The conclusion which I think we must arrive at is, that if man has been developed from a common ancestor with all existing apes, and by no other agencies than such as have affected their development, then he must have existed, in something approaching his present form, during the tertiary period—and not merely existed, but predominated in numbers, wherever suitable conditions prevailed. If then, continued researches in all parts of Europe and Asia fail to bring to light any proofs of his presence, it will be at least a presumption that he came into existence at a much later date, and by a much more rapid process of development. In that case it will be a fair argument that, just as he is in his mental and moral nature, his capacities and aspirations, so infinitely raised above the brutes, so his origin is due, in part, to distinct and higher agencies than such as have affected their development.
Antiquity of Intellectual Man.—There is yet another line of inquiry bearing upon this subject to which I wish to call your attention. It is a somewhat curious fact that, while all modern writers admit the great antiquity of man, most of them maintain the very recent development of his intellect, and will hardly contemplate the possibility of men equal in mental capacity to ourselves having existed in prehistoric times. This question is generally assumed to be settled by such relics as have been preserved of the manufactures of the older races, showing a lower and lower state of the arts; by the successive disappearance in early times of iron, bronze, and pottery; and by the ruder forms of the older flint implements. The weakness of this argument has been well shown by Mr. Albert Mott in his very original but little-known presidential address to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool in 1873. He maintains that “our most distant glimpses of the past are still of a world peopled as now with men both civilised and savage,” and “that we have often entirely misread the past by supposing that the outward signs of civilisation must always be the same, and must be such as are found among ourselves.” In support of this view he adduces a variety of striking facts and ingenious arguments, a few of which I will briefly summarize.
Sculptures on Easter Island.—On one of the most remote islands of the Pacific—Easter Island, 2,000 miles from South America, 2,000 from the Marquesas, and more than 1,000 from the Gambier Islands, are found hundreds of gigantic stone images, now mostly in ruins. They are often forty feet high, while some seem to have been much larger, the crowns on their heads, cut out of a red stone, being sometimes ten feet in diameter, while even the head and neck of one is said to have been twenty feet high.[59] These images once all stood erect on extensive stone platforms.
[59] Journ. of Roy. Geog. Soc. 1870, pp. 177, 178.
The island containing these remarkable works of art has only an area of about thirty square miles, or considerably less than Jersey. Now as one of the smallest images (eight feet high) weighs four tons, the largest must weigh over a hundred tons, if not much more; and the existence of such vast works implies a large population, abundance of food, and an established government. Yet how could these coexist on a mere speck of land wholly cut off from the rest of the world? Mr. Mott maintains that these facts necessarily imply the power of regular communication with larger islands or a continent, the arts of navigation, and a civilisation much higher than now exists in any part of the Pacific. Very similar remains in other islands scattered widely over the Pacific add weight to this argument.
North American Earthworks.—The next example is that of the ancient mounds and earthworks of the North American continent, the bearing of which is even more significant. Over the greater part of the extensive Mississippi valley, four well-marked classes of these earthworks occur. Some are camps, or works of defence, situated on bluffs, promontories, or isolated hills; others are vast inclosures in the plains and lowlands, often of geometric forms, and having attached to them roadways or avenues often miles in length; a third are mounds corresponding to our tumuli, often seventy to ninety feet high, and some of them covering acres of ground; while a fourth group consists of representations of various animals modelled in relief on a gigantic scale, and occurring chiefly in an area somewhat to the north-west of the other classes, in the plains of Wisconsin.
The first class—the camps or fortified inclosures—resemble in general features the ancient camps of our own islands, but far surpass them in extent. Fort Hill, in Ohio, is surrounded by a wall and ditch a mile and a half in length, part of the way cut through solid rock. Artificial reservoirs for water were made within it, while at one extremity, on a more elevated point, a keep is constructed with its separate defences and water-reservoirs. Another, called Clark’s Work, in the Scioto valley, which seems to have been a fortified town, incloses an area of 127 acres, the embankments measuring three miles in length, and containing not less than three million cubic feet of earth. This area incloses numerous sacrificial mounds and symmetrical earthworks, in which many interesting relics and works of art have been found.
The second class—the sacred inclosures, may be compared for extent and arrangement with Avebury or Carnak, but are in some respects even more remarkable. One of these at Newark, Ohio, covers an area of several miles, with its connected groups of circles, octagons, squares, ellipses, and avenues on a grand scale, and formed by embankments from twenty to thirty feet in height. Other similar works occur in different parts of Ohio; and by accurate survey it is found, not only that the circles are true, though some of them are one-third of a mile in diameter, but that other figures are truly square, each side being over 1,000 feet long; and, what is still more important, the dimensions of some of these geometrical figures in different parts of the country and seventy miles apart, are identical. Now this proves the use, by the builders of these works, of some standard measures of length; while the accuracy of the squares, circles, and, in a less degree, of the octagonal figures, shows a considerable knowledge of rudimentary geometry and some means of measuring angles. The difficulty of drawing such figures on a large scale is much greater than any one would imagine who has not tried it; and the accuracy of these is far beyond what is necessary to satisfy the eye. We must therefore impute to the builders the wish to make these figures as accurate as possible; and this wish is a greater proof of habitual skill and intellectual advancement than even the ability to draw such figures. If, then, we take into account this ability and this love of geometric truth, and further consider the dense population and civil organisation implied by the construction of such extensive systematic works, we must allow that these ancient people had reached the earlier stages of a civilisation of which no traces existed among the savage tribes who alone occupied the country when first visited by Europeans.
The animal mounds are of comparatively less importance for our present purpose, as they imply a somewhat lower grade of advancement; but the sepulchral and sacrificial mounds exist in vast numbers, and their partial exploration has yielded a quantity of articles and works of art which throw some further light on the peculiarities of this mysterious people. Most of these mounds contain a large concave hearth or basin of burnt clay, of perfectly symmetrical form, on which are found deposited more or less abundant relics, all bearing traces of the action of fire. We are therefore only acquainted with such articles as are practically fire-proof, or have accidentally escaped combustion. These consist of bone and copper implements and ornaments, discs, and tubes; pearl, shell, and silver beads, more or less injured by the fire; ornaments cut in mica; ornamental pottery; and numbers of elaborate carvings in stone, mostly forming pipes for smoking.[60] The metallic articles are all formed by hammering, but the execution is very good; plates of mica are found cut into scrolls and circles; the pottery, of which very few remains have been found, is far superior to that of any of the Indian tribes, since Dr. Wilson is of opinion that it must have been formed on a wheel, as it is often of uniform thickness throughout (sometimes not more than one-sixth of an inch), polished, and ornamented with scrolls and figures of birds and flowers in delicate relief. But the most instructive objects are the sculptured stone pipes, representing not only various easily recognizable animals, but also human heads, so well executed that they appear to be portraits. Among the animals, not only are such native forms as the panther, bear, otter, wolf, beaver, raccoon, heron, crow, turtle, frog, rattlesnake, and many others well represented, but also the manatee, which perhaps then ascended the Mississippi as it now does the Amazon, and the toucan, which could hardly have been obtained nearer than Mexico. The sculptured heads are especially remarkable, because they present to us the features of an intellectual and civilised people. The nose in some is perfectly straight, and neither prominent nor dilated; the mouth is small, and the lips thin; the chin and upper lip are short, contrasting with the ponderous jaw of the modern Indian, while the cheek-bones present no marked prominence. Other examples have the nose somewhat projecting at the apex in a manner quite unlike the features of any American indigenes; and although there are some which show a much coarser face, it is very difficult to see in any of them that close resemblance to the Indian type which these sculptures have been said to exhibit. The few authentic crania from the mounds present corresponding features, being far more symmetrical and better developed in the frontal region than those of any American tribes, although somewhat resembling them in the occipital outline;[61] while one was described by its discoverer (Mr. W. Marshall Anderson) as a “beautiful skull, worthy of a Greek.”
[60] Woven cloth, apparently of flax or hemp, as well as gauges supposed to have been used to regulate the thickness of the thread, have also been found in several of the mounds of Ohio. (Foster’s Prehistoric Races of the United States, 1873, pp. 225–229.)