer age, and in the dolmens. It is thought by some ethnologists to present analogies to the Berber type of North Africa, and to that of the extinct Guanches of the Canary Islands. Coexistent with or a little later than this type is one of a totally different character both from it and from that of Canstadt, viz. that of a brachycephalic race of very short stature, closely resembling the modern Lapps. This has been subdivided into the several races of Furfooz, Grenelle, and Truchere, according to the degree of brachycephaly and other features; but practically we may look on these as the results of local variations or intercrossings, and consider all the short, brachycephalic races as forming a third type sharply opposed to those of Canstadt and Cro-Magnon. We have thus distinct evidence that the Quaternary fauna in Europe comprised at least three distinct races of palÆolithic men, and there is a good deal of evidence for the existence of a fourth distinct race in America with features differing from any of the European races, and resembling those of the native American men in recent times. But this affords absolutely no clue as to the existence of other palÆolithic types in Asia, Africa, India, Australia, and other countries, forming quite three-fourths of the inhabited world, in which totally different races now exist and have existed since the commencement of history, who cannot possibly have been derived from any of the European types within the lapse of time comprised within the Quaternary period. The Negro race is the most striking instance of this, for it differs essentially from any other in many particulars, which are all in the direction of an approximation towards the pithecoid type. The size of the brain is less, and a larger proportion of it is in the hinder half; the muzzle much more projecting, and the nose flatter; the fore-arm longer; and various other anatomical peculiarities all point in the same direction, though the type remains perfectly human in the main features. It diverges, however, from the known types of Quaternary man in Europe and from the American type, as completely as it does from those of modern man, and it is impossible to suppose that it can be derived from them, or they from it, in the way of direct descent. If there is any truth in evolution, the Negro type must be one of the oldest, as nearest to the animal ancestor, and this ancestor must be placed very far back beyond the Quaternary period, to allow sufficient time for the development of such entirely different and improved races. This will be the more evident if we consider the case of the pygmy Negritos and Negrillos, who are spread over a wide tropical belt of half the circumference of the earth, from New Guinea to Western Africa. They seem originally to have occupied a large part of this belt, and to have been driven into dense forests, high mountains, and isolated islands, by taller and stronger races, such as the true Negro, the Melanesian, and the Malay, and probably represent therefore a more primitive race. But they had already existed long enough to develop various sub-types among themselves, for although always approaching more to the Negro type than any other, the Asiatic Negrito and the African Negrillo and Bushman differ in the length of skull, colour, hair, prognathism, and other particulars. But they all agree in the one respect which makes it impossible to associate them with any known Quaternary type, either as ancestors or descendants, viz. that of dwarfish stature. As a rule the Bushmen and Negritos do not average above four feet six inches, and the females three inches less; while in some cases they are as low as four feet—i.e. they are quite a foot shorter than the average of the higher races, and nearly a foot and a half below that of the Quaternary Cro-Magnon and Mentone skeletons, and of the modern Swedes and Scotchmen. And they are small and slightly built in proportion, and by no means deformed specimens of humanity. Professor Flower suggests that they may be "the primitive type from which the African Negroes on the one hand, and the Melanesians on the other have sprung." In any case they must certainly have existed as a distinct type in the Quaternary period, and probably much earlier. It is remarkable also that the very oldest human implements known get continually smaller as they get older, until those of the Miocene, from Thenay and Puy Courny, are almost too small for the hands even of Stanley's pygmies. If mere guesses were worth anything, it would be rather a plausible one that the original Adam and Eve were something between a monkey and an Andaman islander. In concluding this summary of the evidence as to Quaternary man, I must remark on the analogy which it presents to that of the historical period dealt with in the earlier chapters. In each case we have distinct evidence carrying us a long way back; in that of the historical period for 7000 years; in that of the Quaternary for a vastly longer time, which, if the effects of high eccentricity, postulated by Croll's theory, had any influence on the two last glacial periods, cannot be less than 200,000 years, an estimate which is confirmed by the amount of geological work and changes of flora and fauna which have taken place. In each case also the positive evidence takes us back to a state of things which gives the most incontrovertible proof of long previous existence; in the historical case the evidence of a dense population and high civilization already long prevailing when written records began; in the case of palÆolithic man, that of his existence in the same state of rude civilization in the most remote regions, and over the greater part of the habitable earth, his almost uniform progression upwards from a lower to a higher civilization, and his existing at the beginning of the Quaternary period already differentiated into races as remote from one another as the typical races of the present day. These facts of themselves afford an irresistible presumption that the origin of the human race must be sought much further back, and it remains to consider what positive evidence has been adduced in support of this presumption. Definition of Periods—Passage from Pliocene to Quaternary—Scarcity of Human Remains in Tertiary—Denudation—Evidence from Caves wanting—Tertiary Man a necessary inference from widespread existence of Quaternary Man—Both equally inconsistent with Genesis—Was the first great Glaciation Pliocene or Quaternary?—Section of Perrier—Confirms Croll's Theory—Elephas Meridionalis—Mammoth—St. Prest—Cut Bones—Instances of Tertiary Man—Halitherium—BalÆonotus—Puy Courny—Thenay—Evidence for—Proofs of Human Agency—Latest Conclusions—Gaudry's Theory—Dryopithecus—Type of Tertiary Man—Skeleton of Castelnedolo—- Shows no approach to the Missing Link—Contrary to Theory of Evolution—- Must be sought in the Eocene—Evidence from the New World—Glacial Period in America—PalÆolithic Implements—Quaternary Man—Similar to Europe—California—Conditions different—Auriferous Gravels—Volcanic Eruptions—Enormous Denudation—Great Antiquity—Flora and Fauna—Point to Tertiary Age —Discovery of Human Remains—Table Mountain—Latest Finds—Calaveras Skull—Summary of Evidence—Other Evidence—Tuolumne—Brazil—Buenos Ayres—Nampa Images—Take us farther from First Origins and the Missing Link—If Darwin's Theory applies to Man, must go back to the Eocene. The first difficulty which meets us in this question is that of distinguishing clearly between the different geological periods. No hard-and-fast line separates the Quaternary from the Pliocene, the Pliocene from the Miocene, or the Miocene from the Eocene. They pass from one into the other by insensible gradations, and the names given to them merely imply that such considerable changes have taken place in the fauna as to enable us to distinguish one period from another. And even this only applies when we take the periods as a whole, and see what have been the predominant types, for single types often survive through successive periods. The course of evolution seems to be that types and species, like individuals, have their periods of birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death. Thus fish of the ganoid type appear sparingly in the Silurian, culminate in the Devonian, and gradually die out in the later formations. So also Saurian reptiles appear in the Carboniferous, culminate in the Lias, and die out with the Secondary, or so nearly so that the crocodilia are their sole remaining representatives. And this applies when we attempt to take our first step backwards in tracing the origin of man, and follow him from the Quaternary into the Pliocene. When did the Pliocene end and the Quaternary begin? Within which of the two did the first great glacial period fall? Does pre-glacial mean Pliocene, or is it included in the Quaternary? and to which do the oldest human remains belong, such as the skeletons of Spy? The difficulty of answering these questions is increased because, as we go back in time, the human remains which guide us in the Quaternary age necessarily become scarcer. Mankind must have been fewer in number, and their relics to a great extent removed by denudation. Thus the evidence from caves, which affords by far the most information as to Quaternary man, entirely fails us as to the Pliocene and earlier periods. This may be readily accounted for when we consider the great amount of the earth's surface which has been removed by denudation. In fact we have seen that nearly 2000 feet of a mountain range must have disappeared from denudation in the Weald of Kent, since the streams from it rolled down the gravels with human implements, scattered over the North Downs as described by Professor Prestwich. What chance would Tertiary caves have of surviving such an extensive denudation? Moreover, if any of the present caves existed before the glacial period, their original contents must have been swept out, perhaps more than once, before they became filled by the present deposits. There is evidence in many caves that this was the case, from small patches of the older deposit being found adhering to the roof, as at Brixham and Maccaguone in Sicily, in which latter case flakes of chipped stone and pieces of carbon were found by Dr. Falconer in these patches of a hard breccia. There is another consideration also which must have greatly diminished the chance of finding human remains in Tertiary deposits. Why did men take to living in dark and damp caves? Presumably for protection against cold. But in the Miocene and the greater part of the Pliocene there was no great cold. The climate, as shown by the vegetation, was mild, equable, and ranged from semi-tropical to south-temperate, and the earth was to a certain extent covered by forests sustaining many fruit-bearing trees. Under such conditions men would have every inducement to live in the open air, and in or near forests where they could obtain food and shelter, rather than in caves. And a few scattered savages, thus living, would leave exceedingly few traces of their existence. If the pygmy races of Central Africa, or of the Andaman Islands, became extinct, the chances would be exceedingly small of a future geologist finding any of their stone implements, which alone would have a chance of surviving, dropped under secular accumulations of vegetable mould in a wide forest. It is the more important therefore where instances of human remains in Tertiary strata, supported by strong prim facie evidence, and vouched for by competent authorities, do actually occur, to examine them dispassionately, and not, as a good many of our English geologists are disposed to do, dismiss them with a sort of scientific non possumus, like that which was so long opposed to the existence of Quaternary man, and the discoveries of Boucher-de-Perthes. It is perfectly evident from the admitted existence of man throughout the Quaternary period, already spread over a great part of the earth's surface, and divided into distinct types, that if there is any truth in evolution, mankind must have had a long previous existence. The only other possible alternative would be the special miraculous creations of men of several different types, and in many different centres, at the particular period of time when the Tertiary was replaced by the Quaternary. In other words that, while all the rest of the animal creation have come into existence by evolution from ancestral types, man alone, and that not merely as regards his spiritual qualities, but physical man, with every bone and muscle having its counterpart in the other quadrumana, was an exception to this universal law, and sprang into existence spontaneously or by repeated acts of supernatural interference. As long as the account of the creation in Genesis was held to be a divinely-inspired narrative, and no facts contradicting it had been discovered, it is conceivable that such a theory might be held, but to admit evolution for Quaternary, and refuse to admit it for Tertiary man, is an extreme instance of "straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel," for a duration of even 10,000 or 20,000 years is just as inconsistent with Genesis as one of 100,000 or half a million. In attacking the question of Tertiary man, the first point is to aim at some clear conception of where the Pliocene ends and the Quaternary begins. These are after all but terms applied to gradual changes through long intervals of time; still they require some definition, or otherwise we should be beating the air, and ticketing in some museums as Tertiary the identical specimens which in others were labelled as Quaternary. This turns very much on whether the first great glaciation was Pliocene or Quaternary, and must be decided partly by the order of superposition and partly by the fauna. If we can find a section where a thick morainic deposit is interposed between two stratified deposits, a lower one characterized by the usual fauna of the Older Pliocene, and an upper one by that of the Newer Pliocene, it is evident that the glacier or ice-cap which left this moraine must have existed in Pliocene times. We know that the climate became colder in the Pliocene, and rapidly colder towards its close, and that in the cliffs of Cromer, the forest bed with a temperate climate had given place to Arctic willows and mosses, before the first and lowest boulder-clay had brought blocks of Scandinavian granite to England. We should be prepared, therefore, for evidence that this first period of greatest cold had occurred within the limits of the Pliocene period. Such evidence is afforded by the valleys which radiate from the great central boss of France in the Auvergne. The hill of Perrier had long been known as a rich site of the fossil remains of the extinct Pliocene fauna, and its section has been carefully studied by some of the best French geologists, whose results are summed up as follows by Hamy in his PalÆontologie humaine— "The bed-rock is primitive protogine, which is covered by nearly horizontal lacustrine Miocene, itself covered by some metres of fluviatile gravels. Above comes a bed of fine sand, a mÈtre thick, which contains numerous specimens of the well-known mammalian fauna of the Lower Pliocene, characterized by two mastodons (M. Armenicus and M. Borsoni). Then comes a mass of conglomerates 150 mÈtres thick, consisting of pebbles and boulders cemented by yellowish mud; and above this a distinct layer of Upper Pliocene characterized by the Elephas Meridionalis. "The boulders, some of which are of great size, are all angular, never rounded or stratified, often scratched, and mostly consisting of trachyte, which must have been transported twenty-five kilomÈtres from the Puy de DÔme. In short, the conglomerate is absolutely indistinguishable from any other glacial moraine, whether of the Quaternary period or of the present day. It is divided into three sections by two layers of rolled pebbles and sands, which could only have been caused by running water, so that the glacier must have advanced and retreated three times, leaving each time a moraine fifty mÈtres thick, and the whole of this must have occurred before the deposit of the Upper Pliocene stratum with its Elephas Meridionalis and other Pliocene mammals." The importance of this will presently be seen, for the Elephas Meridionalis is one of the extinct animals which is most directly connected with the proofs of man's existence before the Quaternary period. It is also important as confirming the immense time which must have elapsed between the date of the first and second maxima of glacial cold, and thus adding probability to the calculations derived from Croll's periods of maximum and minimum eccentricity. The three advances and retreats of the great Perrier glacier also fit in extremely well with the calculated effects of precession during high eccentricity, as about three of such periods must have occurred in the period of the coming on, culminating, and receding of each phase of maximum eccentricity. This evidence from Perrier does not stand alone, for in the neighbouring valleys, and in many other localities, isolated boulders of foreign rocks which could only have been transported by ice, are found at heights considerably above those of the more recent moraines and boulders which had been supposed to mark the limit of the greatest glaciation. Thus on the slopes of the Jura and the Vosges, boulders of Alpine rocks, much worn by age, and whose accompanying drifts and moraines have disappeared by denudation, are found at heights 150 or 200 mÈtres above the more obvious moraines and boulders, which themselves rise to a height of nearly 4000 feet, and must have been the front of glaciers from the Alps which buried the plain of Switzerland under that thickness of solid ice. The only possible alternative to this evidence from Perrier would be to throw back the duration of the Quaternary and limit that of the Pliocene enormously, by supposing that all the deposits above the great glacial conglomerate or old moraine, are inter-glacial and not Tertiary. This is, as has been pointed out, very much a question of words, for the phenomena and the time required to account for them remain the same by whatever name we elect to call them. But it still has its importance, for it involves the fundamental principle of geology, that of classifying eras and formations by their fauna. If the Elephas Meridionalis is a Pliocene and not a Quaternary species, we must admit, with the great majority of continental geologists, that the first and greatest glaciation fell within the Pliocene period. If, on the other hand, this elephant is, like the mammoth, part of the Quaternary fauna, we may believe, as many English geologists do, that the first glacial period coincided with and probably occasioned the change from Pliocene to Quaternary, and that everything above the oldest boulder-clays and moraines is not Tertiary but inter-glacial. As bones of the Elephas Meridionalis have been frequently found in connection with human implements, and with cuts on them which could only have been made by flint knives ground by the human hand, it will be seen at once what an interest attaches to this apparently dry geological question, of the age of the great southern elephant. The transition from the mastodon into the elephant took place in the Old World (for in America the succession is different) in the Pliocene period. In the older Pliocene we have nothing but mastodons, in the newer nothing but elephants, and the transition from the older to the newer type is distinctly traced by intermediate forms in the fossil fauna of the Sewalek hills. The Elephas Meridionalis is the oldest known form of true elephant, and it is characteristic of all the different formations of the Upper Pliocene, while it is nowhere found in cave or river deposits which belong unmistakably to the Quaternary. It was a gigantic animal, fully four feet higher than the tallest existing elephant, and bulky in proportion. It had a near relation in the Elephas Antiquus, which was of equal size, and different from it mainly in a more specialized structure of the molar teeth, and the remains of this elephant have been found in the lower strata of some of the oldest bone-caves and river-silts, as to which it is difficult to say whether they are older or younger than the first glacial period. The remains of a pygmy elephant, no bigger than an ass, have also been found in the Upper Pliocene, at Malta and Sicily, and those of the existing African elephant in Sicily and Spain. It would seem, therefore, that the Upper Pliocene was the golden age of the elephants where they were most widely diffused, and comprised most species and most varieties, both in the direction of gigantic and of diminutive size. But in passing from the Pliocene into the Quaternary period, they all, or almost all, disappeared, and were superseded by the Elephas Primigenius, or mammoth, which had put in a first appearance in the latest Pliocene, and became the principal representative of the genus Elephas in Europe and Northern Asia down to comparatively recent times. This succession is confirmed by that of the rhinoceros, of which several species were contemporary with the Elephas Meridionalis, while the Rhinoceros tichorinus, or woolly rhinoceros, who is the inseparable companion of the mammoth, appeared and disappeared with him. In these matters, those who are not themselves specialists must rely on authority, and when we find Lyell, Geikie, and Prestwich coinciding with all modern French, German, Italian, and Belgian geologists, in considering Elephas Meridionalis as one of the characteristic Upper Pliocene fauna, we can have no hesitation in adopting their conclusion. In this case the section of St. Prest, near Chartres, affords a first absolutely secure foothold in tracing our way backwards towards human origins beyond the Quaternary. The sands and gravels of a river which ran on the bed rock without any underlying glacial dÉbris are here exposed. It had no relation to the existing river Eure, the bed of which it crosses at an angle, and it must have run before that river had begun to excavate its valley, and when the drainage of the country was quite different. The sands contain an extraordinary number of bones of the Elephas Meridionalis, associated with old species of rhinoceros, and other Pliocene species. Lyell, who visited the spot, had no hesitation in calling it a Pliocene river. In fact it never would have been disputed if the question of man's antiquity had not been involved in it, for in these sands and gravels have been found numerous specimens of cut bones of the Elephas Meridionalis, together with the flint knives which made the cuts, and other stone implements, rude but still unmistakably of the usual palÆolithic type. The subjoined plate will enable the reader to compare the arrow-head, which is the commonest type found at St. Prest, with a comparatively recent arrow-head from the Yorkshire wolds, and see how impossible it is to concede human agency to the post-glacial and deny it to the Pliocene specimen. PLIOCENE. ARROW-HEAD—ST. PREST. (Hamy, PalÆontologie Humaine.)
POST-GLACIAL. ARROW-HEAD—YORKSHIRE WOLDS. (Evans, Stone Implements.) In this and other instances, cut bones afford one of the most certain tests of the presence of man. The bones tell their own tale, and their geological age can be certainly identified. Sharp cuts could only be made on them while the bones were fresh, and the state of fossilization, and presence of dendrites or minute crystals alike on the side of the cuts and on the bone, negative any idea of forgery. The cuts can be compared with those on thousands of undoubted human cuts on bones from the reindeer and other later periods, and with cuts now made with old flint knives on fresh bones. All these tests have been applied by some of the best anthropologists of the day, who have made a special study of the subject, and who have shown their caution and good faith by rejecting numerous specimens which did not fully meet the most rigorous requirements, with the result that in several cases there could be no reasonable doubt that the cuts were really made by human implements guided by human hands. The only possible alternative suggested is, that they might have been made by gnawing animals or fishes. But as Quatrefages observes, even an ordinary carpenter would have no difficulty in distinguishing between a clean cut made by a sharp knife, and a groove cut by repeated strokes of a narrow chisel; and how much more would it be impossible for a Professor trained to scientific investigation, and armed with a microscope, to mistake a groove gnawed out by a shark or rodent for a cut made by a flint knife. No one who will refer to Quatrefages' Hommes fossilÉs, and look at the figures of cut bones given there from actual photographs, can feel any doubt that the cuts there delineated were made by flint knives held by the human hand. In addition to this instance of St. Prest, Quatrefages in his Histoire des Races Humaines, published in 1887, and containing the latest summary of the evidence generally accepted by French geologists as to Tertiary man, says that, omitting doubtful cases, the presence of man has been signalized in deposits undoubtedly Tertiary in five different localities, viz. in France by the AbbÉ Bourgeois, in the Lower Miocene of Thenay near Pontlevoy (Loir-et-Cher); by M. Rames at Puy Courny near Aurillac (Cantal), in the Upper Miocene; in Italy by M. Capellini in the Pliocene of Monte Aperto near Sienna, and by M. Ragazzoni in the Lower Pliocene of Castelnedolo near Brescia; in Portugal by M. Ribiero at Otta, in the valley of the Tagus, in the Upper Miocene.
CUTS WITH FLINT KNIFE ON RIB OF BALÆONOTUS—PLIOCENE. From Monte Aperto, Italy. (Quatrefages, Histoire des Races Humaines.)
CUT MAGNIFIED BY MICROSCOPE. To these may be added the cut bones of Halitherium, a Miocene species, from PouancÉ (Maine et Loire), by M. Delaunay; and those on the tibia of a Rhinoceros Etruscus, and other fossil bones from the Upper Pliocene of the Val d'Arno. In addition to these are the numerous remains, certainly human and presumably Tertiary, from North and South America, which will be referred to later, and a considerable number of cases where there is a good deal of prim facie evidence for Tertiary human remains, but where doubts remain and their authenticity is still denied by competent authorities. Among these ought to be placed the instance from Portugal, for although a large celt very like those of the oldest palÆolithic type was undoubtedly found in strata which had always been considered as Miocene, the Congress of PalÆontologists who assembled at Lisbon were divided in opinion as to the conclusiveness of the evidence. But there remain six cases in the Old World, ranging from St. Prest in the Upper Pliocene to Thenay in the Lower Miocene, in which the preponderance of evidence and authority in support of Tertiary man seems so decisive, that nothing but a preconceived bias against the antiquity of the human race can refuse to accept it. I have already discussed this evidence so fully in a former work (Problems of the Future, ch. v. on Tertiary Man) that I do not propose to go over the ground again, but merely to refer briefly to some of the more important points which come out in the above six instances. In three of them, those of the Halitherium of PouancÉ, the BalÆonotus of Monte Aperto, and the rhinoceros of the Val d'Arno, the evidence depends entirely on cut bones, and in the case of St. Prest on that of cut bones of Elephas Meridionalis combined with palÆolithic implements. The evidence from cut bones is for the reasons already stated very conclusive, and when a jury of four or five of the leading authorities, such as Quatrefages, Hamy, Mortillet, and Delaunay, who have devoted themselves to this branch of inquiry, and have shown their great care and conscientiousness by rejecting numbers of cases which did not satisfy the most rigid tests, arrive unanimously at the conclusion that many of the cuts on the bones of Tertiary animals are unmistakably of human origin, there seems no room left for any reasonable scepticism. I cannot doubt therefore that we have positive evidence to confirm the existence of man, at any rate from the Pliocene period, through the long series of ages intervening between it and the Quaternary. But the discovery of flint implements at Puy Courny in the Upper Miocene, and at Thenay in the Lower Miocene, carry us back a long step further, and involves such important issues as to the origin of the human race, that it may be well to recapitulate the evidence upon which those discoveries rest. The first question is as to the geological age of the deposits in which these chipped implements have been found. In the case of Puy Courny this is beyond dispute. In the central region of the Auvergne there have been two series of volcanic eruptions, the latest towards the close of the Pliocene or commencement of the Quaternary period, and an older one, which, from its position and fossils, is clearly of the Upper Miocene. The gravels in which the chipped flints were discovered by M. Rames, a very competent geologist, were interstratified with tuffs and lavas of these older volcanoes, and no doubt as to their geological age was raised by the Congress of French archÆologists to whom they were submitted. The whole question turns therefore on the sufficiency of the proofs of human origin, as to which the same Congress expressed themselves as fully satisfied.
FLINT SCRAPER FROM HIGH LEVEL DRIFT, KENT. (Prestwich.) The specimens consist of several well-known palÆolithic types, celts, scrapers, arrow-heads and flakes, only ruder and smaller than those of later periods. They were found at three different localities in the same stratum of gravel, and comply with all the tests by which the genuineness of Quaternary implements is ascertained, such as bulbs of percussion, conchoidal fractures, and above all, intentional chipping in a determinate direction. It is evident that a series of small parallel chips or trimmings, confined often to one side only of the flint, and which have the effect of bringing it into a shape which is known from Quaternary and recent implements to be adapted for human use, imply intelligent design, and could not have been produced by the casual collisions of pebbles rolled down by an impetuous torrent. Thus the annexed plate of an implement from the high level drift on the North Downs, shown by Professor Prestwich to the Anthropological Society, is rude enough, but no one has ever expressed the least doubt of its human origin. The chipped flints from Puy Courny also afford another very conclusive proof of intelligent design. The gravelly deposit in which they are found contains five different varieties of flints, and of these all that look like human implements are confined to one particular variety, which from its nature is peculiarly adapted for human use. As Quatrefages says, no torrents or other natural causes could have exercised such a discrimination, which could only have been made by an intelligent being, selecting the stones best adapted for his tools and weapons. UPPER MIOCENE IMPLEMENTS. PUY COURNY.
SCRAPER, OR LANCE-HEAD. Puy Courny. Upper Miocene (Rames). (Quatrefages, Races Humaines, p. 95.)
SCRAPER. Puy Courny. Upper Miocene (Rames) (Quatrefages, Races Humaines, p. 95.) The general reader must be content to rely to a great extent on the verdict of experts, and in this instance of Puy Courny need not perhaps go further than the conclusion of the French Congress of archÆologists, who pronounced in favour both of their Miocene and human origin. It may be well, however, to annex a plate showing in two instances how closely the specimens from Puy Courny resemble those of later periods, of the human origin of which no doubt has ever been entertained. It is certainly carrying scientific scepticism to an unreasonable pitch to doubt that whatever cause fashioned the two lower figures, the same cause must equally have fashioned the upper ones; and if that cause be human intelligence in the Quaternary period it must have been human or human-like intelligence in the Upper Miocene. COPARE QUATERNARY IMPLEMENTS.
WOKEY HOLE—GLACIAL. (Evans, Stone Implements, p 473.)
PLATEAU DRIFT. North Downs, Kent (Prestwich). The evidence for the still older implements of Thenay is of the same nature as that for those of Puy Courny. First as regards the geological horizon. Subjoined is the section at Thenay as. made by M. Bourgeois, verified by MM. Vibraye, Delaunay, Schmidt, Belgrand, and others, from personal inspection, and given by M. Hamy in his PalÆontologie humaine. It would seem that there could be little doubt as to the geological position of the strata from which the alleged chipped flints come. The Faluns are a well-known marine deposit of a shallow sea spread over a great part of Central and Southern France, and identified, beyond a doubt, as Upper Miocene by its shells. The Orleans Sands are another Miocene deposit perfectly characterized by its mammalian fauna, in which the Mastodon Angustidens first appears, with other peculiar species. The Calcaire de Beauce is a solid freshwater limestone formed in the great lake which in the Miocene age occupied the plain of the Beauce and extended into Touraine. It forms a clear horizon or dividing line between the Upper Miocene, characterized by the Mastodon, and the Lower Miocene, of which the Acrotherium, a four-toed and hornless rhinoceros, is the most characteristic fossil.
SECTION AT THENAY. 9. Quaternary Alluvium.
8. Falums—chipped flints.
7. Orleans Sands—chipped flints.
6b. Calcaire de Beauce—compact.
6a. " Marly—no flints.
5. Clayeye Marl, with Acrotherium—few flints.
4. Marl with nodules—flints.
3. Clay—chief site of cut flints.
2. Marl and clay—very few flints.
1. Marl and silex—no chipped flints. The supposed chipped flints are said to appear sparingly in the upper deposits, disappear in the Calcaire de Beauce, and reappear, at first sparingly and then plentifully, in the lacustrian marls below the limestone. They are by far the most numerous in a thin layer of greenish-yellow clay, No. 3 of section, below which they rapidly disappear. There can be no question therefore that if the flints really came from the alleged deposits, and really show the work of human hands, the savages by whom they were chipped must have lived on the shores or sand-banks of this Miocene lake. As regards the geological question, it is right to observe that Professor Prestwich, who visited the section a good many years ago in company with the AbbÉ Bourgeois, and who is one of the highest authorities on this class of questions, remained unconvinced that the flints shown him really came from the alleged strata below the Calcaire de Beauce, and thought that the specimens which appeared to show human manufacture might have come from the surface, and become intermixed with the natural flints of the lower strata. The geological horizon, however, seems to have been generally accepted by French and Continental geologists, especially by the latest authorities, and the doubts which have been expressed have turned mainly on the proof of human design shown by the implements. This is a question which must be decided by the authority of experts, for it requires special experience to be able to distinguish between accidental fractures and human design, in implements of the extremely rude type of the earlier formations. The test is mainly afforded by the nature of the chipping. If it consists of a number of small chips, all in the same direction, with the result of bringing one face or side into a definite form, adapted for some special use, the inference is strong that the chips were the work of design. The general form might be the result of accident, but fractures from frost or collisions simulating chipping could hardly be all in the same direction, and confined to one part of the stone. The inference is strengthened if the specimen shows bulbs of percussion, where the blows had been struck to fashion the implement, and if the microscope discloses parallel striÆ and other signs of use on the chipped edge, such as would be made by scraping bones or skins, while nothing of the sort is seen on the other natural edges, though they may be sharper. But above all, the surest test is afforded by a comparison with other implements of later dates, or even of existing savages, which are beyond all doubts products of human manufacture. Tried by these tests, the evidence stands as follows— When specimens of the flints from Thenay were first submitted to the Anthropological Congress at Brussels, in 1867, their human origin was admitted by MM. Worsae, de Vibraye, de Mortillet, and Schmidt, and rejected by MM. Nilson, Hebert, and others, while M. Quatrefages reserved his opinion, thinking a strong case made out, but not being entirely satisfied. M. Bourgeois himself was partly responsible for these doubts, for, like Boucher-de-Perthes, he had injured his case by overstating it, and including a number of small flints, which might have been, and probably were, merely natural specimens. But the whole collection having been transferred to the ArchÆological Museum at St. Germain, its director, M. Mortillet, selected those which appeared most demonstrative of human origin, and placed them in a glass case, side by side with similar types of undoubted Quaternary implements. This removed a great many doubts, and later discoveries of still better specimens of the type of scrapers have, in the words of Quatrefages, "dispelled his last doubts," while not a single instance has occurred of any convert in the opposite direction, or of any opponent who has adduced facts contradicting the conclusions of Quatrefages, Mortillet, and Hamy, after an equally careful and minute investigation. MIDDLE MIOCENE IMPLEMENTS.
SCRAPER FROM THENAY. (Hamy, PalÆontologie Humaine, p. 49.)
SCRAPER, OR BORER. Thenay. (Showing bulb of percussion. Quatrefages, Races Humaines, p. 92.) In order to assist the reader in forming an opinion as to the claim of these flints from Thenay, to show clear traces of human design, I subjoin some illustrations of photographs in which they are compared with specimens of later date, which are undoubtedly and by universal consent works of human hands, guided by human intelligence. These figures seem to leave no reasonable doubt that some at least of the flints from Thenay show unmistakable signs of human handiwork, and I only hesitate to accept them as conclusive proofs of the existence of man in the Middle Miocene, because such an authority as Prestwich retains doubts of their having come from the geological horizon accepted by the most eminent modern French geologists. MIDDLE MIOCENE IMPLEMENTS.
BORER, OR AWL. Thenay. Miocene. (CongrÈs PrÉhistorique, Bruxelles, 1872.(CongrÈs PrÉhistorique, Bruxelles, 1872.)
KNIFE, OR SCRAPER. Thenay. (Gaudry. Quatrefages, p. 92.) The evidence of the authenticity of these implements from Thenay is, moreover, greatly strengthened by the discovery of other Miocene implements at Puy Courny, which have not been seriously impugned, and by the essay of Professor Prestwich, confirming the discovery of numerous flint implements in the upper level gravels of the North Downs, which could only have been deposited by streams flowing from a mountain ridge along the Anticlinal of the Weald, of which 2000 feet must have disappeared by sub-aËrial denudation since these rivers flowed northwards from its flanks. How far back such a denudation may carry us is a matter of speculation. Certainly, as Prestwich admits, into the pre-glacial or very early glacial ages, and possibly into the Tertiaries, but at any rate for a time which, by whatever name we call it, must be enormous according to any standard of centuries or millenniums. And what is specially interesting in these extremely ancient implements is that, in Prestwich's words, "these plateau implements exhibit distinct characters and types such as would denote them to be the work of a more primitive and ruder race than those fabricated by palÆolithic men of the valley drift times." COMPARE QUATERNARY IMPLEMENTS.
SCRAPER. Yorkshire Wold. (Evans, Stone Implements.)
QUATERNARY. Mammoth Period. River Drift, Mesvin. Belgium.
QUATERNARY. Chaleux, Belgium. Reindeer Period. (CongrÈs PrÉhistorique, Bruxelles, 1872.) In fact we have only to look at the figures which accompany Prestwich's essay,[12] to see that their types resemble those of Puy Courny and Thenay, rather than those of St. Acheul and Moustier. The following remarks of the Professor would apply almost as well to the Miocene implements as to those of the plateau— "Unlike the valley implements, the plateau implements are, as a rule, made of the fragments of natural drift flints, that are found scattered over the surface of the ground, or picked up in gravel-beds and merely roughly trimmed. Sometimes the work is so slight as to be scarcely apparent; at others, it is sufficient to show a distinct design and object. It indicates the very infancy of the art, and probably the earliest efforts of man to fabricate his tools and weapons from other substances than wood or bone. That there was an object and design is manifest from the fact that they admit of being grouped according to certain patterns. These are very simple, but they answered to the wants of a primitive people. "With few exceptions, the implements are small, from 2 to 5 inches in length, and mostly such as could have been used in the hand, and in the hand only. There is, with the exceptions before named, an almost entire absence of the large massive spear-head forms of the valley drifts, and a large preponderance of forms adapted for chipping, hammering, and scraping. With these are some implements that could not have been used in the hand, but they are few and rude. The difference between the plateau and the valley implements is as great or greater than between the latter and the neolithic implements. Though the work on the plateau implements is often so slight as scarcely to be recognizable, even modern savage work, such as exhibited for example by the stone implements of the Australian natives, show, when divested of their mounting, an amount of work no greater or more distinct, than do these early palÆolithic specimens. "Some persons may be disposed to look upon the slight and rude work which these flints have received as the result only of the abrasion and knocking about caused by collision during the transport of the drift. This belief prevailed for a time even in the case of the comparatively well-fashioned valley implements. A little practice, and comparison with natural drift flints, will show the difference, notwithstanding the, at first, unpromising appearance of these early specimens of man's handicraft. It is as such, and from their being the earliest such work with which we are acquainted, that they are of so great interest, for they give us some slight insight into the occupation and surroundings of the race by whom they were used. A main object their owners would seem to have had in view, was the trimming of flints to supply them with implements adapted to the breaking of bones for the sake of the marrow, scraping skins, and round bodies such as bones or sticks, for use as simple tools or poles. From the scarcity of the large massive implements of the pointed and adze type, so common in the valley drifts, it would seem as though offensive and defensive weapons of this class had not been so much needed, whether from the rarity of the large mammalia, so common later on in the low-level valley drifts, or from the habits and character of those early people." The positive evidence is therefore extremely strong that men existed in the Tertiaries, and if we add to it the irresistible inference that he must have done so to develop so many different races, and leave his rude implements in so many and such remote regions as we found early in the Quaternary, I do not see how it is possible to avoid accepting it as an established fact. But in using the term Tertiary Man, I do not venture to define the exact meaning of "man," or the precise stage in his evolution which had been attained at this enormously remote period. M. Gaudry, an excellent authority, while admitting that the flints from Thenay showed evidence of intentional chipping, thought that they might have been the work of the Dryopithecus, a fossil ape, supposed to be nearer man than any existing anthropoid, whose remains had been found at Sausan in the Middle Miocene. But the Dryopithecus has been deposed from his pride of place by the subsequent discovery of a more perfect jaw, and he is now considered, though undoubtedly an anthropoid ape, to be of a lower type than the chimpanzee or gorilla.[13] The strongest argument however for the essentially human character of the artificers of the flints of Thenay and Puy Courny is that their type continues, with no change except that of slight successive improvements, through the Pliocene, Quaternary, and even down to the present day. The scraper of the Esquimaux and the Andaman islanders is but an enlarged and improved edition of the Miocene scraper, and in the latter case the stones seem to have been split by the same agency, viz. that of fire. The early knowledge of fire is also confirmed by the discovery, reported by M. Bourgeois in the Orleans Sand at Thenay, with bones of mastodon and dinotherium, of a stony fragment mixed with carbon, in a sort of hardened paste, which, as we can hardly suppose pottery to have been known, must be the remnant of a hearth on which there had been a fire. There must always, however, remain a doubt as to the nature of this ancestral Tertiary man, until actual skulls and skeletons have been found, under circumstances which preclude doubt, and in sufficient numbers to enable anthropologists to speak with the same confidence as to types and races, as they can of his Quaternary successors. This again is difficult from the rarity of such remains, and from the fact that after burial of the dead was introduced, graves must often have been dug down from the surface into older strata, with which in course of time their contents become intermixed. No case, therefore, can be safely admitted where the find was not made by well-known scientific authorities, under circumstances which preclude the possibility of subsequent interment, and vouch for the geological age of the undisturbed deposit. This test disposes of all the alleged discoveries of human remains in the Tertiaries of the Old World, except one, and although it is quite possible that some may be genuine among those rejected, it is safer not to rely on them. There is one, however, which is supported by extremely strong evidence, and the discussion of which I have reserved for the last, as if accepted it throws a new and unexpected light on the evolution of the human race. The following is the account of it, taken from Quatrefages' Races humaines— "The bones of four individuals, a woman and two children, were found at Castelnedolo, near Brescia, in a bed identified by its fossils as Lower Pliocene. The excavations were made with the utmost care, in undisturbed strata, by M. Ragazzoni, a well-known scientific man, assisted by M. Germani, and the results confirmed by M. Sergi, a well-known geologist, after a minute personal investigation. The deposit was removed in successive horizontal layers, and not the least trace was found of the beds having been mixed or disturbed. The human bones presented the same fossilized appearance as those of the extinct animals in the same deposit. The female skeleton was almost entire, and the fragments of the skull were sufficiently perfect to admit of their being pieced together so as to show almost its entire form." The first conjecture naturally was that it must have been a case of subsequent interment, a conjecture which was strengthened by the fact of the female skeleton being so entire; but this is negatived by the undisturbed nature of the beds, and by the fact that the other bones were found scattered at considerable distances throughout the stratum. M. Quatrefages sums up the evidence by saying, "that there exists no serious reason for doubting the discovery, and that if made in a Quaternary deposit, no one would have thought of contesting its accuracy. Nothing can be opposed to it but theoretical À priori objections similar to those which so long repelled the existence of Quaternary man." But if we accept this discovery, it leads to the remarkable conclusion that Tertiary man not only existed, but has undergone little change in the thousands of centuries which have since elapsed. The skull is of fair capacity, very much like what might be expected from a female of the Canstadt type, and less rude and ape-like than the skulls of Spy and Neanderthal, or those of modern Bushmen and Australians. And the other bones of the skeleton show no marked peculiarities. This makes it difficult to accept the discovery unreservedly, notwithstanding the great weight of positive evidence in its favour. The great objection to Tertiary man has been, that as all other species had changed, and many had become extinct two or three times over since the Miocene, it was unlikely that an animal so highly specialized as man should alone have had a continuous existence. And this argument of course becomes stronger the more it can be shown that the oldest skeletons differed little if it at all from man of the Quaternary and Recent ages. Moreover, the earlier specimens of Quaternary man which are so numerous and authentic, show, if not anything that can be fairly called the "missing link," still a decided tendency, as they get older, towards the type of the rudest existing races, which again show a distinct though distant approximation towards the type of the higher apes. The oldest Quaternary skulls are dolichocephalic, very thick with enormous frontal sinuses; low and receding foreheads; flattened vertices; prognathous jaws, and slight and receding' chins. The average cranial capacity is about 1150 cubic centimÈtres, or fully one-fourth less than that of modern European man, and of this smaller brain a larger proportion is in the posterior region. The other peculiarities of the skeletons all tend in the same direction, and, as we have seen in Huxley's description of the men of Spy, sometimes go a long way in the pithecoid direction, even to the extent of not being able to straighten the knee in walking. It would, therefore, be contrary to all our ideas of evolution to find that some 100,000 or 200,000, or more probably 400,000 or 500,000 years prior to these men of Spy and Neanderthal, the human race had existed in higher physical perfection nearer to the existing type of modern man. Quatrefages meets this by saying that Tertiary men with a larger brain, and therefore more intelligence than the other Tertiary mammals, might have survived, where these succumbed to changes and became extinct. This is doubtless true to some extent, but it hardly seems sufficient to account for the presence of a higher and more recent type, like that of Castelnedolo in the Lower Pliocene, that is a whole geological period earlier than that of the Lower Quaternary. It is more to the purpose to say with Gaudry that the changes on which the distinction of species are founded are often so slight that they might just as well be attributed to variations of races; and to appeal to instances like that of the Hylobates of the Miocene, one of the nearest congeners of man, in which no genuine difference can be detected from the Hylobates or Gibbon of the present day; and if the discovery referred to at p. 264, of anthropoid primates in the Eocene of Patagonia, should be confirmed, it would greatly strengthen the argument for the persistence of the order to which man belongs through several geological periods. In any case we require more than the evidence of this one discovery before we can assume the type of Tertiary man as a proved fact with the same confidence as we can the existence of something like man in those remote ages, from the repeated evidence of chipped stones and cut bones, showing unmistakable signs of being the work of human intelligence. And in the meantime, the only safe conclusion seems to be that it is very probable that we may have to go back to the Eocene to find the "missing link," or the ancestral animal which may have been the common progenitor of man and of the other quadrumana. I turn now to the evidence from the New World. I have kept this distinct, for there is no such proof of synchronism between the later geological phases of this and of the Old World as would warrant us in assuming that what is true in one is necessarily true in the other. Thus in Europe the presence of the mastodon is a conclusive proof that the formation in which its remains are found is Upper Miocene or Pliocene, and it has completely disappeared before the glacial period and the Quaternary era. But in North America it has survived both these periods, and it is even a question whether it is not found in recent peat-mosses with arrow-heads of the historical Indians. The glacial period also, which in the Old World affords such a clear demarcation between Tertiary and Recent ages, and such manifest proofs of two great glaciations with a long inter-glacial period, presents different conditions in America, where the ice-caps radiated from different centres, and extended further south and over wider areas. There is no proof whether the great cold set in sooner or later, and whether the elevations and depressions of land synchronized with those of Europe. The evidence for a long inter-glacial period is by no means so clear, and the best American geologists differ respecting it. And above all, the glacial period seems to have lasted longer, and the time required for post-glacial or recent denudation, and erosion of river-gorges, to be less than is required to account for post-glacial phenomena on this side of the Atlantic. The evidence, therefore, from the New World, though conclusive as to the existence of man from an immense antiquity, can hardly be accepted as equally so in an attempt to prove that antiquity to be Tertiary in the sense of identifying it with specific European formations. With this reservation I proceed to give a short account of this evidence as bearing on the question of the oldest proofs of man's existence. The first step or proof of the presence of man in the Quaternary deposits which correspond with the oldest river-drifts of Europe, has only been made quite recently. Mr. Abbott was the first to discover such implements of the usual palÆolithic type in Quaternary gravels of the river Delaware, near Trenton in New Jersey, and since then they have been frequently found, as described by Dr. Wright in his recently-published Ice Age in America, in Ohio, Illinois, and other States, in the old gravels of rivers which carried the drainage of the great lake district to the Hudson and the Mississippi, before the present line of drainage was established by the Falls of Niagara and the St. Lawrence. So far the evidence merely confirms that drawn from similar finds in the Old World of the existence of man in the early glacial or Quaternary times, already widely diffused, and everywhere in a similar condition of primitive savagery, and chipping his rude stone implements into the same forms. But if we cross the Rocky Mountains into California, we find evidence which apparently carries us further back and raises new questions. The whole region west of the Rocky Mountains is comparatively recent. The Coast Range which now fronts the Pacific is composed entirely of marine Tertiary strata, and when they were deposited, the waves of the Pacific beat against the flanks of the Sierra Nevada. At length the Coast Range was upheaved and a wide valley left between it and the Sierra of over 400 miles in length, and with an average breadth of seventy-five miles. The Sierra itself is old land, the lower hills consisting of Triassic slates and the higher ranges of granite, and it has never been under water since the Secondary Age though doubtless it stood much higher before it was so greatly denuded. All along its western flank and far down into the great valley is an enormous bed of auriferous gravel, doubtless derived from the waste of the rocks of the Sierra during an immense time by old rivers now buried under their own deposits. While these deposits were going on a great outburst of volcanoes occurred on the western slope of the Sierra, and successive sheets of tuffs, ashes, and lavas are interstratified with the gravels, while finally an immense flow of basalt covered up everything. The country then presented the appearance of a great plain, sloping gradually downwards from the Sierra according to the flow of the basalt and lavas. This plain was in its turn attacked by denudation and worn down by the existing main rivers into valleys and gorges, and by their tributary streams into a series of flat-topped hills, capped by basalt and divided from one another by deep and narrow caÑons. The immense time required for this latest erosion may be inferred when it is stated that where the Columbia river cuts through the axis of the Cascade Mountains, the precipitous rocks on either side, to a height of from 3000 to 4000 feet, consist of this late Tertiary or Post-Tertiary basalt, and that the Deschutes river has been cut into the great basaltic plain for 140 miles to a depth of from 1000 to 2500 feet, without reaching the bottom of the lava. The American and Yuba valleys have been lowered from 800 to 1500 feet, and the gorge of the Stanislas river has cut through one of these basalt-covered hills to the depth of 1500 feet.
SECTION OF GREAT CALIFORNIAN LAVA STREAM, CUT THROUGH BY RIVERS. a, a, basalt; b, b, volcanic ashes; c, c, tertiary; d, d, cretaceous rocks; R, R, direction of the old river-bed; R´, R´, sections of the present river-beds. (Le Conte, from Whitney.) The enormous gorge of the Colorado has cut its caÑons for hundreds of miles from 3000 to 6000 feet deep through all the orders of sedimentary rocks from the Tertiaries down, and from 600 to 800 feet into the primordial granite below, thus draining the great lakes which in Tertiary times occupied a vast space in the interior of America which is now an arid desert. Evidently the gravels which lie below the basalt, and interstratified with the tuffs and lavas, or below them, and which belong to an older and still more extensive denudation, must be of immense antiquity, an antiquity which remains the same whether we call it Quaternary or Tertiary. It is in these gravels that gold is found, and in the search for it great masses have been removed in which numerous stone implements have been found. The great antiquity of those gravels and volcanic tuffs is further confirmed by the changes in the flora and fauna which are proved to have occurred. The animal remains found beneath the basaltic cap are very numerous, and all of extinct species. They belong to the genera rhinoceros, elatherium, felis, canis, bos, tapirus, hipparion, elephas (primigenius), mastodon, and auchenia, and form an assemblage entirely distinct from any now living in any part of North America. Some of the genera survived into the Quaternary age as in Europe, but many, both of the genera and species, are among those most characteristic of the Pliocene period. The flora also, which is well preserved in the white clays formed from the volcanic ash, comprises forty-nine species of deciduous trees and shrubs, all distinct from those now living, without a single trace of the pines, firs, and other conifera which are now the prevalent trees throughout California. Tried by any test, therefore, of fauna, flora, and of immensely long deposit before the present drainage and configuration of the country had begun to be established, Professor Whitney's contention that the auriferous gravels are of Tertiary origin seems to be fully established. It can only be met by obliterating all definite distinction between the Quaternary and the Pliocene, and adding to the former all the time subtracted from the latter. And even if we apply this to the physical changes, it would upset all our standards of geological formations characterized by fossils, to suppose that a fauna comprising the elatherium, hipparion, and auchenia could be properly transferred to the Quaternary. In fact no one would have thought of doing so if human implements and remains had not been found in them. The discovery of such implements was first reported in 1862, and since then a large number have been found, but their authenticity has been hotly contested. The most common were stone mortars very like those of the Indians of the present day, only ruder, and it was objected, first, that they were ground and not chipped, and therefore belonged to the neolithic age; secondly, that they might have slipped down from the surface or been taken down by miners. The difficulty in meeting these objections was that the implements had been found not by scientific men in situ, but by ignorant miners, who were too keen in the pursuit of gold to notice the particulars of the find, and only knew that they had picked them out in sorting loads of the gravels, and generally thrown them aside. This, however, had occurred in such a number of instances, over such wide areas, and with such a total absence of any motive on the part of the miners to misrepresent or commit a fraud, that the cumulative evidence became almost irresistible; and we cannot sum it up better than in the words of the latest and best authority, Professor Wright, in an article in the Century of April 1891, which is the more important because only two years previously, in his Ice Age in North America, he had still expressed himself as retaining doubts. He says, "But so many of such discoveries have been reported as to make it altogether improbable that the miners were in every case mistaken; and we must conclude that rude stone implements do actually occur in connection with the bones of various extinct animals in the undisturbed strata of the gold-bearing gravel." Fortunately the most important human remains have been found in what may be considered as a test case, where it was physically impossible that they could have been introduced by accident, and where the evidence of a common workman as to the locality of the find is as good as that of a professed geologist. During the deposition of the auriferous gravel on the western flanks of the Sierra there were great outbursts of volcanoes near the summits of that range. Towards their close a vast stream of lava flowed down the shallow valley of the ancient Stanislas river, filling up its channel for forty miles or more, and covering its extensive gravel deposits. The modern Stanislas river has cut across its former bed, and now flows in a gorge from 1200 to 2000 feet deeper than the old valley which was filled up by the lava stream, the surface of which appears as a long flat-topped ridge, known as Table Mountain. In many places the sides of the valley which originally directed the course of the lava have been worn away, so that the walls on either side present a perpendicular face one hundred feet or more in height. The gravel of the ancient Stanislas river being very auriferous, great efforts have been made to reach the portion of it which lies under Table Mountain. Large sums have been spent in sinking shafts from the top through the lava cap, and tunnelling into it from the sides. Great masses of gravel have been thus quarried and removed, and a considerable amount of gold obtained, though in most cases not enough to meet the expenses, and the workings have been mostly discontinued.
SECTION ACROSS TABLE MOUNTAIN, TUOLUMNE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA. b, lava; G, gravel; S, slate; R, old river-bed; R´, present river-bed. (Le Conte.) It is evident that objects brought from a great depth below this lava cap must have remained there undisturbed since they were deposited along with the gravels, and that the evidence of the simplest miner, who says he brought them with a truck-load of dirt from the bottoms of shafts, or ends of tunnels pierced for hundreds of feet through the solid lava, is, if he speaks the truth, as good as if a scientist had found them in situ. And this evidence, together with that of mining inspectors and respectable residents who took an interest in scientific subjects, has been forthcoming in such a large number of instances as to preclude any supposition of mistake or fraud. Three of the latest of these discoveries were reported at the meeting of the Geological Society of America on the 30th December, 1890, and they seem to be supported by very first-class evidence.[14] Mr. Becker, one of the staff of the United States Geological Survey, to whom has been, committed the responsible work of reporting upon the gold-bearing gravels of California, exhibited to the Society a stone mortar, and some arrow or spear-heads, with the sworn statement from Mr. Neale, a well-known mining superintendent, that he took them with his own hands from undisturbed gravel in a mine of which he had charge under the lava of Table Mountain. A second object exhibited was a pestle found by Mr. King, who was at one time General Director of the United States Geological Survey, and is an expert whose judgment on such matters should be final, and who had no doubt that the gravel in which he found the object must have lain in place ever since the lava came down and covered it. The third object was a mortar taken from the old gravel at the end of a tunnel driven diagonally 175 feet from the western edge of the basalt cliff, and 100 feet or more below the surface of the flat top of Table Mountain, as supported by evidence entirely satisfactory to Professor Wright, who had just visited the locality and cross-examined the principal witnesses. This may prepare us to consider the case of the celebrated Calaveras skull as by no means an isolated or exceptional one, but antecedently probable from the number of human implements found in the same gravels, under the same beds of basalt and lava, at Table Mountain and numerous other places. Professor Wright in the article already referred to, which is the latest on the subject, and made after his visit to California in 1890, which he says enabled him to add some important evidence, sums up the facts as follows— "In February 1866, Mr. Mattenson, a blacksmith living near Table Mountain, in the county Calaveras, employed his spare earnings in driving a tunnel under the portion of the Sierra lava flow known as Bald Hill. At a depth of 150 feet below the surface, of which 100 feet consisted of solid lava, and the last fifty of interstratified beds of lava, gravel, and volcanic tuffs, he came upon petrified wood, and an object which he at first took for the root of a tree, thickly encased in cemented gravel. But seeing what he took for one of the roots was a lower jaw, he took the mass to the surface, and gave it to Mr. Scribner, the agent of an express company, and still living in the neighbourhood, and highly respected. Mr. Scribner, on perceiving what it was, sent it to Dr. Jones, a medical gentleman of the highest reputation, now living at San Francisco, who gave it to Professor Whitney, who visited the spot, and after a careful inquiry was fully satisfied with the evidence. Soon afterwards Professor Whitney took the skull home with him to Cambridge, where, in conjunction with Dr. Wynam, he subjected it to a very careful investigation to see if the relic itself confirmed the story told by the discoverer, and this it did to such a degree that, to use Professor Wright's words, the circumstantial evidence alone places its genuineness beyond all reasonable question." This is not a solitary instance, for the Professor reports as the result of his personal inquiries only a year ago in the district, that "the evidence that human implements and fragments of the human skeleton have been found in the stratum of gravel underneath the lava of Table Mountain seems to be abundantly sufficient;" among others a fragment of a skull which came up with a bucketful of dirt from 180 feet below the surface of Table Mountain at Tuolumne. Dr. Wallace, in an article on the "Antiquity of Man in North America," in the Nineteenth Century of November 1887, thus enumerates some of the principal instances— "In Tuolumne county from 1862 to 1865 stone mortars and platters were found in the auriferous gravel along with bones and teeth of mastodon 90 feet below the surface, and a stone muller was obtained in a tunnel driven under Table Mountain. In 1870 a stone mortar was found at a depth of 60 feet in gravel under clay and 'cement,' as the hard clay with vegetable remains (the old volcanic ash) is called by the miners. In Calaveras county from 1860 to 1869 many mortars and other stone implements were found in the gravels under lava beds, and in other auriferous gravels and clays at a depth of 150 feet. In Amador county stone mortars have been found in similar gravel at a depth of 40 feet. In Placer county stone platters and dishes have been found in auriferous gravels from 10 to 20 feet below the surface. In Nevada county stone mortars and ground discs have been found from 15 to 30 feet deep in the gravel. In Butte county similar mortars and pestles have been found in the lower gravel beneath lava beds and auriferous gravel; and many other similar finds have been recorded.... "Even these Californian remains do not exhaust the proofs of man's great antiquity in America, since we have the record of another discovery which indicates that he may, possibly, have existed at an even more remote epoch. Mr. E. L. Berthoud has described the finding of stone implements of a rude type in the Tertiary gravels of the Crow Creek, Colorado. Some shells were obtained from the same gravels, which were determined by Mr. T. A. Conrad to be species which are 'certainly not older than Older Pliocene, or possibly Miocene.'" I do not dwell on the discoveries which have been made of human implements and skeletons in the cases of Minas Geraes in Brazil, and in the drift or loess of the pampas of Buenos Ayres, for although associated with extinct animals usually considered as Pliocene, there is a difference of opinion among competent geologists, whether the deposits are really Tertiary or only early Quaternary. There is, however, one discovery, made since the date of these above recorded, of human work below the great basalt cap of North-Western America, brought up from a great depth of underlying gravels and sands of a silted-up lake, formerly forming part of the course of the Snake river at Nampa in Idaho, which is as startling in its way as that of the Calaveras skull. The following account of it is given on the authority of Professor Wright, who, having visited the locality in the summer of 1890, states that he found "abundant confirmatory evidence"— The Nampa image was brought up in boring an Artesian well, at Nampa in Ada county, Idaho, through a lava-cap 15 feet thick, and below it about 200 feet of the quicksands and clays of a silted-up lake, formed in a basin of the Snake river, which joins the Columbia river, and flows into the Pacific, forming part, therefore, of the same geographical and drainage system as the Californian gravels. At this depth the borers came down to a stratum of coarse sand, mixed with clay balls at the top, and resting at the bottom on an ancient vegetable soil, and the image came up from the lower part of this coarse sand. The borer, or liner of the well, was a six-inch iron tube, and the drill was only used in piercing the lava, while the sands below it were all extracted by a sand pump. Mr. King, a respectable citizen of Nampa, who was boring the well, states that he had been for several days closely watching the progress of the well and passing through his hands the contents of the sand pump as they were brought up, so that he had hold of the image before he suspected what it was. Mr. Cumming, superintendent of that portion of the Union Pacific Railway, a highly-trained graduate of Harvard College, was on the ground next day and saw the image, and heard Mr. King's account of the discovery, and Mr. Adams, the president of the railway, happening to pass that way about a month later, he brought it to the notice of some of the foremost geologists in the United States. The image was sent to Boston by Mr. King, who gave every information, and it was found to be modelled from stiff clay, like that of the clay balls found in the sand, slightly if at all touched by fire, and incrusted like those balls with grains of oxide of iron, which Professor Putnam considers to be a conclusive proof of its great antiquity. Mr. Emmons, of the State Geological Society, gives it as his opinion that the strata in which this image is said to have been found, is older by far than any others in which human remains have been discovered, unless it be those under Table Mountain, in California, from which came the celebrated Calaveras skull. So much for the authenticity of the discovery, which seems unassailable, but now comes the remarkable feature of it, which to a great extent revolutionizes our conception of this early palÆolithic age. The image, or rather statuette, which is scarcely an inch and a half long, is by no means a rude object, but on the contrary more artistic, and a better representation of the human form, than the little idols of many comparatively modern and civilized people, such as the Phoenicians. It is in fact very like the little statuettes so abundantly found in the neighbourhood of the old temple-pyramids of Mexico, which are generally believed to be not much older than the date of the Spanish Conquest. THE NAMPA IMAGE—ACTUAL SIZE. (Drawn from the object by J. D. Woodward.) In the face of this mass of evidence, from both the Old and New Worlds, it seems more like obstinate incredulity than scientific caution to deny the existence of Tertiary man. Indeed the objections put forward by those who still cling to the notion that any proofs of greater antiquity of man take them further back from the orthodox standpoint of Genesis, are sufficient of themselves to show the straits to which they are driven to explain the facts. A conspiracy has been imagined of many hundreds of ignorant miners, living hundreds of miles apart, to hoax scientists, or make a trade of forging implements, which is about as probable as the theory that the palÆolithic remains of the Old World were all forged by the devil, and buried in Quaternary strata in order to discredit the Mosaic account of creation. It is enough to say that the great majority of the implements had been thrown away as rubbish, and that not a single instance has ever been adduced in which money was asked or offered for any of them. Another equally wild theory is that gold-mining tunnels had been driven by some race of prehistoric Indians through hundreds of feet of solid basalt and quicksands, who left their implements in them; and this on the face of the fact that no such tunnels or evidences of ancient mining have ever been found in California, and that gold was unknown there until its recent discovery. In accepting, however, the evidence for Tertiary man, we must accept with it conclusions which are much opposed to preconceived opinions. In the two best authenticated instances in which human skulls have been found in presumably Tertiary strata, those of Castelnedolo and Calaveras, it is distinctly stated that they present no unusual appearance, and do not go nearly as far in a brutal or pithecoid direction as the Quaternary skulls of Neanderthal and Spy, or as those of many existing savage races. The Nampa image also appears to show the existence of considerable artistic skill at a period which, if not Tertiary, must be of immense antiquity. How can this be reconciled with the theory of evolution and the descent of man from some animal ancestor common to him and the other quadrumana? Up to a certain point, viz. the earliest Quaternary period, the evidence of progression seems fairly satisfactory. If we take the general average of this class of skulls as compared with modern skulls, we find them of smaller brain-capacity, thicker and flatter, with prominent frontal sinuses, receding foreheads, projecting muzzles, and weaker chins. The brain is decidedly smaller, the average being 1150 cubic centimÈtres as compared with 1250 in Australians and Bushmen, and 1600 in well-developed Europeans; and of this smaller capacity a larger proportion is contained in the posterior part.[15] Other parts of the skeleton will tell the same story, and in many of the earliest and most extreme instances, as those of Neanderthal and Spy, a very decided step is made in the direction of the "missing link." But if we accept the only two specimens known of the type of Tertiary man, the skulls of Castelnedolo and Calaveras, which are supported by such extremely strong evidence, it would seem that as we recede in time, instead of getting nearer to the "missing link," we get further from it. This, and this alone, throws doubt on evidence which would otherwise seem to be irresistible, and without a greater number of well-authenticated confirmations we must be content to hold our judgment to a certain extent in suspense. This, however, it must be remarked, extends only to the type of man as shown by these two skulls, and does not at all affect the fact that man, of some type or other, did exist in the Pliocene and Miocene periods, which is established beyond reasonable doubt by the numerous instances in which chipped implements and cut bones have been found by experienced observers, and pronounced genuine by the highest authorities. All we can say with any certainty is, that if the Darwinian theory of evolution applies to man, as it does to all other animals, and specially to man's closest kindred, the other quadrumana, the common ancestor must be sought very much further back, in the Eocene, which inaugurated the reign of placental mammalia, and in which the primitive types of so many of the later mammals have been found. Nor will this appear incredible when we consider that man's cousins, the apes and monkeys, first appear in the Miocene, or even earlier in the Eocene, and become plentiful in the later Pliocene, and that even anthropoid apes, and one of them, the Hylobates, scarcely if at all distinguishable from the Gibbon of the present day, have been found at Sansan and other Miocene deposits in the south of France, at Œningen in Switzerland, and Pikermi in Greece; while if Professor Ameghino's discoveries are to be credited, anthropoids already existed in the Eocene, and their development may be traced from the oldest Eocene forms. Monogeny or Polygeny—Darwin—Existing Races—Colour—Hair—Skulls and Brains—Dolichocephali and Brachycephali—Jaws and Teeth—Stature—Other Tests—Isaac Taylor—Prehistoric Types in Europe—Huxley's Classification—Language no Test of Race—Egyptian Monuments—- Human and Animal Races unchanged for 6000 years—Neolithic Races—PalÆolithic—Different Races of Man as far back as we can trace—Types of Canstadt, Cro-Magnon, and Furfooz—Oldest Races Dolichocephalic—Skulls of Neanderthal and Spy—Simian Characters—Objections—Evidence confined to Europe—American Man—Calaveras Skull—Tertiary Man—Skull of Castelnedolo—Leaves Monogeny or Polygeny an open Question—Arguments on each side—Old Arguments from the Bible and Philology exploded—What Darwinian Theory requires—Animal Types traced up to the Eocene—Secondary Origins—Dog and Horse—Fertility of Races—Question of Hybridity—Application to Man—Difference of Constitutions—Negro and White—Bearing on Question of Migration—Apes and Monkeys—Question of Original Locality of Man—Asiatic Theory—Eur-African—American—Arctic—None based on sufficient Evidence—- Mere Speculations—Conclusion—Summary of Evidence as to Human Origins. The immense antiquity of man upon earth having been established, other questions of great interest present themselves as to the origin of the race. These questions, however, no longer depend on positive facts of observation, like the discovery of palÆolithic remains in definite geological deposits, but on inference and conjecture from these and other observed facts, most of which are of comparatively recent date and hardly extend beyond the historical period. Thus if we start with the existing state of things, we find a great variety of human races actually prevailing, located in different parts of the world, and of fundamental types so dissimilar as to constitute what in animal zoology would often be called separate species,[16] and yet fertile among themselves, and so similar in many physical and mental characters as to infer an origin from common ancestors. And we can infer from history that this was so to a great extent 6000 years ago, and that the length of time has been insufficient to produce any marked changes, either in physical or linguistic types of the different fundamental races. Was this always so, and what inference can be drawn as to the much-disputed question between monogeny and polygeny, that is, between the theory of descent from a single pair in a single locality, and that of descent from several pairs, developed in different localities by parallel, but not strictly identical, lines of evolution? This is a question which cannot be decided off-hand by À priori considerations. No doubt Darwinism points to the evolution of all life from primitive forms, and ultimately, perhaps, from the single simplest form of life in the cell or protoplasm. But this does not necessarily imply that the more highly specialized, and what may be called the secondary forms of life, have all originated from single secondary centres, at one time and in one locality. On the contrary, we have the authority of Darwin himself for saying that this is not a necessary consequence of his theory. In a letter to Bentham he says—"I dispute whether a new race or species is necessarily or even generally descended from a single or pair of parents. The whole body of individuals, I believe, became altered together—like our race-horses, and like all domestic breeds which are changed through unconscious selection by man." The problem is, therefore, an open one, and can only be solved (or rather attacked, for in the present state of our knowledge a complete solution is probably impossible) by a careful induction from ascertained facts, ascending step by step from the present to the past, from the known to the unknown. The first step is to have a clear idea of what actually exists at the present moment. There are an almost endless number of minor varieties of the human race, but none of them of sufficient importance to imply diversity of origin, with the exception of four, or at the most five or six fundamental types, which stand so widely apart that it is difficult to imagine that they are all descended from a common pair of ancestors. These are the white, yellow, and black races of the Old World, the copper-coloured of America, and perhaps the olive-coloured of Malaysia and Polynesia, and the pygmy races of Africa and Eastern Asia. The difficulty of supposing these races to have all sprung from a single pair will at once be apparent if we personify this pair under the name of Adam for the first man and Eve for the first woman, and ask ourselves the question, what do we suppose to have been their colour? But colour alone, though the most obvious, is by no means the sole criterion of difference of race. The evidence is cumulative, and other equally marked and persistent characters, both of physical structure and of physiological and mental peculiarities, stand out as distinctly as differences of colour in the great typical races. For instance, the hair is a very persistent index of race. When the section of it is circular, the hair is straight and lank; when flattened, woolly; and when oval, curly or wavy. Now these characters are so persistent that many of the best anthropologists have taken hair as the surest test of race. Everywhere the lank and straight hair and circular section go with the yellow and copper-coloured races; the woolly hair and flat section with the black; and the wavy hair and oval section with the white races. The solid framework of the skeleton also affords very distinctive types of race, especially where it is looked at in a general way as applicable to great masses of pure races, and not to individuals of mixed race, like most Europeans. The skull is most important, for it affords the measure of the size and shape of the brain, which is the highest organ, and that on which the differentiation of man from the lower animals mainly depends. The size of the brain alone does not always afford a conclusive proof of mental superiority, for it varies with sex, height, and other individual characters, and often seems to depend more on quality than on quantity. Still, if we take general averages, we find that superior and civilized races have larger brains than inferior and savage ones. Thus the average brain of the European is about 1500 cubic centimÈtres, while that of the Australian and Bushman does not exceed 1200. The shape as well as the size of the skull affords another test of race which is often appealed to. The main distinction taken is between dolichocephalic and brachycephalic, or long and broad skulls. Here also we must look at general averages rather than at individuals, for there is often considerable variation within the same race, especially among the mesocephalic, or medium between the two extremes, which is generally the prevalent form where there has been much intermixture of races. But if we take widely different types there can be no doubt that the long or broad skull is a characteristic and persistent feature. The formation of the jaws and teeth affords another important test. Some races are what is called prognathous, that is, the jaws project, and the teeth are set in sockets sloping outwards, so that the lower part of the face approximates to the form of a muzzle; others are orthognathous, or have the jaws and teeth vertical. And the form of the chin seems to be wonderfully correlated with the general character and energy of the race. It is hard to say why, but as a matter of fact a weak chin generally denotes a weak, and a strong chin a strong, race or individual. Thus the chimpanzee and other apes have no chin, the negro and lower races generally have chins weak and receding. The races who, like the Iberians, have been conquered or driven from plains to mountains, have had poor chins; while their successive conquerors, of Aryan race,—Celts, Romans, Teutons, and Scandinavians,—might almost be classified by the prominence and solidity of this feature of the face. Stature is another very persistent feature. The pygmy races of Equatorial Africa described by Stanley have remained the same since the early records of Egypt, while the pure Aryan races of the north temperate zone, Gauls, Germans, and Scandinavians, have from the first dawn of history amazed the shorter races of the south by their tall stature, huge limbs, blue eyes, and yellow hair. Here and there isolated tall races may be found where the race has become thoroughly acclimatized to a suitable environment, as among some negro tribes, and the Araucanian Indians of Patagonia; but as a rule the inferior races are short, the bulk of the civilized races of the world of intermediate stature, and the great conquering races of the north temperate zone decidedly tall. Other tests are afforded by the shape of the eye-orbits and nasal bones, and other characters, all of which agree, in the words of Isaac Taylor in his Origin of the Aryans, in "exhibiting two extreme types—the African with long heads, long orbits, and flat hair; and the Mongolian with round heads, round orbits, and round hair. The European type is intermediate, the head, the orbit, and the hair being oval. In the East of Europe we find an approximation to the Asiatic type; in the South of Europe to the African." Taking these prominent anthropological characters as tests, we find four distinct types among the earliest inhabitants of Europe, which can be traced back from historic to neolithic times. They consist of two long-headed and two short-headed races, and in each case one is tall and the other short. The dolichocephalic are recognized everywhere throughout Western Europe and on the Mediterranean basin, including North Africa, as the oldest race, and they are thought still to survive in the original type in some of the people of Wales and Ireland and the Spanish Basques; while they doubtless form a large portion, intermixed with other races, of the blood of the existing populations of Great Britain and Ireland, of Western and Southern France, of Spain, Portugal, Sicily, Sardinia, North Africa, and other Mediterranean districts. This is known as the Iberian race, and it can be traced clearly beyond history and the knowledge of metals, into the neolithic stone age, and may possibly be descended from some of the vastly older palÆolithic types such as that of Cro-Magnon. The type is everywhere a feeble one, of short stature, dolichocephalic skull, narrow oval face, orthognathic teeth, weak chin, and swarthy complexion. We have only to compare a skull of this type with one of ruder and stronger races, to understand how the latter must have survived as conquerors in the struggle for existence in the early ages of the world, before gunpowder and military discipline had placed civilization in a better position to contend with brute force and energy. Huxley sums up the latest evidence as to the distinctive types of these historic and prehistoric races of Europe as follows— 1. Blond long-heads of tall stature who appear with least admixture in Scandinavia, North Germany, and parts of the British Islands. 2. Brunette broad-heads of short stature in Central France, the Central European Highlands, and Piedmont. These are identified with the Ligurian race, and their most typical modern representatives are the Auvergnats and Savoyards. 3. Mongoloid brunette broad-heads of short stature in Arctic and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, represented by the Lapps and other tribes of Northern Russia, passing into the Mongols and Chinese of Eastern Asia. 4. Brunette long-heads of short stature—the Iberian race. Huxley adds, "The inhabitants of the regions which lie between these five present the intermediate gradations which might be expected to result from their intermixture. The evidence at present extant is consistent with the supposition that the blond long-heads, the brunette broad-heads, and the brunette long-heads—i.e. the Scandinavian, Ligurian, and Iberian races—have existed in Europe very nearly in their present localities throughout historic times and very far back into prehistoric times. There is no proof of any migration of Asiatics into Europe west of the basin of the Dnieper down to the time of Attila. On the contrary, the first great movements of the European population of which there is any conclusive evidence are that series of Gaulish invasions of the East and South, which ultimately extended from North Italy to Galatia in Asia Minor." I may add, that in more recent times many of the principal movements have been from west to east, viz. of Germans absorbing Slavs, and Slavs absorbing or expelling Fins and Tartars. The next question is, how far can we trace back the existence of the present widely different fundamental types of mankind by the light of ascertained and certain facts? The most important of these facts is, that Egyptian monuments enable us to say, that the existing diversities of the typical races of mankind are not of recent origin, but have existed unchanged from the first dawn of history, say 7000 years ago. The Egyptians themselves have come down from the Old Empire, through all the vicissitudes of conquests, mixtures of races, changes of religion and language, so little altered that the fellah of to-day is often the image of the Egyptians who built the pyramids. The wooden statue of an officer of Chephren who died some 6000 years ago, was such a striking portrait of the village magistrate of to-day, that the Arab workmen christened it the "Sheik-el-beled." And these old Egyptians knew from the earliest times three at least of the fundamental types of mankind: the Nahsu, or negroes to the south, who are represented on the monuments so faithfully that they might be taken as typical pictures of the modern negro; the Lebu to the west, a fair-skinned and blue-eyed white race, whose descendants remain to this day as Kabyles and Berbers, in the same localities of North Africa; and to the east various tribes of Arabs, Syrians, and other Asiatics, who are always painted of a yellowish-brown colour, and whose features may often be traced in their modern descendants. The same may be said of the wild and domestic animals of the various countries, which are the same now, unless where subsequently imported, as when they were first known to the ancient Egyptians. We start, therefore, with this undoubted fact, that a period of 6000 or 7000 years has been insufficient to make any perceptible change in the types of pure races, whether of the animal or of human species. And doubtless this period might be greatly extended if we had historical records of the growth of Egyptian civilization in the times prior to Menes, for in the earliest records we find accounts of wars both with the Nahsu and the Lebu, implying large populations of those races already existing both to the south and west of the valley of the Nile. These positive dates carry us back so far that it is of little use to investigate minutely the differences of races shown by the remains of the neolithic period. They were very marked and numerous, but we have no evidence to show that they were different from those of more recent times, or that their date can be certainly said to be much older than the oldest Egyptian records. All we can infer with certainty is, that whether the neolithic period be of longer or shorter duration, no changes have taken place in the animal fauna contemporary with man which cannot be traced to human agency or other known causes. No new species have appeared, or old ones disappeared, in the course of natural evolution, as was the case during the quaternary and preceding geological periods. The neolithic is, however, a mere drop in the ocean of time compared with the earlier periods in which the existence of palÆolithic man can be traced by his remains; and as far back as we can go we find ourselves confronted by the same fact of a diversity of races. As we have seen in the chapter on Quaternary man, Europe, where alone skulls and skeletons of the palÆolithic age have been discovered, affords at least three very distinct types—that of Canstadt, of Cro-Magnon, and of Furfooz. The Canstadt type, which includes the men of Neanderthal and Spy, and which was widely diffused, having been found, as far south as Gibraltar, is apparently the oldest, and certainly the rudest and most savage, being characterized by enormous brow-ridges, a low and receding forehead, projecting muzzle, and thick bones with powerful muscular attachments. It is very dolichocephalic, but the length is due mainly to the projection of the posterior part of the brain, the total size of which is below the average. The Cro-Magnon type, which is also very old, being contemporary with the cave-bear and mammoth, is the very opposite of that of Canstadt in many respects. The superciliary ridges are scarcely marked, the forehead is elevated, the contour of the skull good, and the volume of the brain equal or superior to that of many modern civilized races. The stature was tall, the nose straight or projecting, and the chin prominent. The only resemblance to the Canstadt type is, that they are both dolichocephalic chiefly on the posterior region, and both prognathous; but the differences are so many and profound that no anthropologist would say that one of these races could have been derived directly from the other. Still less could he say that the small round-headed race of Furfooz could have been a direct descendant of either of the two former. It is found in close vicinity with them over an extensive area, but generally in caves and deposits which, from their geological situation and associated fauna, point to a later origin. In fact, if we go by European evidence alone, we may consider it proved that the oldest known races were dolichocephalic, that the brachycephalic races came later, and that as long ago as in neolithic times, considerable intercrossing had taken place, which has gone on ever since, producing the great variety of intermediate types which now prevail over a great part of Europe. This inference of the priority of the Canstadt type is strengthened by its undoubted approximation to that of the most savage existing races and of the anthropoid apes. If we take the skulls and skeletons of Neanderthal and Spy, and compare them with those of modern civilized man, we find that while they are still perfectly human, they make a notable approximation towards a savage and Simian type in all the peculiarities which have been described by anthropologists as tests. The most important of all, that of the capacity and form of the brain, is best illustrated by the subjoined diagram of the skulls of the European, the Neanderthal, and the chimpanzee placed in superposition.
L'HOMME AVANT L'HISTOIRE. (From Debierre.) It will be seen at a glance that the Neanderthal skull, especially in the frontal part, which is the chief seat of intelligence, is nearer to the chimpanzee than to modern man. And all the other characters correspond to this inferiority of brain. The enormous superciliary ridges; the greater length of the fore-arm; the prognathous jaws, larger canine teeth, and smaller chin; the thicker bones and stronger muscular attachments; the rounder ribs; the flatter tibia, and many other characters described by palÆontologists, all point in the same direction, and take us some considerable way towards the missing link which is to connect the human race with animal ancestors. Still there are other considerations which must make us pause before asserting too positively that in following Quaternary man up to the Canstadt type, we are on the track of original man, and can say with confidence that by following it up still further we shall arrive at the earlier form from which man was differentiated. In the first place, Europe is the only part of the world where this Canstadt type has hitherto been found. We have abundant evidence from palÆolithic stone implements that man existed pretty well over the whole earth in early Quaternary times, but have hitherto no evidence from human remains outside of Europe from which we can draw any inference as to the type of man by whom these implements were made. It is clear that in Europe the oldest races were dolichocephalic, but we have no certainty that this was the case in Asia, in so many parts of which round-headed races exclusively prevail, and have done so from the earliest times. Again, we have no evidence as to the origin of another of the most strongly marked types, that of the Negro, or of the Negrito, Negrillo, Bushmen, Australian, or other existing races who approach most nearly to the Simian type. The only evidence we have of the type of races who were certainly early Quaternary, and may very possibly go back to an older geological age than that of the men of Neanderthal and Spy, comes from the New World, from California, Brazil, and Buenos Ayres, and points to a type not so savage and Simian as that of Canstadt, but rather to that which characterizes all the different varieties of American man, though here also we find evidence of distinct dolichocephalic and brachycephalic races from the very earliest times. Another difficulty in the way of considering the Canstadt type as a real advance towards primitive man and the missing link, arises from the totally different and very superior type of Cro-Magnon being found so near it in time, as proved by the existence in both of the cave-bear, mammoth, and other extinct animals. We can hardly suppose the Cro-Magnon type to have sprung by slow evolution in the ordinary way of direct succession, from such a very different type as that of Canstadt during such a short interval of time as a small portion of one geological period. Again, it is very perplexing to find that the only Tertiary skulls and skeletons for which we possess really strong evidence, those of Castelnedolo, instead of showing, as might be expected, a still more rude and Simian aspect than that of Canstadt, show us the Canstadt type indeed, but in a milder and more human form. All that can be said with certainty is, that as far as authentic evidence carries us back, the ancestral animal, or missing link, has not been discovered, but that man already existed from an enormous antiquity, extending certainly through the Quaternary into the Pliocene, and probably into the Miocene period, and that at the earliest date at which his remains have been found the race was already divided, as at present, into several sharply distinguished types. This leaves the question of man's ultimate origin completely open to speculation, and enables both monogenists and polygenists to contend for their respective views with plausible arguments, and without fear of being refuted by facts. Polygeny, or plural origins, would at first sight seem to be the most plausible theory to account for the great diversities of human races actually existing, and which can be shown to have existed from such an immense antiquity. And this seems to have been the first guess of primitive nations, for most of them considered themselves as autochthonous, sprung from the soil, or created by their own native gods. But by degrees this theory gave place to that of monogeny, which has been for a long while almost universally accepted by the civilized world. The cause of this among Christians, Jews, and Mahometans has been the acceptance of the narratives in Genesis, first of Adam and secondly of Noah, as literally true accounts of events which actually occurred. This is an argument which has completely broken down, and no competent and dispassionate thinker any longer accepts the Hebrew Scriptures as a literal and conclusive authority, on facts of history and science which lie within the domain of human reason. The question, therefore, became once more an open one, but as the old orthodox argument for monogeny faded into oblivion, a new and more powerful one was furnished by the doctrine of Evolution as expounded by Darwin. The same argument applies to man as to the rest of the animal world, that if separate species imply separate creations, these supernatural creations must be multiplied to such an extent as to make them altogether incredible; as for instance 150 separate creations for the land shells alone of one of the group of Madeira islands; while on the other hand genera grade off into species, species into races, and races into varieties, by such insensible degrees, as to establish an irresistible inference that they have all been developed by evolution from common ancestors. No one, I suppose, seriously doubts that this is in the main the true theory of life, though there may still be some uncertainty as to the causes and mode of operation, and of the different steps and stages of this evolution. Monogeny therefore in this general sense of evolution from some primitive mammalian type, may be accepted as the present conclusion of science for man as it has come to be for the horse, dog, and so many other animals which are his constant companions. Their evolution can in many cases be traced up, through successive steps, to some more simple and generalized type in the Eocene; and it may be permitted to believe that if the whole geological record could be traced as far back as that of the horse, in the case of man and the other quadrumana, their pedigree would be as clearly made out. This, however, does not conclude the question, for it is quite permissible to contend that in the case of man, as in that of the horse, though the primary ancestral type in the Eocene may be one, the secondary types from which existing races are more immediately derived may be more than one, and may have been evolved in different localities. Thus in the case of the dog, it is almost certain that some of the existing races have been derived from wolves, and others from jackals and foxes; but this is quite consistent with the belief that all the canine genus have been evolved from the marsupial Carnivora of the Eocene, through the Arctocyon, who was a generalized type, half dog and half bear. In fact, we have the authority of Darwin himself, as quoted in the beginning of this chapter, for saying that this would be quite consistent with his view of the origin of species. Now the controversy between monogenists and polygenists has turned mainly on these comparatively recent developments of secondary types. It has been fought to a great extent before the immense antiquity of the human race had been established, and it had become almost certain that its original starting-point must be sought at least as far back as in the Eocene period. The main argument for monogeny has been that the different races of mankind are fertile among themselves. This is doubtless true to a great extent, and shows that these races have not diverged very far from their ancestral type. But the researches of Darwin and his successors have thrown a good deal of new light on the question of hybridity. Species can no longer be looked upon as separated from one another and from races by hard-and-fast lines, on one side of which is absolute sterility and on the other absolute fertility; but rather as blending into one another by insensible gradations from free intercrossing to sterility, according as the differences from the original type became more pronounced and more fixed by heredity. To revert to the case of dogs, we find free interbreeding between races descended from different secondary ancestors, such as wolves, jackals, and foxes, though freer, I believe, and more permanent as the races are closer; but as the specific differences become more marked, the fertility does not abruptly cease, but rapidly diminishes. Thus Buffon's experiment shows that a hybrid cross between the dog and the wolf may be produced and perpetuated for at least three generations, and the leporine cross between the hare and rabbit is almost an established race. On the other hand, we see in the mule the last expiring trace of fertility in a cross between species which have diverged so far in different directions as the horse and the ass. The human race repeats this lesson of the animal world, and shows a graduated scale of fertility and permanence in crosses, between different types according as they are closely or distantly related. Thus if we take the two extremes, the blond white of North temperate Europe and the Negro of Equatorial Africa, the disposition to union is almost replaced by repugnance which is only overcome under special circumstances, such as slavery, and an absence of women of their own race; while the offspring, the mulatto, is everywhere a feeble folk, with deficient vitality, diminished fertility, and prone to die out, or revert to one or other of the original types. But where the types are not so extremely divergent the fertility of the cross increases, as between the brunet white of Southern Europe and the Arab or Moor with the Negro, and of the European with the native Indian of America. Perhaps the strongest argument for polgyeny is that derived from the different constitutions of different races as regards susceptibility to climatic and other influences. At present, and as far back as history or tradition enables us to trace, mankind has, as in the case of other animals, been very much restricted to definite geological provinces. Thus in the extreme case of the fair white and the Negro, the former cannot live and propagate its type south of the parallel of 40°, or the latter north of it. This argument was no doubt pushed too far by Agassiz, who supposed the whole world to be divided into a number of limited districts, in each of which a separate creation both of men, animals, and plants had taken place suited to the environment. This is clearly inconsistent with facts, but there is still some force in it when stripped of exaggeration, and confined to the three or four leading types which are markedly different. Especially it bears on the argument, on which monogenists mainly rely, of the peopling of the earth by migration from one common centre. No doubt migration has played a very great part in the diffusion of all animal and vegetable species, and their zoological provinces are determined very much by the existence of insurmountable barriers in early geological times. No doubt also man is better organized for migration than most other terrestrial animals, and history and tradition show that in comparatively recent times he has reached the remotest islands of the Pacific by perfectly natural means. But this does not meet the difficulty of accounting, if we place the origin of man from a single pair anywhere in the northern hemisphere, for his presence in palÆolithic times in South Africa and South America. How did he get across the equatorial zone, in which only a tropical fauna, including the tropical Negro, can now live and flourish? Or vice versÂ, if the original Adam and Eve were black, and the Garden of Eden situated in the tropics, how did their descendants migrate northwards, and live on the skirts of the ice-caps of the glacial period? Or how did the yellow race, so tolerant of heat and cold, and of insanitary conditions, and so different in physical and moral characters from either the whites or the blacks, either originate from them, or give rise to them? The nearest congeners of man, the quadrumana, monkeys and apes, are all catarrhine in the Old World, and all platyrhine in America. Why, if all are descended from the same pair of ancestors, and have spread from the same spot by migration? We can only reconcile the fact that it is so with the facts of evolution, by throwing the common starting-point or points of the lines of development much further back into the Eocene, or even further; and if this be true for monkeys, why not for man? One point seems quite clear, that monogeny is only possible by extending the date of human origins far back into the Tertiaries. On any short-dated theories of man's appearance upon earth—as for instance that of Prestwich, that palÆolithic man probably only existed for some 20,000 or 25,000 years before the neolithic period—some theory like that of Agassiz, of separate creations in separate zoological provinces, follows inevitably. If the immense time from the Miocene to the Recent period has been insufficient to differentiate the Hylobates and Dryopithecus very materially from the existing anthropoid apes, a period such as 40,000 or 50,000 years would have gone a very little way in deriving the Negro from the white, or the white from the Negro. To deny the extension of human origins into the Tertiaries is practically to deny Darwin's theory of evolution altogether, or to contend that man is an exception to the laws by which the rest of the animal creation have come into existence in the course of evolution. The question of the locality in which the human species first originated depends also very materially on the date assigned for human origins. The various speculations which have been hazarded on this subject are almost all based on the supposition that this origin took place in comparatively recent times when geographical and other causes were not materially different from those of the present day. It was for ages the accepted belief that all mankind were descended primarily from a single pair of ancestors, who were miraculously created in Mesopotamia, and secondarily from three pairs who were miraculously preserved in the ark in Armenia. This of course never had any other foundation than the belief in the inspired authority of the Bible, and when it came to be established that this, as regards its scientific and prehistoric speculations, was irreconcilable with the most certain facts of science, the orthodox account of the Creation fell with it. The theory of Asiatic origin was, however, taken up on other grounds, and still lingers in some quarters, mainly among philologists, who, headed by Max MÜller, thought they had discovered in Sanscrit and Zend the nearest approach to a common Aryan language. Tracing backwards the lines of migration of these people, the Sanscrit-speaking Hindoos and the Zend-speaking Iranians, they found them intersecting somewhere about the Upper Oxus, and jumped at the conclusion that the great elevated plateau of Pamir, the "roof of the world," had been the birthplace of man, as it was of so many of the great rivers which flowed from it to the north, south, east, and west. This theory, however, has pretty well broken down, since it has been shown that other branches of the Aryan languages, specially the Lithuanian, contain more archaic elements than either Sanscrit or Zend; that language is often no conclusive test of race; that Aryan migrations have quite as often or oftener been from west to east than from east to west; and that all history, prehistoric traditions, and linguistic palÆontology point to the principal Aryan races having been located in Northern and Central Europe and in Central and Southern Russia very much as we find them at the present day. The question of the locality of human origins is now being debated on very different grounds, and although it is not denied that Max MÜller's "somewhere in Asia" may turn out to be a correct guess, it is denied that there is at present a particle of evidence to support it. For really the whole question is very much one of guesswork. The immense antiquity which on the lowest possible estimate can be assigned for the proved existence of man, carries us back to a period when geological, geographical, and climatic conditions were so entirely different, that all inferences from those of the present period are useless. For instance, certainly half the Himalayas, and probably the whole, were under the sea; the Pamir and Central Asia, instead of being the roof of the world, may have been fathoms deep under a great ocean; Greenland and Spitzbergen were types of the north temperate climate best suited for the highest races of man. In like manner language ceases to be an available factor in any attempt to trace human origins to their source. It is doubtless true that at the present day different fundamental types of language distinguish the different typical races of the human family. Thus the monosyllabic type, consisting of roots only without grammar, characterizes the Chinese and its allied races of the extreme east of Asia; the agglutinative, in which different shades of meaning were attached to roots, by definite particles glued on to them as it were by prefixes or suffixes, is the type adopted by most of the oldest and most numerous races of mankind in the Old World as their means of conveying ideas by sound; while in the New World the common type of an immense variety of languages is polysynthetic, or an attempt to splutter out as it were a whole sentence in a single immensely long word made up of fragments of separate roots and particles, a type which in the Old World is confined to the Euskarian of the Spanish Basque. And at the head of all as refined instruments for the conveyance of thought, the two inflectional languages, the Aryan and Semitic, by which, though in each case by a totally different system, roots acquire their different shades of meaning by particles, no longer mechanically glued on to them, but melted down as it were with the roots, and incorporated into new words according to definite grammatical rules. But this carries us back a very little way. Judging by philology alone, the Chinese, whose annals go back only to about 2500 b.c., would be an older race than the Egyptians or Accadians, whose languages can be traced at least 2000 years further back. And if we go back into prehistoric and geological times we are absolutely ignorant whether the neolithic and palÆolithic races spoke these languages, or indeed spoke at all. Some palÆontologists have fancied that there was evidence for some of the older palÆolithic races being speechless, and christened them "Homo alalus," but this is based on the solitary fact that a single human jaw, that of Naulette, is wanting in the genial tubercle, absent also in anthropoid apes, to which one of the muscles of the tongue is attached. But apart from this being a single instance, some of the best anatomists deny that this genial tubercle is really essential to speech, which the latest physiological researches show to be dependent on the development of a small tract in the third frontal convolution of the right side of the brain, any injury to which causes aphasia, or loss of the power of speech, though its physical organs of the larynx remain unimpaired. It is probable, however, that from the very first man had a certain faculty, like other animals, of expressing meaning by sounds and gestures, and the researches of Romanes, and quite recently those of Professor Garner on the language of monkeys and apes, make this almost certain. But at what particular moment in the course of the evolution of man this faculty ripened into what may be properly called language is a matter of the purest conjecture. It may have been in the Tertiary, the Quaternary, or not until the Recent period. All we can say is, that when we first catch sight of languages, they are already developed into the present distinct types, arguing, as in the case of physical types, either for distinct miraculous creations, or for such an immensely remote ancestry as to give time for the fixation of separate secondary types before the formation of language. Thus, if we confine ourselves to the most perfect and advanced, and apparently therefore most modern form of language of the foremost races of the world, the inflectional, we find two types, the Semitic and Aryan, constructed on such totally different principles that it is impossible for one to be derived from the other, or both to be descended from a common parent. The Semitic device of expressing shades of meaning by internal flexion, that is, by ringing the changes of vowels between three consonants, making every word triliteral, is fundamentally different from the Aryan device for attaining the same object by fusing roots and added particles into one new word in which equal value is attached to vowels and consonants. We can partly see how the latter may have been developed from the agglutinative, but not how the stiff and cramped Semitic can have been derived either from that or from the far more perfect and flexible type of the Aryan languages. It has far more the appearance of being an artificial invention implying a considerable advance of intellectual attainment, and therefore of comparatively recent date. In any case we may safely accept the conclusion that there is nothing in language which assists us in tracing back human origins into geological times, or indeed much further than the commencement of history. We are reduced, therefore, to geological evidence, and this gives us nothing better than mere probabilities, or rather guesses, as to the original centre or centres of human existence upon the earth. The inference most generally drawn is in favour of the locality where the earliest traces of human remains have been found, and where the existence of the nearest allied species, the apes and monkeys, can be carried back furthest. This locality is undoubtedly Eur-Africa, that is the continent which existed when Europe and Africa were united by one or more land connections. And in this locality the preference must be assigned to Western Europe and to Africa north of the Atlas; in fact to the portion of this ancient continent facing the Atlantic, and Western Mediterranean, then an inland sea. Thus far Central and South-Western France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Algeria have afforded the oldest unequivocal proofs of the existence of man, and of the coexistence of anthropoid apes. Accordingly Darwin inclined to the view that North Africa was probably the scene of man's first appearance, and the latest authority on the subject, Brinton, in his Races and Peoples, gives at length reasons for assigning this to somewhere in Eur-Africa. But it must be remembered that this inference rests entirely on the fact that the district in question has been more or less explored, while the rest of the earth can hardly be said to have been explored at all, for anything prior to those Quaternary paleolithic implements which prove the existence of man already spread over nearly the whole of the habitable globe. Nor would the origin of the white race in Eur-Africa, even if it were established, help us to account for the existence of the Negro race on the other side of the Atlas and the Sahara, or of the yellow race in Eastern Asia, or of the American race. Indeed America may fairly compete with Eur-Africa for the honour of being the original seat of the human race, for the geological conditions and the animal fauna of the auriferous gravels of California point to the Calaveras skull and other numerous human remains and implements found in them being of Tertiary age, and quite possibly as old or even older than anything which has been found in Europe.[17] The wide diffusion of the same peculiar racial type over the whole continent of America down to Cape Horn, and its capability of existing under such different conditions of climate and environment, also point to its being an extremely ancient and primitive race, and the generic distinction between the apes and monkeys of the Old and New Worlds is a remarkable circumstance which is not accounted for by any monogenist theory of the origin of the order of quadrumana. It is to be observed also, that although all American races have a certain peculiar type in common, still there are differences which show that secondary types must have existed from a very early period, intercrossing between which must have given rise to numerous varieties. Thus, according to Morton, dolichocephaly was most prevalent among the tribes who inhabited the eastern side of the continent facing the Atlantic both in North and South America, while brachycephaly prevailed on the western, side facing the Pacific. Great differences of colour and stature are also found often among contiguous tribes, and irrespective of latitude. On the whole, however, the American type approximates in many important particulars, such as colour, hair, and anatomical structure, more nearly to the yellow races of Eastern Asia than to any other, though it is a fairly open question which of the two may have been the earliest to appear in the immensely remote ages of the Tertiary period. Another theory is that man probably originated in some continent of the Arctic Circle, where, as we know from fossil remains of the Miocene and Eocene periods, Greenland and Spitzbergen enjoyed a mild climate and forest vegetation, admirably adapted for the evolution of a temperate mammalian fauna, including the human species. This is a very plausible theory, but at present it is a mere theory, like that of a lost Atlantis, or submerged continents in the Pacific or Indian Oceans. The only thing approaching to evidence to support it is, as far as I am aware, that Sir Joseph Hooker and other eminent botanists think that the diffusion of the forest trees and other flora of America can be traced along lines radiating from the extreme north, along the mountain chains and elevated plateaux which form the backbone of the continent from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. There seems a probability also that the evolution of the human race, which turns mainly on the development of the erect stature, which is the basis of the larger brain and other anatomical differences between man and the other quadrumana, must have taken place not in tropical regions of dense forests, where climbing would have had a decided advantage over walking in the struggle for life, but rather in some region of wide plains and open forests, where it would be an advantage to see enemies or prey at a distance, or over tall grass or ferns. It must be admitted, however, that in our present state of knowledge all these theories of the place, time, and manner of human origins are speculations rather than science. We have proof positive that man was already spread over most parts of the world in the Quaternary period, and the irresistible inference that he must have existed long before, is confirmed by conclusive evidence as to the finding of his remains and implements in the earliest Quaternary and latest Pliocene periods, and very strong evidence for carrying them back into the Miocene. Anthropoid apes, which are so similar to man in physical structure, and in their ways are as highly specialized from any more general and primitive ancestral form as man himself, undoubtedly did exist in the Miocene period, and have come down to us with comparatively little change. It puzzles the best anatomists to find any clear distinction between the present Hylobates and the Hylobates of the Middle Miocene, while that between the white man and the Negro is clear and unmistakable. Why then should "Homo" not have existed as soon as "Hylobates," and why should any prepossession in favour of man's recent creation, based mainly on exploded beliefs in the scientific value of the myths and guesses of the earliest civilized nations of Asia, stand in the way of accepting the enormous and rapidly increasing accumulation of evidence, tracing back the evolution of the mammal man to the same course of development as other mammals? As regards the course of this evolution, all we know with any certainty is, that as far as we can trace it back, the human species was already differentiated into distinct races, and that in all probability the present fundamental types were already formed. When and where the primitive stock or stocks may have originated, and the secondary ancestral races may have branched off from it, is at present unknown. All we can say is, that the more we examine the evidence, the more it points to extreme antiquity even for these secondary stocks, and makes it probable that we must go, as in the case of the horse and other existing mammals, at least as far back as into the Eocene to look for the primitive generalized type or types from which these secondary lines of quadrumanous and human evolution have taken their origin. As regards the secondary types themselves, there is no certainty as to the place or time of their origin, but the balance of evidence points rather in favour of polygeny, that is, of their having followed slightly different lines of evolution from the common starting-point, under different circumstances of environment and in different localities; so that when man, as we know him, first appeared, he was already differentiated into races distinct though not very far apart. In conclusion, I may remark that these hotly-contested questions as to monogeny or polygeny, and as to the place of man's first appearance on earth, lose most of their importance when it is realized that human origins must be pushed back at least as far as the Miocene, and probably into the Eocene period. As long as it was held that no traces of man's existence could be found, as Cuvier held, until the Recent period; or even as some English geologists still contend, until the post-glacial, or at any rate the glacial or Quaternary periods, it was evident that the facts could only be explained by the theory of a series of supernatural interferences. Agassiz's theory, or some modification of it, must be adopted, of numerous special creations of life at special centres, as of the Esquimaux and polar bear in Arctic regions, the Negro and gorilla in the tropics, and so forth. This theory has been completely given up as regards animals, in favour of the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural causes, and no one now believes in a multiplicity of miracles to account for the existence of animal species. Is man alone an exception to this universal law, or is he like the rest of creation, a product of what Darwinians call "Evolution," and enlightened theologians "the original impress"? The existing species of anthropoid apes, the orang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla, do not differ more widely from one another than do many of the extreme types of the human species. In colour, hair, volume of brain, form of skull, stature, and a hundred other peculiarities, the Negro and the European stand further apart than those anthropoids do from one another, and no naturalist from Mars or Saturn, investigating the human family for the first time, and free from prepossession, would hesitate to class the white, black, yellow, red, and perhaps five or six other varieties, as different species. In the case of these anthropoid apes no one supposes that they were miraculously created in recent times. On the contrary, we find their type already fully developed in the Miocene, and we infer, that like the horse, camel, and so many other existing mammals, their origin may be traced step by step backwards to some lower and generalized type in the Eocene. Who can doubt that physical man, an animal constructed almost exactly on the same anatomical ground-plan as the anthropoids, came into existence by a similar process? The only answer would be, if it could be proved, that his existence on earth had been so short as to make it impossible that so many and so great specific variations as now exist, and some of which have been proved to have existed early in the Quaternary period, could have been developed by natural means and by the slow processes of evolution. But this is just where the evidence fails, and is breaking down more and more every year and with every fresh discovery. Recent man has given place to Quaternary man; post-glacial to inter-glacial and pre-glacial; and now the evidence for the existence of man or of some ancestral form of man, in the Tertiary period, has accumulated to such an extent that there are few competent anthropologists who any longer deny it. But with this extension of time the existence of man, instead of being an anomaly and a discord, falls in with the sublime harmony of the universe, of which it is the dominant note. THE END.
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London & Bungay.
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