PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE
No. DLXXI. MAY 1863. Vol. XCIII.
WILSON’S PREHISTORIC MAN.[[1]]
The title of ‘Prehistoric Man’ in Mr Wilson’s book applies not only to those races who lived and expired before any history whatever was written, but to all races, even those who are contemporary with us, who are incapable of delivering a history of themselves to other nations or their own posterity. They are rather the un-historic, the speechless people—speechless so far as their posterity is concerned, on whom his inquiries are directed. In fact, that portion of the development of mankind which pertains to savage life, or to the very earliest stages of civilisation, is the subject of Mr Wilson’s book. The subject is far from being new, but far from being exhausted; and our author’s archæological knowledge has enabled him to invest it with a novel interest. His position is somewhat singular in its advantages. A European archæologist and antiquarian, he finds himself in that new world where forms of human life are still lingering akin to those which he has been hitherto studying by the light only of such remains as have been preserved for ages buried in the earth. His stone, his bronze, his iron periods are all found living about him. The flint weapon dug up in London or Glasgow from the lowest strata of human remains, has, in this new world, hardly fallen from the hand of the native. The men of the stone period are still alive, though half a century more may see them either absorbed in the more civilised races, or altogether extinguished.
This combination of the knowledge of the antiquarian with the observations of the traveller has a singular charm for us: but there is another combination which is still more attractive; it is where the philosophical historian, familiar with the myths of antiquity, traces in the living barbarians around him the same play of fancy, or the same curious development of thought, that he has been accustomed to study in the obscure records of a dead language. Mr Wilson is an historian as well as an archæologist, and is in both capacities an enlightened student of such living antiquity as may still exist in that continent, where the earliest and the latest forms of civilisation were destined to meet and to recognise each other.
Our author might, we think, have put his materials together in a more compact form, and arranged them more carefully. The headings of the several chapters lead us to expect a more definite arrangement than we find in the book itself: and this must be partly our excuse if our own observations should seem to be of a miscellaneous character. It must be confessed, also, that there is sometimes a want of precision and accuracy of language on just those occasions where precision is most needed, and that this is not compensated by a rather too lavish display of a florid species of eloquence, better fitted for the lecture-room than the written composition. It is good of its kind, but there is too much of it. We presume that a large portion of the book was written originally for the lecture-room. But notwithstanding these minor defects, we confidently recommend these volumes as replete with information on a variety of interesting topics, and suggestive of many trains of reflection. They will assuredly repay an attentive perusal.
Mr Wilson commences with a glance at that problem of the “antiquity of man” which Sir Charles Lyell has still more lately and more fully treated. Perhaps, if he had written after the publication of Sir Charles Lyell’s work, he would have expressed himself with more distinctness on the subject; yet he seems substantially to have arrived at whatever safe conclusions the evidence hitherto collected enables us to rest in. He has said all that can really be said at present on the matter. He observes that “the closing epoch of geology must be turned to for the initial chapters of archæology and ethnology.” It is plain that man could not make his appearance upon the earth till the earth was fitted for his habitation; and it is a reasonable conjecture that it would not long be so prepared for him before, in some part of the world, he made his appearance. Mr Wilson is not disposed to be incredulous as “to the traces of fossil human bones mingling with those of the extinct mammals of the drift;” but we gather from his work that he would be slow to rest his belief on the great antiquity of man solely on the discovery of such flint implements as have been dug out of the valley of the Somme and elsewhere. We think that, notwithstanding the confidence of certain experts who have pronounced that these flints have received their form from the hand of man, there is a well-founded suspicion that, after all, they may have been broken into their present shape by natural or physical forces. They are not ground to a point, it must be remembered, nor sharpened to an edge, only chipped into a wedge-like form. When we read of great numbers of these flints being discovered in a certain spot, and that a selection is made of such as seem to have been chipped by the hand of man, and that this selection is a matter of acknowledged difficulty, we may be excused for suspending our judgment as to the fact whether any one of them was ever the tool or implement of a human being. We may be excused if, in the present state of the evidence, we require that this testimony of the flints be confirmed by other testimony,—by the presence of human bones, or of indisputable works of human art in the same post-pliocene formation.[[2]] We do not presumptuously reject their evidence altogether; we do not take it upon ourselves to say that not one of the stones collected from the valley of the Somme has been fashioned by man; we have little trust in our own judgment upon such a matter; but it is not evidence which can stand alone. This Sir Charles Lyell admits himself, though in some passages of his work he seems to forget his own admission. But such antiquity as we can assign to man on other evidence—by the discovery in certain positions of human remains or indisputable relics of human art—is very great, and sufficient for all the purposes of the ethnologist. The elaborate, and, to the geologist, highly interesting work of Sir Charles Lyell demands a separate and careful examination; we here merely content ourselves with remarking that the very great antiquity of man—that which would compel us to believe that he existed for some almost immeasurable period in the condition of the savage—rests hitherto on unsatisfactory grounds.
The ethnologist who believes, as Mr Wilson does, in the unity of the human race, requires a long period of time for the development of those varieties which had become permanent prior to the epoch of the building of the Egyptian Pyramids. Mr Wilson takes what he requires, but does not, as matters stand at present, contest for more. To those who, on the grounds of the sacred text, would dispute his right to even this modest inroad upon the illimitable Past, he answers,—that the chronology popularly supposed to be that of the Bible is in fact the chronology only of certain learned interpreters, and that there is nothing in the sacred text to exclude the supposition that a much longer interval may have passed than is generally supposed between the creation of Adam and, let us say, the appearance of Abraham. Interpreting the Noachian Deluge as partial—as not, in the literal sense of the term, universal—he finds scope enough within the limits of the sacred text for that slow and gradual development of civilised man which his archæology has taught him to believe in. Nor does he find any difficulty whatever in reconciling this slow progress from the savage to the civilised man with what is recorded of the creation of Adam, or the attributes of our first parents. Their superior excellence, he considers, consisted in their perfect morality, in the predominance of the benevolent affections, and in that reason which is one with self-knowledge: it could not have consisted, he argues, in knowledge of the arts and sciences; certainly not in the knowledge of arts quite needless in the warmth, abundance, and security of the garden of Paradise. When, therefore, their descendants, deprived of this high moral excellence, found themselves scattered abroad upon the earth, what could they, in fact, have become but ignorant savages? They would have to evolve from their own natural sagacity those arts of life which their new relation to the external world rendered necessary. They would have to commence that long and toilsome ascent to civilisation which the speculative historian has so often attempted to describe.