Has not Prof. A. H. Keane, in his authoritative Compendium of Geography and Travel of South America, said that, “it is beyond reasonable doubt that man had spread in early Pleistocene times from his eastern cradle to the New World, probably by two routes: from Europe by the still persisting land connexion with Greenland and Labrador, and from Asia by the narrow Behring Sea?”
He says “the inference seems inevitable that South America was already in Pleistocene time peopled to its utmost (?) limits by two primitive races, that still persist in the same region”; and if South America a fortiori North America.
It is here assumed, and with reason, that Lhatto and Ogga and Lagk talked, and Prof. Cunningham has pointed out that speech has necessitated structural modifications in the human brain totally absent from the brain of the Anthropoid Ape, and of the speechless microcephalic idiot.
These waifs of reconstruction dwelling in the dark backward of time, from whom, as from others, the motions of the heart and head were to start the wide ethnic impulses which have moved to and fro, like luminous and refluent waves, over the sad face of savage life, these waifs deny no natural assumptions. They lead us only into a new zone of imaginative work, and we are bidden to weave fabrics of design which carry on them the pictures of a lost past, when strange creatures, long extinct, were known to men, themselves extinct, when a strange epoch was placing its landmarks over a world, upon which the dawn of Mind had opened, when the Prehistoric somehow extricated from an inheritance of claws and hair and carnivorous ferocity, felt the mystery of the earth, looked with question upon the unrolled skies, and began the long drama of human love and hate.
Let it be so. Let us not be overscrupulous in the dogmas of our literary faith, nor too inquisitive as to the realism of a resurrected day. Were we always too cautious, our religion—which furnishes you, reader, with the balm and fortitude of your existence—would decrepitate and pass away into smoke and dust.
CHAPTER I.
Prelude.
The existence of Man in the geological period that preceded the one we live in, in his full anthropoid reality, possessing a mind, self conscious, radiant with powers of creation, of language, of inquisition, has been established. Man, vested with his essential attributes and physiologically and psychologically erect, as a peculiar dissonant and discrete living thing lived and died in the Quarternary Day of this Earth. The proof is incontestible. The fact is fixed to-day in the records of scientific assertion and discovery.