The level of the Baltic and of the North Sea was 400 feet higher than it is at the present day. The valley of the Somme was not hollowed to the depth it has now attained; Sicily was joined to Africa, Barbary to Spain. Carthage, the Pyramids of Egypt, the palaces of Uxmal and Palenque were not yet in existence, and the bold navigators of Tyre and Sidon, who at a later date were to undertake their perilous voyages along the coasts of Africa, were yet unborn. What we know with certainty is that European man was contemporaneous with the extinct species of the quaternary epoch ... that he witnessed the upheaval of the Alps[1755] and the extension [pg 794]of the glaciers, in a word that he lived for thousands of years before the dawn of the remotest historical traditions. It is even possible that man was the contemporary of extinct mammalia of species yet more ancient ... of the elephas meridionalis of the sands of St. Prest, or at the least of the elephas antiquus, assumed to be prior to the elephas primigenius, since their bones are found in company with carved flints in several English caves, associated with those of the rhinoceros hæemitechus and even of the machairodus latidens, which is of still earlier date. M. Ed. Lartet is also of opinion that there is nothing really impossible in the existence of man as early as the Tertiary period.[1756]
If “there is nothing impossible” scientifically, in the idea, and it may be admitted that man was already in existence as early as the Tertiary period, then it is just as well to remind the reader that Mr. Croll places the beginning of that period 2,500,000 years back; but there was a time when he assigned to it 15,000,000 years.
And if all this may be said of European man, how great is the antiquity of the Lemuro-Atlantean and of the Atlanto-Âryan man? Every educated person who follows the progress of Science, knows how all vestiges of man during the Tertiary period are received. The calumnies that were poured on Desnoyers in 1863, when he announced to the Institute of France that he had made a discovery
In the undisturbed Pliocene sands of St. Prest near Chartres, proving the coëxistence of man and the elephas meridionalis—
were equal to the occasion. The later discovery, in 1867, by the Abbé Bourgeois, that man lived in the Miocene epoch, and the reception it was given at the Pre-historic Congress held at Brussels in 1872, proves that the average man of Science will see only that which he wishes to see.[1757]
The modern Archæologist, though speculating ad infinitum upon the dolmens and their builders, knows, in fact, nothing either of them or of their origin. Yet these weird and often colossal monuments of unhewn stones—which consist generally of four or seven gigantic blocks placed together—are strewn over Asia, Europe, America, and Africa, in groups or rows. Stones of enormous size are found placed horizontally and variously upon two, three, four, and as in Poitou, upon six and seven blocks. People name them “devil's altars,” druidic stones, and giant tombs. The stones of Carnac in Morbihan, Brittany—nearly a mile in length and numbering 11,000 ranged in eleven rows—are [pg 795] twin sisters of those at Stonehenge. The conical menhir of Loch-maria-ker, in Morbihan, measures twenty yards in length and nearly two yards across. The menhir of Champ Dolent (near St. Malo) rises thirty feet above the ground, and is fifteen feet in depth below. Such dolmens and pre-historic monuments are met with in almost every latitude. They are found in the Mediterranean basin; in Denmark (among the local tumuli from twenty-seven to thirty-five feet in height); in Shetland; in Sweden, where they are called Ganggriften (or tombs with corridors); in Germany, where they are known as the giant tombs (Hünengräben); in Spain, where is the dolmen of Antiguera near Malaga; in Africa; in Palestine and Algeria; in Sardinia, with the Nuraghi and Sepolture dei Giganti, or tombs of giants; in Malabar; in India, where they are called the tombs of the Daityas (Giants) and of the Râkshasas, the Men-demons of Lankâ; in Russia and Siberia, where they are known as the Koorgan; in Peru and Bolivia, where they are termed the Chulpas or burial places, etc.
There is no country from which they are absent. Who built them? Why are they all connected with serpents and dragons, with alligators and crocodiles? Because remains of “Palæolithic man” were, it is thought, found in some of them, and because, in the funeral mounds of America, bodies of later races were discovered with the usual paraphernalia of bone necklaces, weapons, stone and copper urns, etc., they are, therefore, ancient tombs! But surely the two famous mounds—one in the Mississippi valley and the other in Ohio—known respectively as the “Alligator Mound” and the “Great Serpent Mound,” were never meant for tombs.[1758] Yet one is told authoritatively that the mounds, and the mound or dolmen builders, are all “Pelasgic” in Europe, antecedent to the Incas in America, yet not of “extremely distant times.” They are built by “no race of dolmen builders,” who never existed save in the earlier archæological fancy (opinion of De Mortillet, Bastian, and Westropp). Finally Virchow's opinion of the giant tombs of Germany is now accepted as an axiom. Says that German Biologist:
The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain.
And Archæology has but to bow and submit to the decision.[1759]
That no gigantic skeletons have been hitherto found in the “tombs” is no reason for saying that the remains of giants were never in them. Cremation was universal till a comparatively recent period—some 80,000 or 100,000 years ago. The real giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned with Atlantis. Nevertheless, classical writers, as we have shown elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons being excavated in their day. Moreover, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet. No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50,000 or 60,000 years,[1760] and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, from the time of the third sub-race of the Âryan stock, which sub-race—born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions—had become European. Since then, as we have said, it has been steadily decreasing. It is truer, therefore, to say that the tombs alone are archaic, and not necessarily the bodies of men occasionally found in them; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic, must have contained giants,[1761] or rather the ashes of generations of giants.