A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Buckle has shown how the physical features of a land have been profoundly active in shaping the racial temperaments of the contrasted populations of India and Greece. In India nature is dominating; the lofty mountains, the torrential and wide rivers, the tyrannous climate, form so severe and overpowering a restraint upon human activity that man becomes dwarfed and insignificant. In Greece, nature, less oppressively developed, has induced the growth of a radiant and high and forceful type of man.

Prof. Keane has said of the Hebrew intellect that it is “less varied, but more intense, a contrast due to the monotonous and almost changeless environment of yellow sands, blue skies, flora and fauna limited to a few species, and mainly confined to oases and plains, reclaimed by irrigation from the desert, everywhere presenting the same uniform aspect.” Prof. Gregory has also pointed out the decisive influence of physical environment on the East African races. He summarizes the aspects of these under the general heading of “instability,” as the variable rainfall, earth movements, etc. He says these “keep alive a disposition toward nomad life, alien alike to the growth of either a fatalism like that of India, or culture like that of Greece. All the tribes, however, cannot become nomadic. Some of them are physically and mentally incompetent for the strains of such a life, and must be content with servitude, or else submit to the ever recurring raids of the more powerful tribes. The physical conditions of the country therefore help to divide the people into two classes: one consists of warlike, conquering nomads; the other of feebler races, who either eke out a precarious existence on mountain summits, in forest clearings, and on islands in the vast malarial swamp, or else live as serfs and helots in subjection to the dominant tribes.”

The intensive influence of nature upon man is deeply hidden in the response Man makes to his physical surroundings, which response in some way grows from the attributes of his mind, as that he loves beauty, that he is stimulated to action by desire, that he feels the subtlety of contrast and color, and living wonders and natural splendor.

And that we may extract from this truth the last possible quantity of justification, the story here places Lhatto and Ogga in the midst of a great diversity and extension of natural features. It assumes that long before their time man had eventuated. Not a shadow and mask and caricature, but man in the possession of a mental character that was responsive to all these wonders about him. It assumes that whereas men living near or in glaciated and cold countries were still immersed in a sort of moral hebitude; those men, as Ogga and Lhatto, who by a sudden juxtaposition of the cold and the hot, were swayed by the contrasted marvels of the glacier and semi-tropic forest, had felt the excitation of their sense of beauty and wonder and worship. It assumes for them at least a psychological stage. It assumes that such a region of contrasts could have existed along our western coasts, where the great terminal moraine, the limital outline of the glacier, bends northward. Here was a southern section, warm and prolific and luxuriant, and here was a northern section, as described in the story, lingering under the malign torpor of ice and snow.

It assumes that the period of time chosen, when the Ice was itself surrendering its strongholds and in stubborn despair relinquishing its conquests, was not so far distant from the historic or semi-historic period, not so far distant from this present period of emotional complexity.

Nor is this last assumption unreasonable. The views as to the distance of the Ice Age in time from our own geological day have undergone some marked changes. It is no longer a requisite of geological orthodoxy to place that period in a chronological perspective diminishing to a point of time which may be sixty thousand years away.

Sir Henry H. Howorth, Prof. Bonney, Matthieu Williams, Pettersen, Kjerulf have promulgated their views as to the necessary assumptions of the Glacialists. Howorth, indeed, says (Glacial Nightmare and the Flood) of the tremendous conception of a continental ice-sheet sweeping over the Northern Sea from Norway into Great Britain, that it was “the invention of Croll, who, sitting in his armchair, and endowed with a brilliant imagination, imposed upon sober science this extraordinary postulate.”

The recentness,—and we may here quote acceptably from the Rev. H. N. Hutchinson—“of the Glacial period, is becoming much more generally recognized, and many geologists failed to see how the striations, moraines and roches moutonnées could have lasted for anything like the periods required by the Astronomical theory. One is inclined to think that delicate striations and polishings would have been destroyed by atmospheric influences within the space of twenty thousand years.”

Lhatto and Ogga were indeed placed at a great distance from us, but they are not therefore utterly lost in the shadows or clouds of antiquity, of myth and fable, or somnambulous reverie, as to be alien to our hearts and sympathies.

Lhatto and Ogga were the heirs to a vast amount of temperamental evolution. If they were elevated in feeling, adroit and sensitive in thought, there had been enough time expended in developing men to bestow upon them these virtues of the head and heart.