BOOKS.
FOSSIL MAN.* THE latest chapter in the Great Stone Book, the genesis and development of man, seems to have concentrated on itself during some years past the popular interest in geology. The works of Lyell, Geikie, Boyd Dawkins, Lubbock, Evans, have passed through repeated editions, have begotten compendiums, have been boiled down into institute lectures ; the discussion on pre- glacial man in the British Association was perhaps the most exciting feature in this year's meeting; and the visit of Sir W. Dawson to England as its President has called attention to the work, better known hitherto in Canada than at home, in which, from a rather unexpected point of view, he presents his own conclusions on the subject.
The inquiry is, as the Montreal Principal reminds us, still in its infancy. Scarce fifty years have passed since McEnery showed to Buckland the chipped flint exhumed from Brixham Cave along with mammoth bones ; and the two clergymen, with a candour rare at that date in their profession, accepted and proclaimed the -upset to received chronology which the discovery involved, the immense though shadowy antiquity which it demanded for the human race, the establishment of the search for primitive man upon a scientific instead of a conjectural basis. From that time, every year has presented a host of well- authenticated facts for comparison and inference ; the position, the material, the structure of the relics found have been de- ciphered by practised interpreters ; and though the date of man's first entry on the globe recedes farther into the past with every fresh discovery, the limit of evidence as regards his euliest habits derived from the implements he has bequeathed to us may not improbably have been reached.
Scientific research into the general history of mankind has established two leading principles,—first, that notwithstanding isolated instances of lapse and degradation, the developments of race, of language, of civilisation, show gradual and uniform progress from a state rude and simple to a state elaborate and refined; secondly, that since the earliest historical or picto- graphical records of our kind five thousand years ago in the monuments of Babylonia and Egypt exhibit a highly advanced stage of culture, speech, and physical beauty, a vast extent of prehistoric time must be demanded for the attainment of so high a leveL And farther, looking, as Sir W. Dawson bids us look, to modern causes for the explanation of ancient effects, we may assume that the three conditions of life now extant on our globe—the savage, the barbaric, the civilised, the condition of the Brazilian forest-dweller, of the New Zealander, of the European —represent the ascending scale by which our ancestors climbed from prehistoric rudeness to historic civilisation. These prin- ciples are strikingly illustrated, and this assumption justified, by geological investigation, which has been able to classify the retreating ages of prehistoric man as the Bronze Age, the Neolithic or new-stone Age, the Palteolithic or old-stone Age,—a period in which bronze was known, but iron was not discovered ; a period in which metal was unknown, and the tools or imple- ments in use were of hard stone, finely ground and edged; a period in which flints chipped roughly, yet chipped by the band of man, were the only weapons known. These eloquent relics, regarded formerly as elf-bolts or moon-stones, now eagerly • Fossil Men, and their Modern Represent at By Sir 3. W. Dawson, F.H.B. London Hodder and Stoughton. 1583. sought and preserved, are derived from two sources,—river gravels, and caves. We stand by a tiny streamlet at the bottom of a deep ravine in Cumberland or Devonshire. There was a time, we know, when the valley was filled, up to the level of the surrounding land, and the predecessor of the stream below ran a hundred and fifty feet above our head. Slowly the water carved for itself an ever-narrowing channel, the sharper tooth of its mid- stream leaving behind it, as it deepened, the successive margins of its gravelly bed. Flood after flood washed into its swollen waters and lodged upon its submerged sides implements of the rude tribes which lived upon its banks, and the bones of the huge animals which they hunted and destroyed, burying them in the mnd which each subsiding cataclysm deposited as it shrank. Man comes to-day and digs into the hillside. In the upper slopes he finds rude flints, with remains of the mammoth and the mastodon; lower down, the polished colt, along with relics of the hywna, lion, elephant ; lower again, the arrow, saw, pierced hammer-head of stone, mingled with the reindeer horn and the tooth of the arctic fox ; lowest of all, with bones of recent animals, otter, deer, and ox, appear the sickle, spear-head, or shield-boss, which attest the Age of Bronze. We unseal an ancient cave which has been for ages closed and lost. We dig through mould charged with human bones, remains of pig and sheep, weapons of stone and bronze. Below it is a mass of stalagmite yielding no remains. Under that, again, we find a hard red mud, containing reindeer-bones and polished implements. This rests upon a second thicker bed. of stalagmite, and boring it, we find another earthy stratum,. mingled with erratic blocks of grit, attesting glacial action, yielding the extinct cave-bear's bones, with the rudest human implements. The section which we have made "drops sense distinct and clear." In times long past, before the glacial drift had ceased, man inhabited the cave. Driven from his home by ice-sheet or by flood, he left his weapons strewed around, and mud poured into the cave, laden with the bones of animals, deceased or slain, which it had gathered in its flow. The dis- turbance passed ; the mud hardened into breccia, lime-drops from the roof splashing their film upon its surface slowly built up the crystalline stalagmite. Another generation of men found out the cave and haunted it, not -knowing that the floor of their new home was the roof of an ancestral tomb. They, too, in time were driven out, their relics left behind, embedded" in earth, sealed by stalagmite, succeeded by fresh inmates,. till the cave is found to-day, a prehistoric museum, preserved, arranged, labelled, by the Great Teacher's hand. Even this is. not the whole. A comparison of ossiferous caves and gravels. yieldsstill minuter evidence as to the ascending development of the races they embalm. They show a period during which. norelics except rude chipped flints are found ; their owner wielded them to dig for roots, to break the ice, to slay his neigh- bour or to wound his prey. By-and-by are seen flint scrapers, such as the Australian uses now to soften the skins he wraps. around his naked form, and with them rude bone pins,—the creature had learned to dress ! Anon we find charred bones with the remains of fire,—the creature had learned to cook 1 Presently we exhume pierced shells and pigments made of hwma- tite,—the idea of ornament had followed on the idea of dress !: And so upward, through kitchen-midden and lake-dwelling, we trace the birth and growth of pottery, of agriculture, of house- building, of domestic animals, of woven cords, nets, mats, and garments; till the Stone Age yields to the Bronze, Stonehenge- and the Cromlechs are reared, the Bronze Age passes into the iron Age, and written history begins.
It is in Western Europe that the remains have hitherto been. found which are pregnant with these exciting revelations ; from America they are absent. On the other hand, savage, or at least barbaric man, unknown for ages in Europe, formed little more than three centuries ago the entire population of America, and survives there to the present day. It is the object of Sir W. Dawson's book to exhibit the culture of the native American as it existed in pre-Columbian days, and by means of it to throw light upon the habits and institutions of Palmolithic man, as he lived in Horne or the valleys of the Somme. The town of- Montreal stands upon the site of the ancient native village of Hochelaga, discovered and described by Cartier in 1534, and shortly afterwards destroyed by an invasion of Huron tribes. Its people, with their arts, manufactures, knowledge, and reli- gion, are depicted at length, and an exceedingly interesting chapter is devoted to their ethnic relations with the other con- tinental tribes, We feel in reading that we probably under- stand as we never understood before the life and the surround- ings of a lake-village in Switzerland, in Ireland, or in our own Hornsea Mere. But Sr W. Dawson is not satisfied with this.
He will have us believe that the savage who has left us all he had to leave in the flint implements and scrapers at the bottom of a French or English cave was "not in- ferior to the aborigines of America at the time of its dis- covery ;" that in the Red Indian of Sebastian Cabot we have the fac-simile of primitive man ! In defiance of the inductive process, he lays down as an established starting-point the Hebrew tradition of our first parents, applies to it the Usherian chronology of B.C. 4000, cites Tnbal-Cain as the pioneer of the Iron Age, Jabal of the nomadic life, sees in Adam a Turanian man, in the big tenants of the Cro-magnon cave the giants of Genesis vi. Facts which decline to fit this theory are hammered into shape like fossils, most commonly shivered in the process. The absence of polished stone or pottery, of, in fact, all but the very rudest implements, from remoter strata is explained by the supposition that these represent mere camping stations of travelling Paheoliths, who had other and better tools at home ; that they used wicker baskets and bark boxes instead of pots and pans ; that the man who made the bone pins in Kent's Hole could, if he pleased, have made edged stones, but found flints handier to his purposes; that because the tenant of the Mentone cave wore perforated shells and the tribes of the St. Lawrence valley wore wampum, therefore the two were in all respects upon a par ; that because jade and coral were known to the Swiss lake-dwellers, therefore Palmolithic man had extensive commerce with distant regions ; that because the American wapiti has disappeared within the historic period, therefore the mammoth is a recent animal ; that because contact with Euro- peans has caused the rapid degradation of the red man, there- fore developments of early man, to which vast periods have been assigned, may be condensed into times not greater than have elapsed since the voyages of Columbus.
We had thought that the school of Reconcilists was extinct ; but, living in a land of survivals, Sir W. Dawson has galvanised it into unexpected life. Even were the philologist and the ethnologist content to accept his theory, the geologist must demur. While declining to fix, or even to approximate, the date of Palteolithic man, he sees that the years essential to his growth cannot possibly be compressed into the six thousand which Sir W. Dawson postulates. If the average rate of valley erosion is proved to be 1 ft. in twelve hundred years, and the average deposit of stalagmite 6 in. in two thousand years, the 150 ft. of descent to the bottom of a Somme valley, and the 17 ft. of stalagmite in Kent's Cavern, demand, on the lowest computa- tion, far more than a decade, or even than a score of thousand years. Nay, more ; the latest discovery recorded, accepted as unquestionable by the veteran Pengelly and his brother anthropologists at Birmingham, a flint flake of human manufacture, disinterred from below the earliest boulder clay in the Vale of Clwyd, carries back the human race into the Pre-Glacial Age, 210,000 years ago, and disposes of the assumption on which the whole of this book is built, the post. glacial genesis of man. The interpretation and the value of the traditions embalmed in the earliest chapters of the Old Testa- ment are questions for the Biblical critic and for the historian ; the geologist must build his conclusions on the phenomena which the earth affords, not ignore or manipulate them to suit a preconception. The student who passionately longs to trace man's first creation to the Miocene, and the Professor who labours to restrict the prehistoric period to a thousand years, will be certain to find proof of their respective theories ; they will not convince their neighbours, nor advance the cause of scientific truth.
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