Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

CHAPTER II.
THE PRIMEVAL TRANSITION.

THE LATEST MIGRATIONS—FOUNDING A CAPITAL—BEGINNINGS OF HISTORY—PREHISTORIC PHASES—NON-METALLURGIC ERAS—OSCILLATIONS OF THE LAND—THE GLACIAL PERIOD—FOSSIL MAMMALIA—THE FLINT-FOLK OF THE DRIFT—ADVENT OF EUROPEAN MAN—THE DRIFT IMPLEMENTS—CHRONOLOGY OF THE FRENCH DRIFT—SCOTTISH ALLUVIUM—PRECELTIC RACES—THEIR IMITATIVE ARTS—MAN PRIMEVAL—HIS INTELLECTUAL CONDITION—INSTINCT—ACCUMULATED KNOWLEDGE—PRIMEVAL BRITAIN—ITS FOSSIL FAUNA—OSSIFEROUS CAVES—BRIXHAM CAVE—SCOTTISH REINDEER—AMERICAN DRIFT—RELICS OF ANCIENT LIFE—EXTINCT FAUNA—MAN AND THE MASTODON—INDIAN TRADITIONS—GIANTS—DRIFT DISCLOSURES—AMERICAN CRANIAL TYPE—ANTIQUITY OF THE AMERICAN MAN—PRIMITIVE ARTS.

The striking contrasts which the New World presents, in nearly every respect, to the Old, are full of significance in relation to the origin of civilisation, and its influence on the progress of man. Viewed merely as the latest scene of migration of European races on a great scale, America has much to disclose in illustration of primitive history. There we see the land cleared of its virgin forest, the soil prepared for its first tillage, the site of the future city chosen, and the birth of the world’s historic capitals epitomised in those of the youngest American commonwealths. Taking our stand on one of the newest of these civic sites, let us trace the brief history of the political and commercial capital of Upper Canada.

Built along the margin of a bay, enclosed by a peninsular spit of land running out from the north shore of Lake Ontario, the city of Toronto rests on a drift formation of sand and clay, only disturbed in its nearly level uniformity by the rain-gullies and ravines which mark the courses of the rivulets that drain its surface. This the original projectors of the city mapped off into parallelograms, by streets uniformly intersecting each other at right angles; and in carrying out their plan, every ravine and undulation is smoothed and levelled, as with the indiscriminating precision of the mower’s scythe. The country rises to the north for about twenty miles, by a gradual slope to the water-shed between Ontario and Lake Simcoe, and then descends to the level of the northern lake and the old hunting-grounds of the Hurons. It is a nearly unvarying expanse of partially cleared forest: a blank, with its Indian traditions effaced, its colonial traditions uncreated. The cities of the old world have their mythic founders and quaint legends still commemorated in heraldic blazonry. But there is no mystery about the beginnings of Toronto. Upper Canada was erected into a distinct province in 1791, only eight years after France finally renounced all claim on the province of Quebec; and a few months thereafter General Simcoe, the first governor of the new province, arrived at the old French fort, at the mouth of the Niagara river, and in May 1793 selected the Bay of Toronto as the site of the future capital. The chosen spot presented a dreary aspect of swamp and uncleared pine forest; but amid these his sagacious eye saw in anticipation the city rise, which already numbers upwards of 60,000 inhabitants; and rejecting the old Indian name, since restored, he gave to his embryo capital that of York. Colonel Bouchette, Surveyor-General of Lower Canada, was selected to lay out the projected city and harbour; and he thus describes the locality as it then existed: “I still distinctly recollect the untamed aspect which the country exhibited when first I entered the beautiful basin. Dense and trackless forests lined the margin of the lake, and reflected their inverted images in its glassy surface. The wandering savage had constructed his ephemeral habitation beneath their luxuriant foliage, the group then consisting of two families of Mississagas; and the bay and neighbouring marshes were the hitherto uninvaded haunts of immense coveys of wild-fowl; indeed, they were so abundant as in some measure to annoy us during the night.”[^[6]]

The vicissitudes attending the progress of the Canadian city have been minutely chronicled by local historians, who record how many dwellings of round logs, squared timber, or more ambitious frame-houses exceeding a single story, were in existence at various dates. The first vessel which belonged to the town, and turned its harbour to account; the first brick house, the earliest stone one; and even the first gig of an ambitious citizen, subsequent to 1812, are all duly chronicled. Could we learn with equal truthfulness of the first years of the city built by Romulus on the Palatine Hill, its annals would tell no less homely truths, even now dimly hinted at in the legend of the scornful Remus leaping over its infant ramparts. Tiber’s hill was once the site only of the solitary herdsman’s hut; and an old citizen has described to me his youthful recollections of Toronto as consisting of a few log-huts in the clearing, and an Indian village of birch-bark wigwams, near the Don, with a mere trail through the woods to the old French fort, on the line where now upwards of two miles of costly stores, hotels, and public buildings mark the principal street of the busy city.

M. Theodore Pavi describes Toronto, in his Souvenirs Atlantiques, published at Paris in 1833, as still in the woods, a mere advanced post of civilisation on the outskirts of a boundless waste. “To the houses succeed immediately the forests, and how profound must be those immense forests, when we reflect that they continue without interruption till they lose themselves in the icy regions of Hudson’s Bay near the Arctic Pole.” Upwards of forty years have since elapsed, and that for New-World cities is an æon. Every year has witnessed more rapid strides, alike in the progress of Toronto, and in the clearing and settling of the surrounding country. Railways have opened up new avenues of trade and commerce, and borne troops of sturdy pioneers into the wilderness behind. So rapid has been the clearing of the forest, and so great the rise in the price of labour, that fuel, brought from the distant coal-fields of Pennsylvania, already undersells the cord-wood hewn in Canadian forests; and even Newcastle coal warms many a luxurious winter hearth. All is rife with progress. The new past is despised; the old past is unheeded; and for antiquity there is neither reverence nor faith. These are beginnings of history; and are full of significance to those who have wrought out some of the curious problems of an ancient past, amid historic scenes contrasting in all respects with this unhistoric but vigorous youth of the New World. The contrast between the new and the old is here sufficiently striking. Yet the old also was once new; had even such beginnings as this; and was as devoid of history as the rawest clearing of the Far West.

There are other aspects also in which a New World, thus entering on its historic life, is calculated to throw light on the origin of civilisation. Though neither its forests nor its aborigines are primeval, they realise for us just such a primitive condition as that in which human history appears to begin. In all the most characteristic aspects of the Indian, as well as in the traces of native American metallurgy, architecture, letters, and science, we find reproduced the same phases through which man passed in oldest prehistoric times; and when, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we witness the mineral wealth of the Andes tempting European colonisation beyond the Atlantic, we only see the expeditions of new Argonauts; and realise incidents of the first voyage to the Cassiterides; or the planting of the infant colonies of Gadir, Massala, and Carthage by Phocian and Punic adventurers of the historic dawn. But the speculations of modern science carry us far beyond any dawn of definite history, even when research is directed to the evidence of man’s primitive arts, and the origin of his civilisation.

The investigation of the underlying chronicles of Europe’s most ancient human history has placed beyond question that its historic period was preceded by an unhistoric one of long duration, marked by a slow progression from arts of the rudest kind to others which involved the germs of all later development. From Europe, and the historic lands of Asia and Africa, we derive our ideas of man; and of the youngest of these continents, on which he has thus advanced from savage artlessness to the highest arts of civilisation, we have history, written or traditional, for at least two thousand years. But in the year 1492 a New World was discovered, peopled with its own millions, for the most part in no degree advanced beyond that primeval starting-point which lies far behind Europe’s oldest traditions. To have found there beings strange as the inhabitants of Swift’s Houyhnhnm’s Land, or the monsters conjured up in the philosophic day-dreams of Sir Humphry Davy for the peopling of other planets,[^[7]] would have seemed less wonderful to the men of that fifteenth century than what they did find: man in a state of savage infancy, with arts altogether rudimentary; language without letters, tradition without history, everything as it were but in its beginning, and yet himself looking back into a past even more vast and vague than their own. The significance of this state of things is worth inquiring into, if it be for nothing else than the light which the analogies of such a living present may throw on the infancy of Europe, and beyond that, on the primal infancy of the human race.

Recent discoveries of primitive art in the diluvial formations both of France and England have tended to add a fresh interest to the investigation of that “primeval stone-period” which underlies the most ancient memorials of Europe’s civilisation. The oldest of all written chronicles assigns a period of some duration in the history of the human race, during which man tilled the ground, pursued the chase, and made garments of its spoils, without any knowledge of the working in metals, on which the simplest of all known arts depend. Through such a primitive stage it had already appeared to me probable that all civilised nations had passed,[^[8]] before disclosures of a still older flint-period in the chroniclings of the drift added new significance to the term primeval, in its application to the non-metallurgic era of Europe’s arts.

The incredulity and even contempt with which the application of a system of archæological periods to the antiquities of Britain was received, in recent years, by a certain class of critics, was inevitable, from the exclusive attention previously devoted to Roman and medieval remains. But the attention of the antiquary, as well as the geologist, is now being directed to conclusions forced on both by the traces of man in the stratified gravel of post-pleiocene formations. The circumstances attending their repeated discovery place their remote antiquity beyond question. The difficulty indeed is to bring the phenomena illustrated by palæolithic relics of the quaternary period into any conceivable harmony with the limits of chronology as hitherto applied to man. The pre-Celtic architects of the British long-barrow, and the allophyliæ of the European stone age, are but men of yesterday in comparison with the Flint-Folk of the Drift. They belong to a lost Atlantis,—another continent, now in part at least buried beneath the ocean; and compared with which the Old World of history is as new as that found for it by Columbus.