We feel persuaded that our author would be unwilling that, in any notice of his work, these explanations should be omitted, and therefore it is that we give them here so prominent a place. For ourselves, so confident are we that scientific truth and religious truth will be found in the end to be inextricably combined, and to be reciprocally sustaining each other, that we are not very solicitous to patch up hasty and perhaps needless reconciliations. At present we have to settle our science; when this is done, it will be time to ask ourselves what it is that needs reconcilement.
Although the archæologist can point with triumph to the evidence of successive tombs, or cromlechs, as proving the sequence of his three ages of stone and bronze and iron, he can nowhere carry us back to the first stone period, and from this to the first development of the bronze and the iron. He can show us that on a certain spot—say the soil on which London stands—there have been generations of men distinguished by the kind of tools they had framed for themselves. But it is the history of men on that spot which his materials enable him to write; they do not enable him to write the history of the progress of man from his earliest condition of existence. For the first men who lived on the banks of the Thames had come, we presume, from other countries; they had had a history, and were the products of some kind of human society before they settled there; and the generations that followed might have received their arts, as in one case we know they did, from foreign nations. It is, after all, therefore, from a priori speculation—from what we infer must have been the course of things—that we describe mankind as proceeding from the rudest modes of existence to the more civilised. The testimony which the archæologist appeals to confirms these speculations; it can do no more. It never brings us to the real history of human art. We have still to guess how men lived at first, whether on the fruits of the earth or by the chase; we have still to guess how men discovered the use of fire, how they elaborated mere vocal signs into a grammatical language; we have still to conjecture when or where the first canoe or the first house was built. We make this remark not to detract from the labours of the archæologist, but simply to put the subject on its right basis. We have nowhere that kind of evidence which takes us back to the first developments of the human intellect; the nature of these must still be matter of inference. We still argue, to a great extent, in a purely speculative manner; we conclude that a progress like that which history and historical monuments enable us to trace, was the kind of progress which the first families of the earth passed through; but we know nothing historically of that early progress.
In the old European or Asiatic continent we had been accustomed to regard the earliest generations of mankind as entirely lost in the mists of antiquity; but, till lately, we looked on the continent of America as being, in respect of its population, far more recent, and as affording a more simple subject for ethnological speculation. The civilisation of Mexico and Peru, destroyed by the Spaniards, was traced to Egypt, or to some other portion of the Old World. The vagrant tribes of savages that lived upon the chase were the still more degenerate children of Europe. But this new continent is now found to have been the habitation of man at so remote a period, that the civilisations of Mexico and Peru, however they originated (and they were probably native), must rank amongst its modern events. Ruins of more ancient cities are found buried in its forest, and monuments of some forgotten worship are traced upon the banks of its rivers. The remains of man himself—parts of the human skeleton—have been found in positions which suggest an antiquity far beyond that of the cities of the Nile or the Euphrates. Some of these cases are well known, and well known on account of the disputes and discussions they have given occasion to; others, from which (geologically speaking) only a modest antiquity has been inferred, seem to our author to be worthy of credit. He says:—
“In the post-pliocene formations of South Carolina, exposed along the bed of the Ashley River, remains of the megatherium, megalodon, and other gigantic extinct mammals, occur, not only associated with existing species peculiar to the American continent, but also apparently with others hitherto believed to have been domesticated and introduced for the first time by modern European colonists. But, still more interesting for our present purpose, as possibly indicating the contemporaneous existence of some of those strange extinct mammals with man, are notices of the remains of human art in the same formation. Professor Holmes, in exhibiting a collection of fossils from the post-pliocene of South Carolina before the Academy of Natural Science at Philadelphia, remarked:—‘Dr Klipstein, who resides near Charleston, in digging a ditch for the purpose of reclaiming a large swamp, discovered and sent to me the tooth of a mastodon, with the request that I should go down and visit the place, as there were indications of the bones and teeth of the animal still remaining in the sands which underlie the peat-bed. Accordingly, with a small party of gentlemen, we visited the doctor, and succeeded not only in obtaining several other teeth and bones of this animal, but nearly one entire tusk; and immediately alongside of the tusk discovered the fragment of pottery which I hold in my hand, and which is similar to that manufactured at the present time by the American Indians.’
“It would not be wise,” continues Mr Wilson, “to found hasty theories on such strange juxtaposition of relics, possibly of very widely separated periods. The Ashley River has channeled for itself a course through the eocene and post-pliocene formations of South Carolina, and where these are exposed on its shores the fossils are washed from their beds, and become mingled with the remains of recent indigenous and domestic animals, and objects of human art. But the discovery of Dr Klipstein was made in excavating an undisturbed, and, geologically speaking, a comparatively recent formation.”
After alluding to the magnificent skeleton of the Mastodon Ohioticus which is now in the British Museum, and in companionship with which an Indian flint arrow-head was found, he adds:—
“Another remarkable account, preserved in the ‘American Journal of Science,’ describes the bones of a mastodon, with considerable portions of the skin, found in Missouri, associated with stone spear-heads, axes, and knives, under circumstances which suggest the idea that it had been entangled in a bog, and there stoned to death, and partially consumed by fire. Such contiguity of the works of man with those extinct diluvial giants warns us at least to be upon our guard against any supercilious rejection of indications of man’s ancient presence in the New World as well as the Old. If the evidence is inconsequential or untruthful, future discoveries will not fail to bring it to nought; if, on the contrary, it involves glimpses of an unseen truth, no organised scepticism will prevent the ultimate disclosure of its amplest revelations.”
Had man, during the whole of this early prehistoric epoch, whatever its duration may have been, lived like the savage, in what we call the stone period? Or had the use of metals and other arts been discovered and lost again—lost, perhaps, because human societies had not attained that coherence and stability necessary to the preservation of the arts? However this may be, it cannot be doubted that the use of the metal tool forms an important era in the progress of civilisation. And Mr Wilson mentions a fact which enables us to understand very readily the transition from the use of stone to the use of metal. Copper is still found in the New World, and probably was at first found in the Old World, in a pure state—in nuggets, as an Australian gold-digger would call them—and these could at once be beaten into the shape of an axe by stone hammers without the application of fire. The fragment of copper was to the Indian a new kind of stone, which had the fortunate property of malleability.
“In the veins of the copper region of Lake Superior, the native metal occurs in enormous masses weighing hundreds of tons; and many loose blocks of considerable size have been found on the lake shore, or lying detached on the surface, besides smaller pieces exposed on and mingled with the superficial soil in sufficient quantities to supply all the wants of the nomade hunter. This, accordingly, he wrought into chisels and axes, armlets and personal ornaments of various kinds, without the use of the crucible and any knowledge of metallurgic arts; and, indeed, without recognising any precise distinction between the copper which he mechanically separated from the mass, and the unmalleable stone or flint out of which he had been accustomed to fashion his spear and arrow heads.”
Whilst applauding the metal tool, copper or iron, and acknowledging what we owe to it, let us not pass over the stone—that handful of rock or flint by the aid of which the metal, in the first instance, was wrought and fashioned—without its meed of gratitude. It seems a slight unnoticeable fact that there should be these manageable fragments of hard substance ready to the hand of man; that the whole earth was not divided between the bed of rock and the bed of sand or clay; that there should have been there mere stones (mere litter, you would say), of which the floor of the earth had better have been swept clean. Yet those nodules of flint formed slowly in the chalk—yet those rolled stones upon the deserted beach, that the sea has fashioned for the human palm, and left high and dry upon the land—seem to have entered as much into the preparation for man as the fauna or the flora amongst which he was to live.