Part 1

Transcriber’s Note Italic text displayed as: _italic_

THE

PUZZLE OF LIFE.

LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET

[Illustration:

_Frontispiece_

_The Mammoth._]

THE PUZZLE OF LIFE;

AND

HOW IT HAS BEEN PUT TOGETHER.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FORMATION OF THE EARTH, WITH ITS VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL LIFE, FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES,

INCLUDING AN ACCOUNT OF

_PRE-HISTORIC MAN, his WEAPONS, TOOLS and WORKS_.

BY

ARTHUR NICOLS, F.R.G.S.

_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS by FREDERICK WADDY._

SECOND EDITION.

LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1877.

_All rights reserved._

TO

MY YOUNG FRIENDS

BEATRIX, GUY, SYLVIA, MAY, AND GERALD.

THE CHILDREN OF

GEORGE DU MAURIER.

PREFACE

TO

THE SECOND EDITION.

The favourable reception accorded to the first edition has induced me to give the present a more definite educational character. Foot-notes are appended, referring to the position in the British Museum of all the principal antiquities, fossils, and implements mentioned in the text; so that the specimens can easily be found by any young student who wishes, with the book in his hand, to make himself familiar with these records of past time. This will probably facilitate the search for and recognition of specimens by the reader.

The additions to the text consist chiefly of a more extended account of the deposition of chalk and other deep-sea formations, founded on the results of the “Challenger” and “Tuscarora” expeditions, and a sketch of the earthworks of the Ohio mound-builders and the stone monuments of Easter Island. Examples of pre-historic art and lake-dwellings have been added to the illustrations.

A. N.

HAMPSTEAD: _March 1877_.

PREFACE

TO

THE FIRST EDITION.

Having found that children could be interested in the history of life upon the Earth, and that it appealed forcibly to their understanding, I considered that a little book upon the subject might give them the taste for more extended study in after years. The difficulty of treating the, to them, novel conclusions of geology, often founded on abstract reasoning, in language simple in form yet stating clearly the great principles upon which this reasoning rests, will probably be apparent on every page. Breadth, rather than minuteness, has been aimed at, in the belief that a general view, not overcrowded with details, is likely to be the most impressive. Thus, in the geological part the leading features of the succession of strata have been preserved, but no details of systematic classification entered into. Similarly, Primeval Man is considered mainly with reference to gradual progress from a rude to a more civilized condition. To have been more explicit, where there is still much difference of opinion, would have obscured the main facts of the evidence for man’s great antiquity.

The illustrations are typical examples of the three arbitrary but convenient divisions of the history of life—the vegetable, the animal, and the human—such as will be most readily met with in museums. Slight as this sketch is, the liking for it shown by some intelligent children, who saw it in manuscript, encouraged me to believe that there are many others to whom it might prove interesting.

Some acquaintance with the leading facts in science is daily becoming more necessary to those who aspire to liberal culture, and instruction in them is a recognised feature in the curriculum of some public and leading private schools. Thus, it is hoped that the present volume may to some extent serve as a text-book without the severity of such a form. The best English and foreign authorities have been consulted, and other trustworthy sources—as papers read before scientific societies—drawn upon, bringing the information down to the latest time. Though these pages are designed for young persons, other readers, perhaps, who are not familiar with the subject, may find some interest in them if they are not deterred by the necessarily simple style.

My thanks are due to Mr. H. B. WOODWARD, of the Geological Survey of England and Wales, for some valuable suggestions made during the progress of the work.

A. N.

HAMPSTEAD: _November 1876_.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE 1

THE GEOLOGICAL PART 17

THE VEGETABLE PART 56

THE ANIMAL PART 77

THE HUMAN PART 120

CONCLUSION 168

INDEX 171

ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE MAMMOTH _Frontispiece_

I. UPHEAVAL: SUBSIDENCE: DENUDATION 51

II. DIFFERENT KINDS OF PLANTS OF THE COAL FORESTS 65

III. TRILOBITE 79

IV. FOOTPRINTS OF LABYRINTHODON: FOOTPRINTS OF BIRDS, (2) WITH MARKS OF RAIN-DROPS 83

V. FISH-REPTILES 87

VI. BIRD-REPTILES 93

VII. FOSSILS OF THE CHALK 97

VIII. GIGANTIC IRISH STAG (CERVUS MEGACEROS) 108

IX. THE MEGATHERIUM 112

X. 1. FLINT ARROW-HEAD; 2. STONE AXE IN HANDLE; 3. FLINT KNIFE; 4. BONE HARPOON; 5. BONE NEEDLES; 6. SCEPTRE MADE OF HORN; 7. MARROW SPOON 129

XI. EXAMPLES OF PRE-HISTORIC DRAWINGS 135

XII. LAKE-DWELLINGS 148

XIII. THE GUADALOUPE HUMAN FOSSIL 159

THE

PUZZLE OF LIFE.

_THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE._

You must often have looked with wondering eyes at this World of ours, and asked yourselves questions about it. How did it come here? What is it made of? How old is it? All of them questions not to be answered without a great deal of thought and study, and even then not so perfectly as we should like. It is easy to say “It is here,” and “It is made of earth,” and “It surely must be old,” but that will not satisfy us. We want to know something more certain than this, if possible. We can see that a clock goes with wheels, but we are not very intelligent people if we do not want to find out what makes the clock go. One way of finding out is to pull things to pieces, but we cannot exactly do this with the World. We must think about it, and put together all the knowledge we can gain from the outside and inside, and from the other Worlds around us, which we can see, and when we have done this we may get something like answers to our questions.

How did it come here? But this is not quite the right way of asking the question, because the World is never for two moments together in the same place. It is travelling in a great circle round the Sun at the rate of more than sixty thousand miles an hour, and has been ever since it was formed. That is a wonderful arrangement by which all Worlds travel round some other World larger than themselves, in greater or less circles, and we do not know why it is, though we are certain that it is so. The Moon travels round us once in about every month, and we and the Moon together round the Sun once in every year.

Then again, other planets, with their moons, such as Jupiter, for instance, travel round the Sun in much larger circles than our World, and take many years to do the journey, while Venus, which is nearer the Sun than we are, travels in a much smaller circle, and takes less time. We do not perceive that we are moving so fast because everything we see is moving equally fast with us; but there is no doubt that we are spinning along at sixty thousand miles an hour.

If we ask an astronomer how our World came into existence, he will tell us that it is probably a mass separated from the Sun, that it was once red-hot, and that it slowly cooled down until animals and plants could live upon it. He will tell us besides, that he can see mountains and valleys in our Moon, and land and sea, snow and clouds, on the planet Mars, with his great telescopes. When he thinks about the planets and our own World, then he believes them to be pieces of some much larger World—perhaps the Sun—which now travel round the Sun and receive their light and heat from it. The World is made of what we call “earth,” and it is of this I mean to tell you now—how it was formed, what changes have taken place in it, what plants and animals have lived upon it, and what reasons there are for thinking that it is an exceedingly old place, with a long and interesting story to tell.

Little was known thirty or forty years ago by the most learned men about the age of our World, and it was thought that the human race had not lived here very long. It was indeed known that many large animals, whose huge bones have been found, must have lived before man came to inhabit the Earth, and that even far smaller creatures—such as fishes, and crabs, and insects, and shell-fish—most probably lived for many generations, and died and left their bones and shells in the soil long before the first man or the first tribes of men came to share the World with them. I hope to be able to tell you something of the strange and beautiful history of all these animals, and of man himself, and to show you what reasons there are now for thinking that the human race has inhabited this Earth for a very long time indeed, and how all this knowledge has been gained and put together piece by piece. It is something like the different parts of a puzzle-map, which might be scattered all over the house, and found at one time or another in different places, and at last made up altogether. Some parts of the puzzle have not been found yet certainly; but so many have been collected, and they fit into one another so well, that we can begin to see its real shape and size. It will perhaps be a very long time before some of the missing pieces are found; but in the meantime we can go on without them, and put the framework together, and no doubt in time we shall see what our puzzle, the history of life on the Earth, was like.

Before telling you what its parts are, I ought to say where many of them have been found, and how they are still being looked for. They are found _upon_ the ground, _under_ it, in caves, in rivers, and in the sea. Since railways have been in use a great many tunnels have been made, as well as very deep cuttings through hills, and some of these are several miles long. In this way we have come to know something of the Earth below the surface. Some of these tunnels are bored right through high hills and even mountains, and the cuttings are deep enough to hide high houses if they were put into them. While digging these the workmen have found many of the parts of our puzzle, which are the bones of animals, and fishes, and shells, and even smaller things—such as insects. These could not possibly have been put there by anyone, because they were many, many yards below the surface, and, until they were dug up, nobody imagined that they could be there. Many other things besides have been dug out of these places, but nearer the surface, such as weapons and tools made of flint, and stone, and bone, and metal, and pieces of rough crockery, and various ornaments, all of which must at some time or other have been made and used by people very like ourselves. In digging canals, too, the same kinds of things have been found, and some caves are almost filled up with them. We have other means, too, of knowing what is under the surface of the ground we walk upon. Many of the coal-mines are so deep that the Tower of London, or St. Paul’s Cathedral, or York Minster, or even the Pyramids of Egypt could be buried in them! In digging these the workmen have had to go through a great quantity of earth, sometimes chalk, sand, or gravel, or clay or limestone, layer upon layer, placed, like a pile of books of different kinds and different thicknesses, one upon the other, until they have come to the coal. In these different layers of earth parts of the puzzle have been found, and we shall see by-and-by what parts have been found in the coal itself. Then again, when deep mines are made to get the metals, iron and gold and silver, these layers of earth have to be dug through; and when the beautiful kinds of stone, like marble and limestone, are wanted, they must be dug out of the sides of the hills, and in doing this still more pieces of the puzzle come to hand. But there are other places where Nature herself seems to have shown us some of them without the trouble of searching for them. In many parts of the World, by the sea, and on the banks of rivers, there are cliffs hundreds of feet high, like the chalk cliffs at Dover and Ramsgate, and the sandy cliffs at Folkestone and on the south coast of Devonshire. These cliffs have been cut into by the sea very gradually, and a kind of wall has been left, and from the sides of the cliffs great numbers of the pieces of the puzzle, bones, shells, &c., have been collected and taken away to museums. But the little we can do with our mines and railway tunnels is nothing in comparison with the work of Nature. In some of the great mountain chains—the Andes, the Himalayas, and the Alps, for instance—parts of the sides of mountains have fallen down, and rents many miles long have been left, showing what had been buried there in the different kinds of soil; and where rivers have cut deep, narrow channels through the earth, like the Cañons of Colorado, these natural miners have turned out more of the parts of “the puzzle of life” than we can with all our labour.

It will not be easy at first to understand all the wonders I have to show you, but, when we get further on, you will see them one by one, and there will be very little difficulty. You know now where these things are to be found: principally in the ground you walk upon, without knowing all there is beneath you. The creatures here are much more wonderful than any of the monsters of fairy tale or fable, because the works of God are greater than the imagination of men who have invented the stories of flying dragons and griffins, and trees which grew up into the skies; but I cannot help thinking that this imagination shows what men thought _might_ once have been, and we shall see that “truth is stranger than fiction.” Creatures really did live on this Earth of such strange shapes and great size that the imaginations of those who wrote the fairy tales did not exaggerate much; and, though we know that no flying serpents or immense birds like the Roc are living now, and that there is no beanstalk which grows up into the sky while we are asleep, we shall see that there were lizards as large as whales, and birds taller than elephants, and great sloths stronger than the rhinoceros or hippopotamus, and ferns as high as oak trees, and mosses as large as gooseberry bushes; and that perhaps these animals and plants grew much faster than they do now, and that their dead bodies form a very large part of the earth of our World. This is not imagination, and when you go to a museum you can see all these wonders for yourselves, just as they were taken out of the earth; but of course the bones only of the animals are there. The flesh has long since gone away, and some of the stalks and fronds (leaves) only of the ferns remain to show us how large they must have been when they were alive and growing.

It will be necessary to use a few scientific names, most of which are borrowed from the Greek and Latin languages, but I will explain the meaning of them all, so that they will be easily remembered. First of all, then, the pieces of the puzzle are called _fossils_, and the name comes from a Latin word meaning “dug out;” because they have been dug out of the ground either by man in making railways and mines, or by Nature in the many ways in which she works by cutting down cliffs and scooping out valleys. These fossils are bones of animals and fishes, the skins, shells, and wings of insects, and the stalks and leaves of plants, some of which have lain so very long in the ground that they have become as hard and heavy as stone. But the shape of them always remains, and the moment you look at them you see that they once belonged to living creatures.

I shall give you pictures of some of these fossils; and no doubt you will be able to find some like them in the chalk and sands of the seaside—beautiful shells and bones of fishes. You may pick these out of the cliffs, and then go to the pools of salt water left among the rocks by the ebbing tide, and compare your fossils with the living shell-fish, and see how nearly those inhabitants of the ancient oceans resemble the creatures we find now, sporting in the water, just as these fossils did when the sand and chalk cliffs were under the sea. Of course all the bright colours are gone from the fossils, for the colour of animals fades away soon after they die, and the flesh does not last long; but the hard parts—the bones and shells—are not easily destroyed, because they are made of the same material as rocks. And when we look at the fossil plants we see the same thing. The colours of the green stems and leaves have quite faded, but the delicate shapes of the leaves and branches, and the grain of the wood, can still be seen, and you will have no doubt that they once lived and bore flowers and fruit, and died, as plants are living and dying every day.

You have got so far now that you know what fossils are, and where they may be found. You know that they are the small and large pieces of the “puzzle of life”—of all sorts of different shapes and sizes—and you know that they are scattered about the Earth, deep down in coal-mines, on the tops of mountains, at the bottoms of rivers, in deep caves, and under the sea. The patience and industry of clever men have been well spent in gathering together all they can find, and arranging them in museums for our instruction, and making a history of them which is more wonderful than the Arabian Nights, and more beautiful because it is all _true_. And, though you may think it strange that I promise to show you creatures more marvellous than those of the fairy tales, I shall keep that promise faithfully. We shall find no Genii with wonderful lamps and magic rings, because they never really lived, though it gave us much pleasure and amusement to read about them; but we shall see what God, the greatest Genius of all, has done by means of His magicians—the laws of Nature. These magicians have built up high mountains and dug out valleys, and sent mighty rivers sweeping down to the sea, and even filled up oceans with sand and chalk, and buried ancient forests deep down under sea and land. They worked with fire, and air, and water; not quickly, but with such strength that nothing could resist them, and they gradually moulded the Earth into the beautiful thing it is, so that

In contemplation of created things, By steps we may ascend to God.—_Milton._

But, lovely as the Earth is, we should not perhaps have thought so much of it if there had been nothing to discover. We see that it has been prepared for us an immensely long time ago; and when we know a little, we want to search further and find out what the whole plan of Creation is, so far as we can. You will be surprised when you know how many signs of past life there are around you—many more than you can see with the eye. The Earth is one great burying-place of creatures which have passed away. You are walking over their dead and fossil bodies at almost every step. They are built into the walls of our houses, and there are millions of them in some of the commonest stones of the pavement. Those round, smooth pebbles, called flint stones, which we pick out of the gravel walks, were once partly such soft tender things as sponges; but time has hardened them, and they have been rolled together in seas and rivers by the always moving water until they have become quite different to look at from the rough blue flints they were when they were washed out of the chalk beds. When you are walking along the sands of some seacoasts, you are treading on little specks of these small flints which have been ground down fine in that great mill, the ocean. The sponges, then, did some part in the building up of the Earth. The very chalk you draw with is composed of the shells of sea-animals. Your slates and slate pencils were once a fine mud at the bottom of the sea, since become so hard that it is used for covering the roofs of our houses, and in this mud lived myriads of small shell-fish which have sometimes left their frail houses in the slate beds to tell us how they were made. That slate is the hardened mud of an old sea bottom, there is no doubt at all.

There are many other things in common use which show us the life that was.

Perhaps you did not know that coals are _compressed plants_, and that we are now burning the vegetation of the past time! But these will be described in their right places by-and-by, and you will see how certain it is that some of the commonest things we use were living creatures and graceful plants.

Here is “the framework” of the puzzle, and I think you will agree with me that we shall have pleasure in putting it together with all the queerly-shaped pieces we shall find in the following chapters. We have fossil plants to show us what grew upon the Earth, fossil bones to tell us what animals lived here, and thousands of different kinds of fossil shells and fishes to show us that the seas in the long past time were crowded with life; and besides, though there are no written histories of the men whom we shall read about, they, too, have left many things which they used in the caves where they lived and in their graves, to make us feel certain that they were some of the oldest people that ever lived. With all these things to help us, it will be strange if we cannot make out a great deal of the history of life upon our Earth.

_THE GEOLOGICAL PART._

You will have learned from other books something about the size and shape of our World: for instance, that it is a great round body, or rather more like an orange, a little flatter one way than the other, and about 8,000 miles through, from one side to the other, and that it turns round once in every twenty-four hours; but I have only to tell you now what it is made of. The material is called rock, earth, or soil; and there are many kinds of it, such as granite, gravel, clay, sand, chalk, mud, and so on; and we shall see that many of these different soils contain different fossils.