In all that relates to the history of man in the New World, we have ever to reserve ourselves for further truths. There are languages of living tribes, of which we have neither vocabulary nor grammar. There are nations of whose physical aspect we scarcely know anything; and areas where it is a moot point even now, whether the ancient civilisation of central America may not be still a living thing. The ossiferous caves of England have only revealed their wonders during the present century, and the works of art in the French drift lay concealed till our own day. We cannot, therefore, even guess what America’s disclosures will be. Discoveries in its ossiferous caverns have already pointed to the same conclusions as those of Europe. A cabinet of the British Museum is filled with fossil bones of mammalia, obtained by Dr. Lund and M. Claussen from limestone caverns in the Brazils, closely resembling the ossiferous caves of Europe. The relics were imbedded in a reddish-coloured loam, covered over with a thick stalagmitic flooring; and along with them lay numerous bones of genera still inhabiting the continent, with shells of the large bulimus, a common terrestrial mollusc of South America.
No clear line of demarcation can be traced here between the era of the extinct carnivora and edentata, and those of existing species; and there is therefore no greater cause of wonder than in the analogous examples of Europe, to learn that in the same detritus of those Brazilian caves Dr. Lund found human skeletons, which he believed to be coeval with some of the extinct mammalia. Nor have the first disclosures of works of art in the American drift still to be made. I have in my possession an imperfect flint-knife (Fig. 1), to all appearance as unquestionable a relic of human art as the most symmetrical of those assigned to a similar origin by the explorers of the French and English drift-gravels. It was given to me by Mr. P. A. Scott, an intelligent Canadian, who found it at a depth of upwards of fourteen feet, among the rolled gravel and gold-bearing quartz of the Grinell Leads, in Kansas Territory, while engaged in digging for gold. In an alluvial bottom, in the Blue Range of the Rocky Mountains, distant several hundred feet from a small stream called Clear Creek, a shaft was sunk, passing through four feet of rich black soil, and below this, through upwards of ten feet of gravel, reddish clay, and rounded quartz. Here the flint implement was found, and its unmistakably artificial origin so impressed the finder, that he secured it, and carefully noted the depth at which it lay.
Fig. 1.—Flint-Knife, Grinell Leads.
It is difficult at present to test such chance evidence accurately. The discovery of the palæolithic implements of Europe had been recorded upwards of half a century before their true significance was recognised; whereas the American explorer is on the look-out for similar disclosures, and evinces at times a feeling as though the honour of his country is imperilled if he fail. It will be seen, moreover, from the narrative of a subsequent chapter, that the abundance of flint and stone implements in the virgin soil of the New World is almost marvellous. The discovery, therefore, of stray specimens in modern river-gravels, the washings of gold-drift, or in any excavations liable to be affected by surface admixtures, must be viewed with the utmost caution. Several flint implements from the auriferous gravel of California were produced at the Paris Exposition of 1855. According to the geological survey of Illinois, for 1866, the bones of the mastodon and other fossil mammals have been found in a bed of “local drift” near Alton, underlying the Loess; and at the same depth stone axes and flint spear-heads were obtained.[[25]]
But such disclosures of worked flints or polished implements of stone are cast into the shade by the reputed discovery of human remains in the auriferous drift of California. In 1857 Dr. C. F. Winslow produced a fragment of a human skull found eighteen feet below the surface, in the “pay drift,” at Table Mountain, in connection with the bones of the mastodon and fossil elephant. A later disclosure brought to light a complete human skull, reported to have been discovered in auriferous gravel, underlying five successive lava formations. Professor Whitney, after satisfying himself of the genuineness of the discovery, produced the skull at the Chicago meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1869, to the manifest delight of some who were prepared at once to relegate American man to a remoter epoch than the Flint-folk of the Abbeville and Amiens gravel drift. More recently a highly polished plummet of syenite, in the form of a double cone perforated at one end, was produced before the Chicago Academy of Sciences, as an implement found at a depth of thirty feet, in the drift-gravel of San Joaquin, California, by some workmen engaged in digging a well. In this case also Professor Whitney appears to have had no hesitation in assigning it to the age of the fossil elephant and mastodon. It does not seem to have been recognised how much more probable it is that a highly finished stone implement like the San Joaquin plummet should fall from the surface, in the process of excavation, and so be perhaps no older than the era of the Mexican conquest, than that it is a choice specimen of post-pleiocene art.
Much of the evidence hitherto adduced for the antiquity of the American man has a singularly modern aspect. The human skulls are of the predominant Indian type of the present day, though that need not surprise us. Dr. Usher only notes this in the case of the “human fossils” from the Brazil Caves, to add: “this consideration may spare science the trouble of any further speculation on the modus through which the New World became peopled from the Old; for after carrying backwards the existence of a people monumentally into the very night of time, when we find that they have also preserved the same type back to a remote, even to a geological, period, there can be no necessity for going abroad to seek their origin.”[[26]] The question of this fancied American type will come under review hereafter. But on a par with this evidence are fragments of baskets and clay vessels submitted to the New Orleans Academy of Sciences in 1867, as contemporary with the elephant and other fossil mammals, the bones of which were found in digging the same salt-pits in which the pottery and basket-work were met with; or a fragment of cane-matting presented to the Smithsonian Institution in 1866 by Mr. J. F. Cleu, along with portions of tusks and teeth of the fossil elephant which lay above it, at a depth of thirteen feet in a Louisiana salt mine. Matting, or basket-work, of split cane is as common among the contents of southern Indian graves as fragments of pottery; and both may be reasonably suspected to carry with them evidence inconsistent with any geological antiquity.
Fig. 2.—Lewiston Flint Implement. (5/7).
Mr. Charles C. Jones notes a discovery of a more suggestive character, due also to the search for gold. In the state of Georgia the river Chattahoochee flows through an auriferous region of the Nacoochee valley. From time to time the gold-diggers have made extensive cuttings through the soil and underlying drift-gravel, down to the slate-rock upon which it rests. During one of these excavations, at a depth of some nine feet, intermingled with the gravel and boulders of the drift, three large flint implements were found, measuring between three and four inches in length, and “in material, manner of construction, and appearance so nearly resembling some of the rough so-called flint hatchets belonging to the drift-type that they might very readily be mistaken the one for the others.”[[27]] With those may not unfitly be classed a large implement of hornstone, now in the collection of the Scottish Antiquaries, obtained by me from a dealer in Indian curiosities at Lewiston in the State of New York, where it was said to have been found at a great depth when sinking a well. Its form, though common enough among the implements of the American Mound-Builders, rarely, if ever, occurs on so large a scale in Europe, except among palæolithic remains. Ovoid discs of the same class attracted the attention of the Rev. J. MacEnery in his early explorations of Kent’s Cavern, and have anew been brought to light in the recent systematic researches there. Mr. Evans figures one found there in 1866 (Fig. 3), somewhat smaller, and more ovoid in outline, but of the same type. The Lewiston implement is shown in Fig. 2. It has been reduced to the present shape by comparatively few strokes; and on the reverse side it appears as if broken off by a final ill-directed blow. One edge is worn and fractured as if by frequent use. Unfortunately more minute information of the locality and the circumstances attendant on its discovery could not be obtained. But even if it be regarded as only a stray relic of the same class as those hereafter described among the ancient mound deposits of Wisconsin and Ohio, it possesses a novel interest from its discovery near the banks of the Niagara River, where no traces of the Mound-Builders or their arts occur. Mr. Evans permits me to introduce here the analogous example from Kent’s Cavern. It is of grey cherty flint, and chipped on both faces with more than wonted care. Though smaller than the Lewiston implement, the difference is only about half an inch; the larger of the two being a little over five inches long. I have purposely engraved the Lewiston disc on a large scale, in order to suggest more clearly the proportions of this class of implements; and to show the close analogy traceable between those of the American continent, and the European disclosures of the river and cave drift.