The same fact is further illustrated by similar relics of a subterranean stone dwelling at Saverock, near Kirkwall, in Orkney, situated, like the natural caverns of Torbay, close to the sea-shore. Accumulated remains of charcoal and peat ashes lay intermingled with bones of the small northern sheep, the horse, ox, deer, and whale, and also with some rude implements illustrative of primitive Orcadian arts; while a layer of shells of the oyster, escallop, and periwinkle, the common whelk, the purpura, and the limpet, covered the floor and the adjacent ground, in some places half a foot deep.
In the interval since I first drew attention to such traces of Scotland’s prehistoric centuries, this class of remains has excited special interest. Ancient shell-mounds, analogous to the kjökkenmöddingr of Denmark, discovered on the coasts of Elgin and Inverness-shire, have yielded similar results; and the explorations of other mounds, especially that of Keiss, in Caithness, have proved beyond question that the natives of North Britain were familiar at a comparative late period with the Reindeer. Specimens of its horns have been found not only associated with flint implements, cups and personal ornaments of stone and shale, the miscellaneous heaps of fish-bones, littoral shells, and other débris of a kitchen-midden; but with the masonry of the Scottish Broch, or primitive round tower. Some of the reindeer horns thus found show marks of sawing and cutting, apparently with metal tools. How old they are may not be strictly determinable; but they serve to place the Scottish Reindeer Period in a very modern era, compared with that assigned to the “Reindeer Period” of France; and remove all grounds for rejecting the statement of Torfæus that, so recently as the twelfth century, the Jarls of Orkney were wont to cross the Pentland Firth, to chase the roe and the reindeer in the wilds of Caithness.
But recent discoveries replete with interest and value, which thus extend the resources of the European archæologist and anthropologist, are only known to me through the ordinary channels of information; and I turn therefore to another field of study and research, rendered valuable by the contrast which it presents in all ways to that of historic Europe, with its confusing elements pertaining to times when the ambition of Rome so overrode all nationalities, and obliterated the memories of history, that even now it is hard to persuade some men there was a European world before that of the Cæsars.
The city of Toronto, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, is built on the drift clays which have accumulated above the rocks of the Lower Silurian formation to an average depth of upwards of thirty feet, and in some places to more than seventy feet. The same overlying beds of boulder clay and drift-gravel extend with monotonous uniformity eastward from Lake Huron to the Ottawa; and throughout the lower valley of the St. Lawrence to Labrador. The traces of ancient life recovered from those Canadian glacial deposits, with very few exceptions, correspond to living species,—including Radiata, Mollusca, Articulata, and Vertebrata, now found in other latitudes. As might be anticipated, the older glacial beds indicate a more Arctic condition of life; and thus accord with other evidence in pointing to a gradual amelioration of climate in Northern America. But it is only in the boulder clay of the lower St. Lawrence that the palæontologist finds the fossils by means of which such conclusions are formed; and alongside of which it would be reasonable to anticipate traces of the presence of man. The construction of an esplanade along the margin of the Bay of Toronto, during recent years, exposed a cutting of upwards of two miles in length, and laid bare the virgin soil of the most populous site now devoted to the civilising processes of European colonisation in Upper Canada. The same drift clay and gravel have been exposed in numerous other excavations, but hitherto without disclosures of interest to the archæologist. In two cases only, so far as I have been able to ascertain, did any trace of prior human presence appear. At the depth of nearly two feet from the surface, in front of the Parliament buildings, the bones and horn of a deer lay amid an accumulation of charcoal and wood ashes, and with them a rude stone chisel or hatchet. More recently, to the west of the same spot, at a depth of eight or nine feet, one of the cervical vertebræ of the Wapiti (Cervus Canadensis), was found along with a rude stone hatchet and a lance-head of flint. But the travelled fossils of the Toronto drift are of a very different era, and belong to the Hudson river group of the Lower Silurian, like the rocks on which it is superimposed. With varying organic remains imbedded in its clay and gravel, the same formation overlies the true fossiliferous rocks of Western Canada; and seems to make of its long stretch of wooded levels and gentle undulations a country fitted to slumber through untold centuries under the shadow of its forests, a type of the earth of primeval man, until the new-born mechanical science of Europe provided for it the railway and the locomotive, and made its vast chain of rivers and lakes a highway for the steamboat. With such novel facilities added to the indomitable energy of the intruding occupants, the whole face of the continent is in rapid process of transformation; and it is well, ere the change is completed, that some note be made of every decipherable index of the characteristics of a past thus destined to speedy obliteration.
From the uncleared wilds that still occupy the shores of Lake Superior, south-eastward through the great lakes and rivers to the valley of the St. Lawrence, those drift deposits reveal to the geologist marvellous changes that have transpired in this extensive area of the North American continent. Along the low shores stretching away from the rapids of Sault Ste. Marie to Lake Superior, huge granitic boulders lie strewed like the wreck of some Titanic Babel; raised beaches at various levels on the shores of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, show traces of other revolutions; and wherever the waves of the St. Lawrence reopen the deposits along the lower portion of the valley, the bottoms of an ancient ocean are revealed, frequently with littoral or deep-sea shells imbedded at different levels in the stratified drift. But remote as is the antiquity, according to all human chronology, to which the fauna of these beds of marine detritus belong, the palæontologist detects among their post-tertiary fossils the phoca, balænæ of more than one species, fishes, articulata, and the shells of many mollusca still inhabiting the neighbouring ocean along the northern Atlantic coasts. The period, therefore, which embraces those relics of ancient life is the same to which man belongs; and they mark for it one of the phases of that last transitional era during which the continent was being prepared for his entrance upon it. Since the natica, fusus, turritella, and other marine animals of the post-pleiocene period, were the living occupants of the St. Lawrence valley, vast changes have been wrought on the physical geography of the continent. The relative levels of the sea and land have altered, so as to elevate old sea-margins to the slopes of lofty hills, and leave many hundred miles inland escarpments wrought by the waves of that ancient sea. The conditions of climate have undergone no less important changes, developing in a corresponding degree the new character and conditions of life pertaining to this bed of an extinct ocean: covered with successive deposits of marine detritus, and then elevated into the region of sun and rain, to be clothed with the umbrageous forest, and to become the dwelling-place through another dimly-measured period of the wapiti, the beaver, and the bison; and with them, of the Iroquois, the Huron, and the Chippewa: all alike the fauna of conditions of life belonging to a transitional period of the New World preparatory to our own.
Marvellous as are those cosmical revolutions belonging to the period of emergence of the northern zone of America from the great Arctic Ocean, when we look on each completed whole the process appears to have been characterised by no abnormal violence. Slowly through long centuries the ocean shallowed. The deep-sea organisms of a former generation were overlaid by the littoral shells of a newer marine life, and then the tidal waves retreated from the emerging sea-beach; until now we seek far down in the gulf of the St. Lawrence and on the coast of Labrador for the living descendants of species gathered from the post-pleiocene drift. Thus the closing epoch of geology in the New World, as in the Old, is brought into contact with that in which its archæology begins; and we look upon the North American continent as at length prepared for the presence of man.
Such records are here noted among the disclosures of the great valley of the St. Lawrence, which drains well-nigh half a continent; for it is in the valleys by which the present drainage of historic areas takes place, that not only such deposits of recent shells and fossil relics of existing fauna occur, but also that the most extensive remains of the extinct mammalia are disclosed, in association with objects serving to link them with those of modern eras. In formations of this character have been found, in the lower valley of the Mississippi, the Elephas primigenius, the Mastodon Ohioticus, the Megalonyx, Megalodon, Ereptodon, and the Equus curvidens, or extinct American horse: with many other traces of an unfamiliar fauna, and also a flora, contemporaneous with those gigantic mammifers, but which also include both marine and terrestrial representatives of existing species. Corresponding in its great geographical outlines very nearly to its present condition, the American continent must have presented in nearly all other characteristics a striking contrast to its modern aspect, clothed though it seems to us in primeval forests, and scarcely modified by the presence of man. In the post-pleiocene formations of South Carolina, exposed along the bed of the Ashley River, remains of the megatherium, megalodon, and other gigantic extinct mammals occur, not only associated with existing species peculiar to the American continent, but also apparently with others, hitherto believed to have been domesticated and introduced for the first time by modern European colonists. But more interesting for our present purpose, as possibly indicating the contemporaneous existence of some of those strange mammals with man, are notices of remains of human art in the same formation. Professor Holmes, in exhibiting a collection of fossils from the post-pleiocene of South Carolina before the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, remarked: “Dr. Klipstein, who resides near Charleston, in digging a ditch for the purpose of reclaiming a large swamp, discovered and sent to me the tooth of a mastodon, with the request that I should go down and visit the place, as there were indications of the bones and teeth of the animal still remaining in the sands which underlie the peat-bed. Accordingly, with a small party of gentlemen, we visited the doctor, and succeeded not only in obtaining several other teeth and bones of this animal, but nearly one entire tusk, and immediately alongside of the tusk discovered the fragment of pottery which I hold in my hand, and which is similar to that manufactured at the present time by the American Indians.”[[21]] It would not be wise to found hasty theories on such strange juxtaposition of relics, possibly of very widely separated periods. The Ashley River has channeled for itself a course through the eocene and post-pleiocene formations of South Carolina, and where these are exposed on its shores the fossils are washed from their beds, and become mingled with the remains of recent indigenous and domestic animals, and objects of human art. But the discovery of Dr. Klipstein was made in excavating an undisturbed and, geologically speaking, a comparatively recent formation. The tusk of the mastodon lay alongside of the fragment of pottery, in a deposit of the peat and sands of the post-pleiocene beds. Immediately underneath lie marine deposits, rich with varied groups of mollusca, corresponding to species now living on the sea-coast of Carolina, but also including two fossil species no longer to be met with there, though common in the Gulf of Mexico and the West Indian seas.
Here the palæontology of the New World discloses to us types of a fauna pertaining to its latest transitional period, which serve to illustrate the marvellous contrast between its commencement and its close. Until the discovery of teeth of the megatherium in the post-pleiocene bed of the Ashley River, remains of that extinct mammal had been found only in the state of Georgia, in North America, while the Mastodon Ohioticus and Elephas primigenius are among the well-known fauna of the Canadian drift. Of those, some North American localities have furnished remains in remarkable profusion, but none more so than the celebrated morass in Kentucky, known by its homely but expressive name of the Big-bone Lick. Imbedded in the blue clay of this ancient bog, entire skeletons, or detached bones, of not less than one hundred mastodons and twenty mammoths, have been found, besides remains of the megalonyx and other extinct quadrupeds. A magnificent skeleton of the Mastodon Ohioticus, now in the British Museum, was discovered, with teeth and bones of many others, near the banks of La Pomme de Terre, a tributary of the Osage River, Missouri; and there once more we seem to come upon contemporaneous traces of man. “The bones,” says Mantell, who examined them in the presence of Mr. Albert Koch, their discoverer, “were imbedded in a brown sandy deposit full of vegetable matter, with recognisable remains of the cypress, tropical cane, and swamp-moss, stems of the palmetto, etc., and this was covered by beds of blue clay and gravel to a thickness of about 15 feet. Mr. Koch states, and he personally assured me of the correctness of the statement, that an Indian flint arrow-head was found beneath the leg-bones of this skeleton, and four similar weapons were imbedded in the same stratum.”[[22]] Some of the deductions of Mr. Koch were extravagant, and tended to bring discredit on his statement. But there appear to be no just grounds for doubting the main facts. A full-sized view of the large arrow-head is given in the Smithsonian Report of 1872. Another, but more dubious account, preserved in the American Journal of Science, describes the discovery in Missouri of the bones of a mammoth, with considerable portions of the skin, associated with stone spear-heads, axes, and knives, under circumstances which suggest the idea that it had been entangled in a bog, and there stoned to death and partially consumed by fire.[[23]] Such contiguity of the works of man with those extinct mammals warns us at least to be on our guard against any supercilious rejection of indications of his ancient presence in the New World as well as in the Old.
Whether or not the mammoth and mastodon had been contemporary with man, their remains were objects of sufficiently striking magnitude to awaken the curiosity even of the unimpressible Indian; and traditions were common among the aborigines relative to their existence and destruction. M. Fabri, a French officer, informed Buffon that they ascribed those bones to an animal which they named the Père aux Bœufs. Among the Shawnees, and other southern tribes, the belief was current that the mastodon once occupied the continent along with a race of giants of corresponding proportions, and that both perished together by the thunderbolts of the Great Spirit. Another Indian tradition of Virginia told that these monstrous quadrupeds had assembled together, and were destroying the herds of deer and bisons, with the other animals created by the Great Spirit for the use of his red children, when he slew them all with his thunderbolts, excepting the big bull, who defiantly presented his enormous forehead to the bolts, and shook them off as they fell; until, being at length wounded, he fled to the region of the great lakes, where he is to this day.
The first notice in an English scientific journal of the fossil mammals of the American drift furnishes such a counterpart to the Shawnee traditions of extinct giants as might teach a lesson to modern speculators in science; when it is borne in remembrance that the difficulty now is to reconcile with preconceived beliefs the discovery of works of human art alongside of their remains. In 1712, certain gigantic bones, which would now most probably be referred to the mastodon, were found near Cluverack, in New England. The famous Dr. Increase Mather soon after communicated the discovery to the Royal Society of London; and an abstract in the Philosophical Transactions duly set forth his opinion of this supposed confirmation of the existence of men of prodigious stature in the antediluvian world, as proved by the bones and teeth, which he judged to be human, “particularly a tooth, which was a very large grinder, weighing four pounds and three-quarters, with a thigh bone seventeen feet long.”[[24]] They were doubtless looked upon with no little satisfaction by Dr. Mather, as a striking confirmation of the Mosaic record, that “there were giants in those days.” To have doubted the New England philosopher’s conclusions might have been even more dangerous then than to believe them now. Possibly, after the lapse of another century and a half, some of our own confused minglings of religious questions with scientific investigations will not seem less foolish than the antediluvian giants of the New England divine.