Part 8
We have seen how much these ancient people differed from us in their civilization, and how far they were behind us in everything; but we must not suppose that they were very different in bodily size and shape. Some of their skulls might have belonged to a philosopher, or they might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage. The skulls from the Cromagnon and Engis caves are quite equal in size and shape to those of several uncivilized, and even of some civilized races of the present time, and there are people in all large cities whose heads are not better formed. Though the outward signs of their civilization then were so different from ours, it is not certain that their mental capacity was much less.
A race possessing considerable civilization may, we know, pass away, as the Assyrians and the Pyramid builders have. In one of the Pacific islands—Easter Island—a thousand miles from the nearest land, there are hundreds of carved images of stone, fifty or sixty feet high, and weighing perhaps a hundred tons each. The people who made these must have been very numerous and must have had considerable skill. Yet they have passed away. The arts of Nineveh and Babylon have only lately become known, so that, you see, the works of a race may easily become hidden from us who follow. Quite lately, too, the works of a partly civilized people have been discovered in Ohio in America. There are there hundreds of mounds and earth embankments forming fortified camps. Some of them are several miles round, and they could only have been made by a very numerous and intelligent people who knew something about geometry; for the circles, squares, and angles of these earthworks are quite as correct as we could make them. Among the multitude of things found here are copper tools made by hammering, ornamental pottery, silver beads, plates of mica with scrolls and designs engraved on them, and carefully carved pieces of stone. These carvings are most curious and excellently finished. They represent human heads and many animals, such as the bear, otter, wolf, beaver, raccoon, frog, rattlesnake, heron, crow, &c. A people, then, who could do these things and took pleasure in doing them must have possessed great intelligence and a knowledge of things far beyond a simple state. They even had religious ideas, such as they were, for they had places for sacrifice. All their works are now overgrown by forests, but it is impossible to mistake them; yet the native Indians of Ohio living now have no idea that such a people lived in their country before them, and no tradition at all about a people whose civilization was so far superior to their own.
We may come nearer to our own times, and look at the Assyrians and Egyptians. Until quite recently nothing was known about the Assyrians except what could be learned from the few references made to them in Scripture and some ancient writers; but Mr. Layard dug up their cities, and found that they possessed the arts of building, sculpture, working in metals, and a written language. All this was buried under the sand of a desert! Then there is the great Pyramid of Egypt, built in a way that we could not surpass, and with much knowledge of geometry and other sciences.[29] The men who designed and constructed these works could not have lived among a half-barbarous people; and as these are the highest works of the people, how much there must have been that went before, of which there is no trace now, when Assyria and Egypt were in _their_ age of stone axes and flint arrow-heads.
I do not think that the Stone-Age men of Europe were nearly so civilized. At all events, they have not left any such imperishable monuments as the gigantic images of Easter Island, the earthworks of the Ohio people, or the sculptures, writings, and buildings of the Assyrians and Egyptians; but they might have been more civilized than they seem to have been from their simple weapons and tools. They might have made many things which were perishable, and have been destroyed by time—things which would have given us a higher belief in their intelligence and civilization.
The past history of the human race may be compared to the rise and fall of the tide. Wave after wave has risen higher and higher on the everlasting shore of Time, and when the tide was at its highest it has fallen again slowly, to rise again and again in the same way through many ages. We know that man may rise slowly from a simple condition to much civilization and power, and may again sink back almost to barbarism, as has been the case with the people of whom we have been speaking, and then again a new civilization may grow up. It is possible that all now savage nations are the sinking descendants of some, in comparison, once civilized people. Modern nations are taking up the ground of savages all over the world, and soon there will be no trace of these simple people. Thus it may have been with mankind throughout all the time during which they have occupied the earth, and so it may be perhaps again.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] A fine Mexican MS. on diapered cloth, with figures and mystical signs, has lately been added to the MS. department of the British Museum.
[23] Some fine examples of papyrus writings on the North-west Staircase, Upper Floor.
[24] British Antiquities Room, upper floor, Middle and Upper Shelf-cases, Nos. 1, 2, and 5-12, flint and stone implements. Table-case B, horn implements from French caves and Swiss lake-dwellings.
[25] Examples of stone implements of New Zealanders in Ethnographical Room, Cases No. 45-48, upper floor.
[26] In Lake Mohrya. _Across Africa_, by V. L. Cameron.
[27] At the end of Room VI., opposite the door, North Gallery.
[28] See examples in the Bronze Room, upper floor, British Museum.
[29] Built of nummulitic limestone, composed of shells of foraminifera. See Case 15, Room V., North Gallery.
_CONCLUSION._
I have now put “The Puzzle of Life” together as well as I can, and there is not much more to say. You must do the rest for yourselves by going to the Museums, where all the pieces are collected, and seeing them with your own eyes. When you stand before these silent witnesses to the great age of our Earth, and all that is on it, you will feel how wonderful the story they tell is. They have no words to speak to you, but there is a power in your own minds which interprets their history through your own thoughts. They are only lumps of rock and lifeless bones, but they seem to say to you, “We are living again now, because we are teaching you a lesson which the great Builder of this Universe wishes you to learn from us. There is not a stone or fossil among us but it has its tale to tell—a tale of time and tide, and long past ages, and innumerable changes, and a life that was, and progress from a lower to a higher existence. We have obeyed the same eternal laws of one Creator from the beginning, as all things will to the end of time. We have opened the great Book of Nature from the first page of the ‘life-dawn animal’ to the last, on which the hand of the Almighty has written the name of Man—his most perfect work. We, you, and all things which have lived and will live, have bodies made of particles which will be returned to the Earth, no single atom of which has been destroyed since the first, but has been fashioned over and over again into innumerable forms of tree and flower, of gossamer-winged insect and towering mammoth, throughout the long ages in which our Globe has known day and night, cold and heat, summer and winter.”
There is nothing sad, if we look at it rightly, in this constant succession of life and death. It is
A moulding Of forms, and a wondrous birth, And a growing and fair unfolding Of life from life, and life from death. For death, a mother benign, Transformeth but destroyeth not, And the new thing fair of the old is wrought.
G. F. ARMSTRONG.
Is it not worth while then to listen to these stories of the Earth—to spell them out for ourselves? They are written everywhere,—in the mountains and valleys, the rivers and seas, on the hard faces of granite cliffs, on the rounded pebbles of the sea beach, and even in the finest dust of the roads. We have not to go far to hear them: every foot-step on the ground covers a chapter great or small in the universal history, and the stone walls of our houses could speak with ten thousand tongues of all they witnessed in their long life on the floor of an ancient ocean.
We can scarcely have a more pleasant occupation and greater interest than in searching for and putting together the pieces of this wonderful and beautiful puzzle, and in doing our utmost to “Summon from the shadowy Past the forms that once have been.”
INDEX.
Age of bronze, 161; of iron, 161; of reptiles, 81
Aleph, 125
Amber, 69
Ammonites, 90, 97
Animal Part, the, 77; animals of coal period, 71
Ants, white, 61
Arctic climate, 67; expedition, 67
Archæopteryx, 91, 93
Australian savages, 127
Babylon and Nineveh, 164, 165
Bear, grisly, 106
Beginning of life, 58
Bird forms, earliest, 89; reptiles, 85
Blacklead, 58
Boulders carried by ice, 48
Bogwood, 70
Boiling springs, 54
Bronze, age of, 161, 162; implements in British Museum, 162
Brighton Downs, 99
Burning mountains, 19
Calamites, 42, 68
Cañons of Colorado, 8
Caves of Engis and Cromagnon, 163; near Belfort and of Switzerland, 141; of the Vezère, 139
Cetiosaurus, 86
Chalk, nature of, 26; pits, 20; ammonites and foraminifera in, 27; period, 95; under the ocean, 29, 99
“Challenger” expedition, 27
Changes have been gradual, 43
Cissbury camp, 134
Clay, London, 21, 22; and mud, 33
Climate, Arctic, and of coal formations, 67
Club-mosses, 61
Clothing, 138
Coal beds, 31; in Arctic regions, 67; plants of the, 63; is fossil wood, 73; is sunlight compressed, 30
Colorado, the people in, 142
Compressed plants, 15
Conclusion, 168
Cookery, 137
Corals, 78
Creation, the plan of, 117
Cretaceous period, 96
Cromagnon and Engis, caves of, 163
Dawn of life, 56; plant, 59
Denudation, 49, 50
Dinornis, specimens of, in British Museum, 116
Dinosaurus, 89
Dinotherium, 114
Drawings, pre-historic, 135
Dwellings and food of men, 137
Early histories, 123; plant life, 59
Earth, early history of, 1, 2, 3; interior of, 18; intense heat of, 24; climate of, 48; not yet fit for man, 75; ‘foraminifera earth’, 30
Earthquakes, 18, 19
Earthworks of Ohio, 165
Easter island monuments, 164
Egypt, monuments of, 166
Eodendron, 59
Eophyton, 59
Eozöon, 57, 77
First weapons, 121
Fish-lizards, 85
Fishes, fossil, 71
Flint, origin of, 14; in chalk, 96; weapons, where found, 131; tool manufactory, 134
Foraminifera, 20; ‘foraminifera earth’, 30; drawings of, 97; specimens of, in British Museum, 99
Forests under the sea, 75, 76
Fossil, derivation of, 10; plants, 61; sunlight, 73; footprints, 83; human, 157, 159
Food and dwellings, 137
Footprints, fossil, 83
Flying reptiles, 89
Geological part, 17
Geology, derivation of, 19
Geysers, 54
Gigantic animals, 101; birds, 115
Glaciers and icebergs, 47
Granite, raised, 23; appearance of, 24
Gravel, &c., 35
Great Irish Stag, drawing, &c., of, 108
Guadaloupe human fossil, 157
Heat of the Earth, 3, 18
Hebrew letters, 125
Hesperornis, 92
Hippopotamus in England, 105
Histories, early, 123
Human part, the, 120; fossils, 157
Ice age, 45; more than one, 48
Icebergs and glaciers, 47
Ichthyornis, 92
Ichthyosaurus, 85
Implements, flint and stone, in British Museum, 131; bronze, 162
India, elephants in, 145
Insects in coal forests, 64
Irish stag, 107
Islands appear and disappear, 39
Jet, 69
Jurassic age, 89
Kangaroo, fossil, 115
Kitchen-middens, 152
Labyrinthodon, 2
Lake-dwellers, 146; dwellings in Europe, Africa, Asia, and New Guinea, 149
Language, origin of; and of pre-historic man, 155
Laurentian rocks, 57
Lena river, mammoth found, 102
Life, the dawn of, 56; ‘life-dawn animal’, 57
Lignite, 69
Lion, English sabre-toothed, 106
Mammalia, 102
Mammoth, 49, 102-3; bones of, in Siberia, Asia, North America, &c.; drawing of, on ivory, 135; in Essex, 104; skull of, in British Museum, 104
Man and his works, 121; his earliest inventions, 122; mammoth, mastodon, reindeer, &c., contemporary with, 116; pre-historic, 127, 131; dwellings and food of, 137
Marsupial animal, 95
Mastodon, 102; in Europe, America, India, &c., 104; in Missouri, 128; skeleton of, in British Museum, 104
Megalosaurus, 89
Megatherium, in South America, 110; drawing of, 112; account of, 113; skeleton of, in British Museum, 113
Mexican writings, 124
Middens, kitchen, 152-4; makers, life of, 153
Moa, 115-16
Monkeys, fossil, 102; at Gibraltar, 102
Monuments of Easter Island, 164; of Egypt and Assyria, 166
Mountains, burning, and covered with snow, 19
Moresby, Captain, in New Guinea, 143
New Guinea, stone age of, 143
New Zealand dinornis, 115; moa, 116; stone age of, 143
Nineveh and Babylon, ruins, &c., of, 164, 165
Norway, raised terraces of, 38
Ohio, earthworks of, 165
Oolite, 41, 86
Origin of language, 155
Papyrus writings, 125
Paris, built of shells, 100
Parts, the, are called fossils, 11
Past life, the signs of, 13
Peat, 70
Plan of creation, 117
Plants of coal forests, 63
Plesiosaurus, 85
Pottery, 141, 142
Pre-historic art, 133; drawings, 135; man, 127, 131; weapons and tools, 129
Pterodactyl, derivation of, 89; description of, 90
Puzzle, the framework of, 1-16; parts of, where found, 5
Pyrenees, when raised, 100
Rain-drops, marks of, 84
Reindeer, drawing of, on slate, 135
Reptiles, the age of, 81
Rhinoceros in England, 105
Rocks, raising of the; how placed, 21, 25; carried by ice, 48
Sandstone, formation of, 25, 26; Old Red, 62, 81; New Red, 77
Slate hardened mud, 15
Sponges, 15, 78
Star-fish, 78
Stone age, 128; first stone age, 137; second, 138; of New Guinea and New Zealand, 143, 145
Subsidence, 37
Succession of formations, 41, 42
Sucklers, 102
Sunlight, fossil, 73
Tertiary period, 34, 100
Time, the work of, 167
Tools, polished and rough, 139
Trilobite, 78
Upheaval and depression, 36, 38
Vegetable part, the, 56
Vertebrata, 101
Volcanoes and earthquakes, 19
Water, a powerful tool of Nature, 34, 45; thrown out of the earth, 54
Weapons, early, 121; and tools, where found, 131
Whales, 101
World, early history of the, 3, 4; size and shape, 17; materials of, 17; heat of, 18
Work, the, of time, 167
Writing, origin of, 123; Mexican, Egyptian, and Assyrian, 124, 125; on papyrus, 125; by signs, 125
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Transcriber’s Notes
pg 29 Changed: For innumerable agest hese little creatures to: For innumerable ages these little creatures
pg 91 Changed: Footnote 1: Wall-case No. 11 in Room III., several specimens, mperfect to: Footnote 1: Wall-case No. 11 in Room III., several specimens, imperfect
pg 131 Changed: lived as that these flin weapons and tools to: lived as that these flint weapons and tools