CHAPTER X.
CONCLUSION.
In the two previous chapters, as well as in that devoted to medieval ecclesiology, some of the later exemplars of Scottish arts and civilisation have been glanced at, coeval with many authentic historical documents, to which the researches of the antiquary can only add supplementary illustrations. These, however, though legitimately included in the compass of archæological investigations, do not strictly come within the plan of this work, except in so far as they suffice to illustrate the remarkable contrast, both in character and historical value, of the antiquities of the Primitive and Medieval Periods. Viewing Archæology as one of the most essential means for the elucidation of primitive history, it has been employed here chiefly in an attempt to trace out the annals of our country prior to that comparatively recent medieval period at which the boldest of our historians have heretofore ventured to begin. The researches of the ethnologist carry us back somewhat beyond that epoch, and confirm many of those conclusions, especially in relation to the close affinity between the native arts and Celtic races of Scotland and Ireland, at which we have arrived by means of archæological evidence. Of the six Celtic dialects known, either as living languages or preserved in books, the Irish and the Scottish Gaelic most nearly approximate, the former being to a great extent only a cultivated and more artificial modification of the other. The Manx dialect, though belonging to the same subdivision, differs much more considerably from both, representing, it may be assumed, the northern Celtic tongue prior to the intrusion of the Scoti into Ireland, or their later colonization of Dalriada. Again, the three several dialects of the Celtic idiom of the ancient Britons, the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Armorican, differ essentially from all these; thus clearly indicating the early separation which took place between the Southern Celtic Britons and the Picts, and the modification of the peculiar characteristics of the latter by local influences in which the former bore no share. In all these respects the conclusions of the ethnologist receive not only confirmation but much minute elucidation from archæological research. But we have found from many independent sources of evidence, that the primeval history of Britain must be sought for in the annals of older races than the Celtæ, and in the remains of a people of whom we have as yet no reason to believe that any philological traces are discoverable, though they probably do exist mingled with later dialects, and especially in the topographical nomenclature, adopted and modified, but in all likelihood not entirely superseded by later colonists. With the earliest intelligible indices of that primeval colonisation of the British Isles our archæological records begin, mingling their dim historic annals with the last giant traces of elder worlds; and, as an essentially independent element of historical research, they terminate at the point where the isolation of Scotland ceases by its being embraced into the unity of medieval Christendom.
The subdivision of historic periods here indicated is by no means peculiar to Scotland. The isolation of the elder nations was universal prior to the diffusion of Christianity. Egypt, Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre, Judea, Greece, Carthage, and even Rome, each stood solitary amid its vastest conquests. It was reserved for the Popedom—that great fact of medieval history—to create a unity by means of which the isolation of the nations came to an end without the sacrifice of their individuality. But that also was no final stage in the world's history; and though the shadow of Papal supremacy still lingers as a medieval relic which has outlived its use, time has developed nobler elements of unity, in harmony with the true spirit of modern nationality. In nothing is the practical character of modern scientific discovery and mechanical skill—the steam-engine, the railway, the electric telegraph—more apparent than in its antagonism to this antiquated isolation of the nations. Between the modern and the primeval periods, the medieval era interposes as the long stage of transition in which the transforming influences of the new faith were changing the whole social fabric, and moulding it into higher forms. But as these things of the past have made way for the time which is, so too must it give place, as a transition time and the precursor of a still brighter future. The world itself is a transition stage, and all sublunary things are but the preparatives for a mightier futurity. Viewed as a part of the great cosmical history of which geology has recovered so many chapters, the labours of the archæologist seem to add but a few stray leaves. The strata of the earth's crust, deep as we can penetrate, or lofty as we may climb, are filled with the evidences of the organic life of preadamite orders of being; but it is only in the latest diluvial superficies that we detect those traces of our own race, which thus so unmistakably announce that man is but of yesterday. If, however, the isolated individuality of the elder nations of the world's history confers on each of them an interest which we seek for in vain in those of the medieval era of transition, man also has a peculiar individuality which gives a value to the most perishable relics he casts behind him in his brief lifetime. To the geologist one perfect example is a certain type of its species, and hence a complete geological collection is a conceivable thing; but it is not so with the labours of the archæologist. He aims at recovering a clue to the esoteric no less than to the exoteric indices of past generations, and sees in each varied relic the product of human thought, invention, and intelligent design. Each human being of all the past ages, born into time as an immortal being, had a personality and a destiny which give to whatever traces may he recoverable of him an interest for all time. Minutest variations may be the fruits and evidence of a mental labour never repeated, and each device of fancy or caprice may contain a clue to the character of the individual mind,—a reflex, as it were, of the individuality, of the psychical physiognomy of its originator. If we except, indeed, the treasures of the numismatist,—which are, strictly speaking, a branch of written history,—there are no true duplicates in the collection of the archæologist. His researches are conducted in a boundless field, since their novelty is as inexhaustible as the phases of human thought. Nor can the archæologist forget, while thus reviewing his own study as a branch of human knowledge, and seeking for it its just place among the Sciences, that he is little likely to overestimate the dignity of a pursuit which embraces within its aim the primal history of man.
The geologist, devoutly scanning the records of earlier Creation, traces onward the development of higher organizations, not as an embryonic life, passing by some innate or self-generated law of vitality from the fœtal and immature to more perfect and higher states of being, but as successive ideas of the Divine Creator thought out into a recorded actuality; while each, by its embryonic organization, or by its manifestations of the lower nature of a preliminary and imperfect dispensation, reveals the mind of the Creator, and purposely foreshadows the "better things to come." Literal types are these, but shadows also pointing onward from the first days in that uterine week of Creation when the Spirit of God moved on the face of the deep, and the formless and the void became instinct with successive orders of being, until at length man was made in the Divine image, and God rested from his work. Into the original moral condition of that most perfect fruit of Creation thus born in the fulness of time, it is not our province here to enter. Archæology, in a peculiar sense, deals with man mortal, not immortal—with man not as he was made at first, "upright," but as the seeker out of "many inventions;" and as such he too appears to us, like the elder offspring of Creation, in an embryonic state, from which we follow him upward step by step until we recognise in the present an harvest of all the past. The Archaic Period presents, indeed, as one of its most peculiar characteristics, the abundance of native gold, but the true GOLDEN AGE OF MAN lies before him, not behind. Some nations do appear from the very dawn of history possessed of a singularly developed civilisation. Such, however, was indispensable to the existence of any history not purely mythic or archæological; while in the very oldest of these we discover also the traces of a still earlier embryonic period through which they have passed.
A general system of Archæology remains as yet a desideratum. Egypt stands alone in its strange old civilisation, as if, Minerva-like, it had sprung forth at once a maiden nation, endowed with arts, polity, and an organized social system; but even its unwritten history, we have seen, retains the traces of an ante-historic Stone Period—a childhood in common with the world's younger commonwealths. Heretofore, however, the infancy of nations has been, for the most part, contentedly left in the wrappages of their first swaddling myths. Of Asia our knowledge of its primitive archæology is only by means of the merest fragmentary and isolated data, which can piece into no coherent system. India and China reveal much that illustrates the maturity of an elder and superseded period, but nothing as yet that takes hold of the beginnings of things. Nineveh and Babylon have recently yielded up strange and most interesting records of the past; but the more minutely we investigate these, the less reason we find for imagining that they pertain to the infancy of Asiatic nations. The primeval archæology of Asia remains yet to be explored. It must not be sought for among the deserted scenes of barbaric pomp and oriental magnificence, on the banks of the Tigris or the Euphrates, but in the northern steppes, and on the less hospitable heights, and the outlying valleys which skirt the seats of elder empire. There truths of the deepest importance in relation to the history of man still lie recorded in undeciphered annals. There only can we hope to find the types which have been repeated, with endless variations, by the later wanderers, not only into Europe, but throughout the diverse regions of the New World. When this branch of knowledge has been thoroughly explored, we shall possess a new argument for the unity of the human race, not less conclusive than any which the ingenious learning of the philologist has supplied. Of another chapter in the progress of man, bearing more directly on the elucidation of the antehistorical period of Europe, that of the north-western migration from central Asia, a comprehensive general system of archæology has yet much to reveal. We owe to the Asiatic researches of Humboldt a clear understanding of the systems of mountain chains, both of Europe and Asia, which have exercised so important an influence on the distribution of the entire Fauna of the two continents. A remarkable simplicity of structure is discernible in the arrangement of the continuous lines of greatest elevation, which strikingly coincides with the traces we can recover of the route pursued by the successive nomadic waves of population which have passed from Asia to Europe. These chains of abrupt elevation, which appear to have served as natural tracts, within the defined limitations of which the nomade races were urged onward by as natural a law as the river is borne seaward in its channel, are composed of four great systems of mountains, almost uniformly directed from west to east, and parallel with the greatest length of the continent. These are the Altai, the Thianshan, the Kuenlun, and the Himalaya. A glance at the map of Asia, and especially at the admirable physical charts prepared by Mr. Alexander Keith Johnston, shews with singular precision the courses of continuous migration, the localities where mountain barriers arrested for a time some portion of the migrating nomades, as in the eddies of a stream, and the vast yet isolated steppes in which they may be assumed to have settled down for ages, and become the centres of later migratory offshoots, tending ever to the north-east. Tracing again the influence of the geographical features of the old world at the imaginary line of separation between Europe and Asia, we discern the physical causes of known historical facts. We see the inevitable course of the old patriarchal tribes, from the table-land of Iran, and the great Asiatic peninsulas beyond, directly to Asia Minor and the narrow Straits of the Dardanelles, while the table-land of Syria and Arabia is shut in to the western shores of Palestine, the seat of Tyre and of Judea. Northward of this the Caspian Sea seems placed as it were to exclude the wanderers for a time from their final settlements. South of it a narrow shore appears to be the appointed channel by which one early stream passed along the continuous line of the Kuenlun chain to the base of the Caucasus, and from thence reached the ancient scenes of Pelasgian colonization. But it is by the wider gorge, to the north of the Caspian Sea, that the great nomadic tide must have flowed, while we see there the Ural chain stretching southward to limit the European portal of colonization, and to arrest and detain the wanderers who pursued a more northerly course. Herein, therefore, may be discovered the geographical elements in which important ethnological distinctions have had their rise, while at the same time the archæologist discovers in it an additional motive for pursuing his researches into the primitive antiquities of the great northern Asiatic steppes, where the true key to the sources of European primeval archæology, we cannot doubt, is yet to be found.
Of this comprehensive system of antehistorical research the Archæology of Scotland forms the merest fractional item. It is indispensable, however, for the integrity of the whole; and as I believe that it is not at Babylon or Nimrud, but in the northern steppes of Asia, that the primeval history of the elder continent must be sought, so also it is not in the annals of Greece or Rome, or in the antiquities of the adjacent kingdoms, modified by their arts and arms, but in Ireland, Scotland, and the Scandinavian countries, that we may hope to recover the unadulterated first chapters of European history. The precise conclusions to which we have been led, in relation to Scottish Archæology, are such as amply accord with this idea. The Celtæ, we have seen reason to believe, are by no means to be regarded as the primal heirs of the land, but are on the contrary comparatively recent intruders. Ages before their migration into Europe, an unknown Allophylian race had wandered to this remote island of the sea, and that in its turn gave place to later Allophylian nomades, also destined to occupy it only for a time. Of these antehistorical nations Archæology alone reveals any traces. Hitherto both the historian and the ethnologist have ascribed their remains to the later Celtæ, the first historical race of Northern Europe, introducing thereby confusion and cumulative error into all reasoning on their data. These elements of history can only be rectified and properly adjusted when the primitive archæology of the various countries of Europe has been sifted and treated in detail, and when each subdivision has been traced to its origin, and most probably to its Asiatic source. We need not doubt that an abundant phalanx of workers will ere long be found enlisted in this interesting field of research. The mere gathering of curious rarities commanded but a limited sympathy, while their possession was the sole end to be attained, and the gratification of an impassive acquisitiveness superseded the search for truth. The fossil encrinite or the "witch bead"[717] was equally singular and valueless, so long as it was merely an incomprehensible lusus naturæ. But when it came to be recognised as the index to the history of a whole genus of radiated polyps, both recent and fossil, it was taken from the novelties of the curiosity-hunter, and permanently classified among the illustrations of natural science. It were easy to shew why it is that we have been slower in turning to account the no less manifest illustrations of the history of the Bimana, first order in the class of mammals. Some of the sources of this tardy recognition of their value have already been glanced at; but it is sufficient that we are now learning to discover their true use, and are at length aiming at the recovery of a just view of man as a rational and immortal creature, by means of the perishable trappings which he throws off behind him, in his passage across this probationary stage of being. We are all conscious of passionate longings after a knowledge of the past, no less than of an instinctive desire to search into the future. Man "looks before and after," he feels himself no isolated being, but one link in a vast chain, the ends of which stretch away immeasurably into the past and the future; and while he discovers in the preadamite periods of creation a preparatory dispensation, he recognises in his own period a more perfect one, not because he conceives it to be final, but because he knows it to be probationary, and the preliminary to that which is perfect. Thus, by thoughts in which the antiquary dwells on the yet undeveloped designs of the Ancient of Days, does he perceive a new dignity and sacredness in pursuits which not the ignorant only have heretofore deemed puerile and worthless, recognising in them the means of recovering lost links in that chain by which such mighty truths depend. He looks upon the shadowy past by the clearer light of the future; and while the revelation of "life and immortality" adds a new force to his convictions of the unity which pervades creation, and is manifested in Providence, it also stimulates with a more lively energy his desire to lay hold upon "the evidence of things not seen."
FOOTNOTES:
[717] Witch beads, Fairy beads, St. Cuthbert's beads, are all names by which the Entrochi, or joints which compose the stem of the Encrinite or Stone Lily, are popularly known in various districts of Scotland and the north of England.