CAVE-HUNTING.*
SOBER science has nowhere more conspicuously displaced mystic fancy than in the popular ideas as to caverns. Their gloomy passages no longer lead the explorer bodily down to the depths of Hades, but they carry him mentally back into the far recesses of time. Antiquaries of the last generation imagined the Peak Cavern and Kent's. Hole to have been the temples where were celebrated the " Dionysiack Mysteries," where the catechumens were initiated into the awful scenes of death and the world be- yond; but modern geologists find traces of lions and hyenas, rather than of Druids and " Arkite priests." Searchers after the picturesque were enjoined in the old guide-books to wonder at grottos like cathedrals, with pillars, and organ-pipes, and statues, and altars, all done in stalactite by unassisted nature ; but they walked unheeding over the stalagmite floors which hid the real treasures of the place, the bones of extinct animals and relies of human work which are now read as prehistoric records of man- kind. Up to the present time, the main results gained from the study of these remains are that Man lived in Europe in the remote days of the mammoth and the hippopotamus, and that he was then a savage. Just now a naturalist is about exploring caverns in Borneo, and if the half- developed creature between ape and man is to be found fossil anywhere, this is a likely region, for it is the home of his cousin the orang-utan, and the tropical climate would allow a naked semi-human race to subsist there, if they could subsist anywhere. But no trace has been found in any cavern in Europe or else- where pointing to a human condition much below that of a modern Tasmanian or Fuegian, and the earliest cave-dwellers dealt with in Mr. Boyd Dawkins's elaborate work are the men of the Palmolithic or Old Stone Age, whose unground stone hatchets may have fairly symbolised their unpolished lives.
The details as to cave-exploring, and the summaries of results thence obtained in Europe, form that part of the present book which especially belongs to geologists and ethnologists. This more technical part forms the basis of two arguments which the author has worked out with great care, and which must receive the attention of general students, whether agreeing with or differing from him as to their validity.
_ No one has gone more thoroughly than Professor Dawkins into the evidence as to the succession of animal life in England since the Miocene period, and the bearing of this evidence on the antiquity of man. 'The remains in caves, as is now well known, prove the existence, not merely of prehistoric tribes of men, but of two populations in Europe, one much more ancient than the other. These populations are especially distinguished by the different quality of their stone implements. 'I'he earlier and ruder tribes, who shaped their weapons and tools very
* Cave-hunting: Researches on the Evidence of Caves respecting the Early Inhabi- tants of Europe. By W. Boyd Dawkins, M.A., F.B.S., .to. London: Macmillan and Co, 1874,
coarsely, and did not grind or polish, are classed by Sir John Lubbock as palmolithic, or of the Old Stone Age. The later tribes, who made stone implements of better finish and polished their cells, are classed as neolithic, or of the New Stone Age. Now, there is reason to believe that a vast lapse of time intervened between the Old and the New Stone Age populations. In the Old Stone Age, England was inhabited by many animals now extinct, or only to be found in distant regions where the climate is unlike ours. Among these were the mammoth, African elephant, hippopotamus, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear, reindeer, musk-sheep, leopard, hyena, and cave lion. But by the time that the new Stone Age men succeeded their more savage pre- decessors, a wonderful change had taken place in the animals inhabiting the country. No mammoth or other elephant re- mained alive, no hippopotamus or rhinoceros, no lion, hyena, or cave-bear. Moreover, there appear, together with the New Stone Age men, certain domesticated animals, such as the dog, swine, horse, horned sheep, goat, and larger ox ; the inference being that the new inhabitants had immigrated from some other region, perhaps from Asia, bringing their domesticated animals with them. Mr. Dawkins puts forcibly the inference as to the length of time which probably elapsed during the gradual extinction of the animals of the mammoth period. Moreover, the disappearance of these animals from the world, or at least from our part of it, seems to have been due to a change of climate. Here arises a very curious question. Among the pleistocene mammals, in whose time the earliest known men lived, are some belonging to cold mountain or arctic regions, such as the arctic fox, musk-sheep, reindeer, ibex, mid chamois, while the woolly rhinoceros and the mam- moth, with its heavy coat of hair, would seem likewise adapted to conditions of severe cold. But on the other hand, the lion, Caffir cat, hyena, and African elephant suggest a climate as hot as the Cape of Good Hope ; nor is it to be supposed that the hippopo- tamus, with its aquatic habits, could endure a country where the rivers were frozen over in winter. It is true that the remains of the cold-climate animals abound most in the northern district, and those of the warm-climate animals in the southern district. But "the remains of the two groups of animals are so associated together in the caves and river deposits of Europe, north of the Pyrenees, that it is impossible to deny the fact that it was the common feedimg-ground of both dtuing the same era." The explana- tion offered by Professor Dawkins of this apparent contradiction is from the analogy of what happens in northern Asia and America, where the arctic animals migrate south for the winter, occupying the feeding-grounds to which the elk, red deer, &c., resort for the sum- mer herbage, so that the bones of the two groups of animals, though belonging to two different climates, may nevertheless be found lying together. Now Europe in the Pleistocene period must have had a winter of intense severity, as is shown by the traces of vast glaciers and snow-fields then existing; and if the summer heat were also intense, then we might find, as we do, the bones lying together of the lion and hippopotamus which had wandered north in the summer, and those of the reindeer and musk ox which had wandered south in the winter. The working-out of this argument from the distribution of fossil remains over Europe seems to us the best piece of original work in the book. After this, it is a well-known geological problem to account for the geographical changes which have caused our present temperate climate to ensue, in place of a climate whose summer heat and winter cold were more excessive even than in the high lands of Central Asia now. The elevation of Europe so as to make into dry land what is now shallow sea in the Mediterranean and the English and Irish Channels would substitute an extreme "continental climate" for our present condition. Here, again, a long lapse of time would be demanded for the vast geological change since the time when there were great glaciers in Syria and Morocco, so that the land about the Mediterranean must have been then two or three thousand feet higher than now above the sea-level. Physical geography and zoology seem thus to combine their evidences with great strength in favour of the high antiquity of the human race.
The other argument of Professor Dawkins to which we have to draw attention relates to ethnology. What races composed the two populations which, as we have seen, inhabited Europe before the dawn of history? The ruder Old Stone Age cave-men, whose relics are found in Kent's Hole or the Dordogne caverns, were hunters and fishers, who used harpoon-heads, awls, and other instruments of bone, and showed much skill and artistic sense in scratching and carving figures of animals, &c. In these points they resembled the modern Esquimaux, and they not only led much
the same life as the Esquimaux, but had in the land the same animals, the reindeer and musk-sheep. These correspondences lead Mr. Dawkins to the opinion that the old cave-men of Europe, when their climate became milder, retreated north withtheir rein- deer to Arctic America, and were theancestors of the Esquimaux. To us this reasoning seems inconclusive, for different savage races living under similar circumstances may well show likeness as to their rude implements and rude beginnings of art. There is proof positive that it may be so as to these very points. Tribes of North-West America, in British Columbia and northward, who are also hunters and fishers inhabiting the region of the rein-deer and musk-sheep, used stone hatchets and bone harpoons, and were remarkably clever in carving figures of men sad beasts. Yet these people are not Esquimaux by race, but rather belong to the physically different American-Indian type. Thus Professor Dawkins might as plausibly have argued that the cave-dwellers of ancient France were Red Indians as that they were Esquimaux. And a third course is not less open to us,- namely, to refuse to admit without stronger evidence that they were either the one or the other. Again, our author treats it almost as a proved fact that the inhabitants of Gaul and Britain in the New Stone Age were either identical or cognate with the modern Basques. This view he connects with the well-known theory that these small, swarthy, narrow-headed mountaineers of the Pyrenees are to be identified as to race with the dark-com- plexioned type of men found elsewhere in the Western World, from Barbary to Wales. How is this very large generalisation to be made out ? Professor Dawkins remarks that in the question he has "purposely omitted to use the uncertain light of philology." Yet philology affords excellent evidence, which, within certain limits, favours his view. We do not refer to Mr. Hyde Clarke's paper mentioned at p. 262, but to the well-established evidence of geographical names, such as Asia and Astigi (now Ecija) in Andalusia, which indicate that the present Basques are but the remnant of tribes once reaching as a distinct population hundreds of miles beyond their present narrow limits. So far, so good, and as to physical likeness, there is enough between the Basques and the dark Kelts of Wales to have led anthropologists to bring forward rather strongly the theory of their being allied races. Still this is far from being proved, and the further step of setting up the New Stone Age men as Basques, on the sole evidence of the narrowness of their skulls, appears to us an uncertain one. Professor Dawkins's theory is a combination of these two.
While our author is grubbing in his caverns, he is as scrupulous ,as need be, pointing out the dangers of incautious argument from the thickness of stalagmite or the relative positions of bone-beds, and only judging after minute and careful criticism. He is less disposed than most cave-hnnters to worship their special "idols of the cave." But when he comes out into the open, and takes to looking ethnologically at the people of the land, he is somewhat apt to set up "idols of the tribe" and pay them reverence.
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