Part 1

BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. NO. DLXXI. MAY 1863. VOL. XCIII.

CONTENTS.

WILSON’S PREHISTORIC MAN, 525 CAXTONIANA.—PART XVI., 545 NO. XXII.—ON CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ART IN WORKS OF IMAGINATION. THE LIFE OF GENERAL SIR HOWARD DOUGLAS, BART., 561 ITALIAN BRIGANDAGE, 576 LUDWIG UHLAND, 586 MY INVESTMENT IN THE FAR WEST, 595 THE LANDSCAPE OF ANCIENT ITALY, AS DELINEATED IN THE POMPEIAN PAINTINGS, 613 AMERICAN STATE PAPERS, 628 THE BUDGET, 645

EDINBURGH: WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET. AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

_To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed._

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

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.

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.

Who first applied fire to the metal, and thus made it plastic as the clay and sharper than the stone? who first discovered fire itself? No one knows; nor is the question worth asking. But there is one thing well worth noticing: it is the answer given to the question, and that in the rudest of times and amongst many various nations. Some god bestowed it. This tendency to look for a supernatural giver is very soon and very widely developed. And what is more, the idea of a giver has called forth amongst rude selfish people struggling for existence, the desire to manifest their gratitude by some act of worship which should also be some act of self-denial. On a certain day of the year all lights shall be extinguished, and one man amongst them (endowed for the very purpose with imaginary sanctity) shall rekindle the flame, thus acknowledging by this symbol its reception from the divine Giver. The ancient Peruvians drew their fire on this solemn occasion at once from the sun; they collected its rays into a focus by a concave mirror of polished metal, and thus ignited some dried cotton, or bark, or fungus. Nothing could be more expressive and appropriate than such a symbolic act. It is a pity that the historian has to record that other symbolic acts (if such they are to be considered) were of a cruel and hideous description. The savage is not accustomed only to _thank_ God; he has, he thinks, to propitiate His favour; and as he has nothing to _give_, he _destroys_ in honour of the universal Bestower. The worship of the American Indian is tainted more than any other we read of with the rite of human sacrifice.

Various methods for obtaining fire have been invented, but the earliest seems to have been by the friction of two dry pieces of wood. It was a progressive step, we presume, when the bark of a certain tree or a dried fungus was used for tinder. However produced, it was to the savage, in the first instance, itself a tool, the immediate instrument he employed to cut down the tree which would have resisted a long while his flint hatchet. We thought that all known people had made discovery of fire and converted it to their own purposes; but the inhabitants of the Ladrones, when discovered by the Spaniards, are said to have shrunk from fire as from a thing they simply feared: “they called it a devil, a god that bit fiercely when it was touched, and lived on wood, which they saw it devour.”