harmonise with the simplicity of that primeval life, and its easy toils, far more naturally than the most artistic Sheffield cutlery could do, with all its requisite preliminary processes of mining, smelting, forging, grinding, and hafting the needless tool.
The idea which associates man’s intellectual elevation with the accompaniments of mechanical skill, as though they stood somehow in the relation of cause and effect, and with the intellectual as the offspring, instead of the parent, of the mechanical element, is the product of modern thought. The very element which begets the unintellectual condition of the savage is that his whole energies are expended, and all his thoughts are absorbed, in providing daily food and clothing, and the requisite tools by which those are to be secured; or where, as in the luxuriant islands of Polynesia, nature seems to provide all things to his hand, his degraded moral nature unparadises the Eden of the bread-fruit tree.
A primeval “Stone period” appears to underlie the most remote traces of European civilisation; and not only to carry back the evidence of man’s presence to times greatly more remote than any hitherto conceived of, but to confirm the idea that his earliest condition was one not only devoid of metallurgy, but characterised by mechanical arts of the very simplest kind. But it does not necessarily follow that he was in a condition of intellectual dormancy. The degradation of his moral nature, and not the absence of the arts which we associate with modern luxury and enterprise, made him a savage. The Arab sheikh, wandering with his flocks over the desert, is not greatly in advance of the Indian of the American forests, either in mechanical skill or artistic refinement; yet the Idumean Job was just such a pastoral Arab, but, nevertheless, a philosopher and a poet, far above any who dwelt amid the wondrous developments of mechanical and artistic progress in the cities of the Tigris or the Euphrates. It is not to be inferred, however, that the whole history of the human race is affirmed by the archæologist to disclose a regular succession of periods—Stone, Bronze, and Iron, or however otherwise designated,—akin to the organic disclosures of geology; or that where their traces are found they necessarily imply such an order in their succession. The only true analogy between the geologist and the archæologist is, that both find their evidence imbedded in the earth’s superficial crust, and deduce the chronicles of an otherwise obliterated past by legitimate induction therefrom. The radical difference between the palæontologist and the ethnologist lies in this, that the one aims at recovering the history of unintelligent divisions of extinct life; the other investigates all that pertains to a still existing, intelligent being, capable of advancing from his own past condition, or returning to it, under the most diverse external circumstances.
Amid that strangely diversified series of organic beings which pertains to the studies of the geologist, there appears at length one, “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals”;[[19]] a being capable of high moral and intellectual elevation, fertile in design, and with a capacity for transmitting experience, and working out comprehensive plans by the combined labours of many successive generations. In all this there is no analogy to any of the inferior orders of being. The works of the ant and the beaver, the coral zoophyte and the bee, display singular ingenuity and powers of combination; and each feathered songster builds its nest with wondrous forethought, in nature’s appointed season. But the instincts of the inferior orders of creation are in vain compared with the devices of man, even in his savage state. Their most ingenious works cost them no intellectual effort to acquire the craft, and experience adds no improvements in all the continuous labours of the wonderful mechanicians. The beaver constructs a dam more perfect than the best achievements of human ingenuity in the formation of breakwaters, and builds for itself a hut which the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire justly contrasts in architectural skill with the ruder dwelling of the Asiatic Tartar. The bee, in forming its cell, solves a mathematical problem which has tasked the labours of acutest analysts. But each ingenious artificer is practising a craft which no master taught, and to which it has nothing to add. The wondrous, instinctive, living machine creates for itself the highest pleasure it is capable of in working out the art with which it is endowed; and accomplishes it with infallible accuracy, as all its untaught predecessors did, and as, without teaching, each new-born successor will do. To such architects and artists history does not pertain, for their arts knew no primeval condition of imperfection, and witness no progress. Of their works, as of their organic structure, one example is a sufficient type of the whole. The palæontologist’s materials have been designated by one popular geologist, “the Medals of Creation”; and the term, though borrowed from the antiquary, has a significance which peculiarly marks the contrast now referred to between geology and archæology. Like medals struck in the same die, the multitude of examples of an extinct species, each exquisitely modelled coral, and every cast of a symmetrical sigillaria, repeat the same typical characteristics; and the poet’s fancy may be accepted as literally true, in relation to the most ingenious arts which engage the study of the naturalist:—
“All the winged habitants of paradise,
Whose songs once mingled with the songs of angels,
Wove their first nests as curiously and well
As the wood minstrel in our evil day
After the labour of six thousand years.”[[20]]
But with the relics of human art, even in its most primitive stage, it is otherwise. Each example possesses an individuality of its own, for it is the product of an intelligent will, capable of development, and profiting by experience.