The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 62, December, 1862. Various

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      "It is better to sink than to yield!"

      And the whole air pealed

      With the cheers of our men.

      THE FOSSIL MAN

      The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been: to be found in the register of God, not in the records of men. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The Night of Time far surpasseth the Day, and who knoweth the Equinox?—Sir THOMAS BROWNE.

      What a mysterious and subtile pleasure there is in groping back through the early twilight of human history! The mind thirsts and longs so to know the Beginning: who and what manner of men those were who laid the first foundations of all that is now upon the earth: of what intellectual power, of what degree of civilization, of what race and country. We wonder how the fathers of mankind lived, what habitations they dwelt in, what instruments or tools they employed, what crops they tilled, what garments they wore. We catch eagerly at any traces that may remain of their faiths and beliefs and superstitions; and we fancy, as we gain a clearer insight into them, that we are approaching more nearly to the mysterious Source of all life in the soul. The germ, to our limited comprehension, seems nearer the Creator than the perfected growth. Then the great problem of Origin forever attracts us on,—the multitudinous and intricate questions relating to "the ordained becoming of beings": how the Creating Power has worked, whether through an almost endless chain of gradual and advantageous changes, or by some sudden and miraculous ictus, placing at once a completed body on the earth, as an abode and instrument for a developed soul,—all these remote and difficult questions lead us on. And yet the search for human origins, or the earliest historic and scientific evidences of man on the earth, is but a groping in the dark.

      We turn to the Hebrew and the inspired records; but we soon discover, that, though containing a picture, unequalled for simplicity and dignity, of the earliest experiences of the present family of man, they are by no means a monument or relic of the most remote period, but belong to a comparatively modern date, and that the question of Time is not at all directly treated in them.

      We visit the region where poetry and myth and tradition have placed a most ancient civilization,—the Black-Land, or Land of the Nile: we search its royal sepulchres, its manifold history written in funereal records, in kingly genealogies, in inscriptions, and in the thousand relics preserved of domestic life, whether in picture, sculpture, or the embalmed remains of the dead; and we find ourselves thrown back to a date far beyond any received date of history, and still we have before us a ripened civilization, an art which could not belong to the childhood of a race, a language which (so far as we can judge) must have needed centuries for its development, and the divisions of human races, whose formation from the original pair our philosophy teaches us must have required immense and unknown spaces of time,—all as distinct as they are at the present day.

      We traverse the regions to which both the comparison of languages and the Biblical records assign the original birthplace of mankind,—the country of the Euphrates and the plateau of Eastern Asia. Buried kingdoms are revealed to us; the shadowy outlines of magnificent cities appear which flourished and fell before recorded human history, and of which even Herodotus never heard; Art and Science are unfolded, reaching far back into the past; the signs of luxury and splendor are uncovered from the ruin of ages: but, remote as is the date of these Turanian and Semitic empires, almost equalling that of the Flood in the ordinary system of chronology, they cannot be near the origin of things, and a long process of development must have passed ere they reached the maturity in which they are revealed to us.

      The Chinese records give us an antiquity and an acknowledged date before the time of Abraham, (if we follow the received chronology,) and even then their language must have been, as it is now, distinct and solidified, betraying to the scholar no certain affinity to any other family of language. The Indian history, so long boasted of for its immense antiquity, is without doubt the most modern of the ancient records, and offers no certain date beyond 1800 B.C.

      In Europe, the earliest evidences of man disclosed by our investigations are even more vague and shadowy. Probably, without antedating in time these historical records of Asia, they reach back to a more primitive and barbarous era. The earliest history of Europe is not studied from inscription or manuscript or even monument; it is not, like the Asiatic, a conscious work of a people leaving a memorial of itself to a future age. It is rather, like the geological history, an unconscious, gradual deposit left by the remains of extinct and unknown races in the soil of the fields or under the sediment of the waters. The earliest European barbarian, as he burned his canoe from a log, or fabricated his necklace from a bone, or worked out his knife from a flint, was in reality writing a history of his race for distant days. We can follow him now in his wanderings through the rivers and lakes and on the edges of the forests; we open his simple mounds of burial, and study his barbarian tools and ornaments; we discover that he knew nothing of metals, and that bone and flint and amber and coal were his materials; we trace out his remarkable defences and huts built on piles in the various lakes of Europe, where the simple savage could escape the few gigantic "fossil" animals which even then survived, and roved through the forests of Prussia and France, or the still more terrible human enemies who were continually pouring into Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland from the Asiatic plains. We find that the early savage of Switzerland and Sweden was not entirely ignorant of the care of animals, and that he had fabricated some rude pottery. Of what race he was, or when he appeared amid the forests of Northern Europe, no one can confidently say. Collecting the various indications from the superstitions, language, and habits of this barbarian people, and comparing them with like peculiarities of the most ancient races now existing in Europe, we can frame a very plausible hypothesis that these early savages belonged to that great family of which the Finns and Laps, and possibly the Basques, are scattered members. Their skulls, also, are analogous in form to those of the Finnish race. This age the archaeologists have denominated the "Stone Age" of European antiquity.

      Following this is what has been called by them the "Bronze Age." Another, more powerful, and more cultivated race or collection of peoples inundates Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, and other districts. They make war against and destroy the early barbarians; they burn their water-huts, and force them to the mountains, or to the most northern portions of the continent. This new race has a taste for objects of beauty. They work copper and bronze; they make use of beautiful vases of earthenware and ornaments of the precious metals; but they have yet no knowledge of iron or steel. Their dead are burned instead of being buried, as was done by the preceding races. They are evidently more warlike and more advanced than the Finnish barbarians. Of their race or family it is difficult to say anything trustworthy. Their skulls belong to the "long-skulled" races, and would ally them to the Kelts. Antiquaries have called their remains "Keltic remains."

      Still another age in this ancient history is the "Iron Age," when the tribes СКАЧАТЬ