| [67] | Conquest of Peru, vol. i. B. i. ch. ii. |
CHAPTER VII.
TOOLS.
MAN THE ARTIFICER—THE LAW OF REASON—INDIGENOUS RACES—MAN’S CAPACITY FOR DETERIORATION—WHAT IS A STONE-PERIOD?—MATERIALS OF PRIMITIVE ART—SUCCESSION OF RACES—INDICATIONS OF ANCIENT TRADE—THE SHOSHONE INDIAN—TEXAS IMPLEMENTS—MODES OF HAFTING—DEER’S-HORN SOCKETS—STONE KNIVES—THLINKETS OF ALASKA—METALS OF A STONE PERIOD—ARTS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC—MALAYAN INFLUENCE—FIJIAN CONSTRUCTIVE SKILL—FIJIAN POTTERY—SLOW MATURITY OF RACES—THE FLINT-EDGED SWORD—THE LEAGUE OF THE FIVE NATIONS—IROQUOIS PREDOMINANCE—WORK IN OBSIDIAN AND FLINT—HONDURAS FLINT IMPLEMENTS—SOURCES OF THE MATERIAL—COLLISION OF RACES—FATE OF INFERIOR RACES.
As the type of oceanic migration, the canoe claims a prominent place among the primitive arts of man. In it we see the germs of commerce, maritime enterprise, and much else that is indispensable to any progress in civilisation. But the primitive ship implies the existence of tools; and, as we have seen, probably owed its earliest fashioning to the useful service of fire. Intelligent design was working out the purposes of reason by processes which, even in their most rudimentary stage, reveal the characteristics of a new order of life, compared with which the tool-born ant, the spider, and the bee, seem but as ingenious self-acting machines, each made to execute perfectly its one little item in the comprehensive plan of creation.
As industrial artificers, the creatures so far beneath us in the scale of organisation seem often to put to shame our most perfect workmanship; yet provided with no other instruments than the eye and the hand, but guided by that intelligent reason which distinguishes man from the brutes, we see him, even as an artificer, presenting characteristics which are altogether wanting in the lower animals. Labour is for them no sternly imposed necessity, but an inevitable process, having only one possible form of manifestation; producing in its exercise the highest enjoyment the labourer is capable of; and in its results leading our thoughts from the wise, unerring, yet untaught worker, to Him whose work it is, and of whose wisdom and skill the workmanship, not less than the workman, appears a direct manifestation. It is not so with man. The capacity of the workman is a divine gift, but the work is his own, and too often betrays, in some of its most ingenious devices and results, anything rather than a divine origin.
If ours be not the latest stage of being, but is to be succeeded by “new heavens and a new earth,” marvellous indeed are the revelations which posthistoric strata have yet to disclose. But even they will scarcely suffice to reveal the most striking characteristics of a being on whom the economy of nature reacts in a way it never did on living being before; in whom all external influences are subordinated to an inner world of thought, by means of which he is capable of searching into the past, anticipating the future, of looking inward, and being a law unto himself. His nature embraces possibilities of the widest conceivable diversity, for his is no longer the law of instinct, but of reason: law, therefore, that brings with it conscious liberty, and also conscious responsibility.
But an important and seemingly conflicting element arises out of the capacity of man for moral progression, to which some ethnologists fail to give due weight. A suggestive thought of Agassiz, relative to certain real or supposed analogies between the geographical distribution of species of simiæ, and especially the anthropoid apes, and certain inferior types of man, sufficed as the nucleus of Gliddon’s elaborate monkey-chart, in the Indigenous Races of the Earth, illustrative of the geographical distribution of monkeys in relation to that of certain types of men. Notwithstanding the very monkeyfying process to which some of the illustrations of inferior human types have been subjected in this pictorial chorography, the correspondences are not such as to carry conviction to most minds. But, assuming, as a supposed reductio ad absurdum, the descent of all the diverse species of monkeys from a single pair, Mr. Gliddon thus sums up his final observations: “I propose, therefore, that a male and female pair of the ‘species’ Cynocephalus Hamadryas, be henceforward recognised as the anthropoid analogues of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet; and that it must be from these two individuals that, owing to transplantation, together with the combined action of aliment and climate, the fifty-four monkeys represented on our chart have originated. It is, notwithstanding, sufficiently strange, that, under such circumstances, this ‘primordial organic type’ of monkey should have so highly improved in Guinea, and in Malayana, as to become gorillas and chimpanzees, orangs and gibbons; whereas on the contrary, the descendants of ‘Adam and Eve’ have, in the same localities, actually deteriorated into the most degraded and abject forms of humanity.” In reality, however, whatever may be said about the possibility of such simian development, possible human deterioration is an inevitable attribute of the rational, moral free-agent man: capable of the noblest aspirations and of wondrous intellectual advancement, but also with a capacity for moral degradation such as belongs to him alone. The one characteristic, no less than the other, separates man from all those other living creatures that might appear in some respects gifted with endowments akin to his own.
Man, as a tool-using artificer, seems to have a rival in the beaver, felling its timber, carrying its clay, and building its dam; in the spider weaving its web, more perfect than any net of human fisher; and even in the squirrel with its provident hoard of well-secured winter store, or the monkey employing the cocoa-nut and other shell-fruit as missiles. But in such artificial appliances there is nothing obsolete, nothing inventive, nothing progressive; whereas the child born amid the most highly developed civilisation,—the son of a Watt, a Stephenson, a Brunel,—if reared from infancy to manhood without any knowledge of mechanical science or the industrial arts, would start anew from the rudimentary instincts of the tool-using animal, and expend his ingenuity, not perhaps without some traces of hereditary mechanical genius, on the primitive materials of flint, stone, horn, or shell.
Man depends for all on his teachers; and when moral and intellectual deterioration return him to the toolless condition of the uncivilised nomad, he is thrown back on the resources of his infantile reason and primary instincts, and reaches that point from which the primeval colonist has had to start anew in all lands, and work his way upwards, through stone, and bronze, and iron periods, into the full co-operation of a civilised community, treasuring the experience of the past, and making for itself a new and higher future.
The subdivisions of the archæologist designated The Stone Period, The Bronze Period, and The Iron Period, have been brought into some discredit, in part by what, as a general system, must be regarded only as a hypothesis, being assumed as involving facts of no less indisputable and universal application than the periods of the geologist. In part, also, their non-acceptance is due to wilful errors of their impugners; and to the want of appreciation of the inevitable characteristics which pertain to transitional periods, such as chiefly come under the European archæologist’s observation. So far as the American Indian is concerned, the New World is in the first transitional stage still: that of a stone-period, very partially affected by the introduction of foreign-wrought weapons and implements; and scarcely indicating, among the numerous tribes of North America, any traces of the adoption of a superinduced native metallurgy. Such therefore appears to be a condition of things, the comparison of which with traces of a corresponding stage in the early ages of Britain, may be of use in clearing the subject from much confusion.