The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 62, December, 1862. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
Period,"3 the mighty animals lived whose bones are now found in caverns, or under the slowly deposited sediment of the waters, or preserved in bog,—the mammoth, and rhinoceros, and elk, and bear, and elephant, as well as many others of extinct species.
We may suppose, that, if man did exist during these convulsions and inundations, his superior intelligence would enable him to escape the fate of the animals that were submerged,—or that, if his few burial-places were invaded by the waters, his remains are now completely covered by marine deposits under the ocean. If, however, in his barbarian condition, he had fashioned implements of any hard material, and especially if, as do the savages of the present family of man, he had accidentally deposited them, or had buried them with the dead in mighty mounds, the invading waters might well sweep them together from their place and deposit them almost in mass, in situations where the eddies should leave their gravel and sand.4
Such seems in reality to have been the case; though in regard to so important a fact in the history of the world much caution must be exercised in accepting the evidence. We will state briefly the proofs, as they now appear, of the existence of a race of human beings on this earth in an immense antiquity.
A French gentleman, M. Boucher de Perthes, has for thirty-four years been devoting his time and his fortune, with rare perseverance, to the investigation of certain antiquities in the later geological deposits in the North of France. His first work, "Les Antiquités Celtiques and Antédiluviennes," published in 1847, was received with much incredulity and opposition; a second, under the same title, in 1857, met with a scarce better reception, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he could induce even the savans of his own country to look at the mass of evidence he had collected on this subject.
He made the extraordinary claim to have discovered a great quantity of rough implements of flint, fashioned by art, in the undisturbed beds of clay, gravel, and sand, known as drift, near Abbeville and Amiens. These beds vary in thickness from ten to twenty feet, and cover the chalk hills in the vicinity; in portions of them, upon the hills, often in company with the flints, are discovered numerous bones of the extinct mammalia, such as the mammoth, the fossil rhinoceros, tiger, bear, hyena, stag, ox, horse, and others.
The flint implements are found in the lowest beds of gravel, just above the chalk, while above them are sands with delicate fresh-water shells and beds of brick-earth,—all this, be it remembered, on table-lands two hundred feet above the level of the sea, in a country whose level and face have remained unaltered during any historical period with which we are acquainted. "It must have required," says Sir Charles Lyell, "a long period for the wearing down of the chalk which supplied the broken flints (stones) for the formation of so much gravel at various heights, sometimes one hundred feet above the level of the Somme, for the deposition of fine sediment, including entire shells, both terrestrial and aquatic, and also for the denudation which the entire mass of stratified drift has undergone, portions having been swept away, so that what remains of it often terminates abruptly in old river-cliffs, besides being covered by a newer unstratified drift. To explain these changes, I should infer considerable oscillations in the level of the land in that part of France, slow movements of upheaval and subsidence, deranging, but not wholly displacing the course of ancient rivers."
The President of the British Association, in his opening speech at the meeting of 1860, affirms the immense antiquity of these flint implements, and remarks:—"At Menchecourt, in the suburbs of Abbeville, a nearly entire skeleton of the Siberian rhinoceros is said to have been taken out about forty years ago,—a fact affording an answer to the question often raised, as to whether the bones of the extinct mammalia could have been washed out of an older alluvium into a newer one, and so redeposited and mingled with the relics of human workmanship. Far-fetched as was this hypothesis, I am informed that it would not, if granted, have seriously shaken the proof of the high antiquity of human productions; for that proof is independent of organic evidence or fossil remains, and is based on physical data. As was stated to us last year by Sir Charles Lyell, we should still have to allow time for great denudation of the chalk, and the removal from place to place, and the spreading out over the length and breadth of a large valley, of heaps of chalk-flints in beds from ten to fifteen feet in thickness, covered by loam and sands of equal thickness, these last often tranquilly deposited,—all of which operations would require the supposition of a great lapse of time."
An independent proof of the age of these gravel-beds and the associated loam, containing fossil remains, is derived by the same authority from the large deposits of peat in the valley of the Somme, which contain not only monuments of the Roman, but also those of an older, stone period, the Finnic period; yet, says Lord Wrottesley, "distinguished geologists are of opinion that the growth of all the vegetable matter, and even the original scooping out of the hollows containing it, are events long posterior in date to the gravel with flint-implements,—nay, posterior even to the formation of the uppermost of the layers of loam with fresh-water shells overlaying the gravel."
The number of the flint implements is computed at above fourteen hundred in an area of fourteen miles in length and half a mile in breadth. They are of the rudest nature, as if formed by a people in the most degraded state of barbarism. Some are mere flakes of flint, apparently used for knives or arrow-heads; some are pointed and with hollowed bases, as if for spear-heads, varying from four to nine inches in length; some are almond-shaped, with a cutting edge, from two to nine inches in length. Others again are fashioned into coarse representations of animals, such as the whale, saurian, boar, eagle, fish, and even the human profile; others have representations of foliage upon them; others are either drilled with holes or are cut with reference to natural holes, so as to serve as stones for slings, or for amulets, or for ornaments. The edges in many cases seem formed by a great number of small artificial tips or blows, and do not at all resemble edges made by a great natural fracture. Very few are found with polished surfaces like the modern remains in flint; and the whole workmanship differs from that of flint arrow-heads in other parts of Europe, as well as from the later Finnish (or so-called Keltic) remains, discovered in such quantities in France. The only relics that have been found resembling them are, according to Mr. Worsaae, some flint arrow-heads and spear-points discovered at great depths in the bogs of Denmark. A few bone knives and necklaces of bone have been met with in these deposits, but thus far no human bones. The people who fabricated these instruments seemed to be a hunting and fishing people, living in some such condition as the present savages of Australia.
These discoveries of M. de Perthes have at length aroused the attention of English men of science, and during 1859 a number of eminent gentlemen—among them Sir Charles Lyell, Mr. Prestwich, Dr. Falconer, and others—visited M. Perthes's collection, and saw the flints in situ. Several of them have avowed their conviction of the genuineness and antiquity of these relics. Sir Charles Lyell has given a guarded sanction to the belief that they present one strong proof of a remote human antiquity.
The objections that would naturally be made to this evidence are, that the flints are purely natural formations, and not works of man,—that the deposit is alluvial and modern, rather than of the ancient drift,—or that these implements had been dropped into crevices, or sunk from above, in later periods.
The testimony of disinterested observers seems to be sufficient as to the human contrivance manifest in these flints; and the concurrence of various scientific men hardly leaves room for doubt that these deposits are of great antiquity, preceding the time in which the surface of France took its present form, and dating back to what is called the Post-Pliocene Period. Their horizontal position, and the great depth at which the hatchets are found, together with their number, and the peculiar incrustation and discoloration of each one, as well as their being in company with the bones of the extinct mammalia, make it improbable that they could have been dropped into fissures or sunk there in modern times.5 In regard to the absence of human bones, it should be remembered that no bones are easily preserved, unless they are buried in sediment or in bog; and furthermore, that the extent of the researches in these formations is very small indeed. Besides, the country where above all we should expect the most of human remains in the drift-deposits, as being probably the most ancient abode of man,—Asia,—has been the least explored for such purposes. Still this is without doubt
We should bear in mind that the Quaternary or Diluvian Period, however ancient in point of time, has no clearly distinguishing line of separation from the present period. The great difference lies in the extinction of certain species of animals, which lived then, whose destruction may be due both to gradual changes of climate and to man.—PICTET.
Sir C. Lyell, in his remarks before the British Association in 1859, said upon the discovery alluded to here: "I am reminded of a large Indian mound which I saw in St. Simon's Island in Georgia,—a mound ten acres in area, and having an average height of five feet, chiefly composed of cast-away oyster-shells, throughout which arrow-heads, stone axes, and Indian pottery were dispersed. If the neighboring river, the Altamalia, or the sea which is at hand, should invade, sweep away, and stratify the contents of this mound, it might produce a very analogous accumulation of human implements, unmixed, perhaps, with human bones."—
An article in Blackwood, (October, 1860,) which is understood to be from the pen of Professor H.D. Rogers, admits entirely that the flints are of human workmanship, and that it is impossible for them to have dropped through fissures, as, according to the writer's observation of the deposits, it would be impossible even for a mole to penetrate them, so close are they. Professor Rogers takes the ground that human antiquity is not proven from these relics, for two reasons:—First, because the indications in the deposits inclosing the flints point clearly to a "turbulent diluvial action," and therefore it is possible for a violent incursion of the ocean to have taken place in the historic period, and to have mixed up the more recent works of man with the previously buried bones or relics of a pre-historic period; and secondly, because the different geological deposits do not necessarily prove time, but only succession,—two schools of geology interpreting all similar phenomena differently, as relating to the time required.
The last position would be admitted by few scientific geologists at the present day, as the evidence for time, though inferential from the deposits known to us, is held generally to be conclusive. On the first point, Professor Rogers has the weight of authority against him: all the great masters of the science, who have examined the formation and the deposits of the surrounding country, denying that there is any evidence of an incursion of the ocean of such a nature, during the historic period.