dustry which methodized and shaped observing and classifying material those materials for after ages. A phenomena, if those phenomena repnew standard of the possibilities of a resented no order and obeyed no law? single life is given in what he was And when we say "Order," Mr. and what he did. There was no senescence in his experience. He passed away in the midst of tasks which the noon of his life bequeathed to its evening, and which the evening did not seek to escape. And when he died, it seemed as if the civilized world, from the Himalaya to the Andes, sighed in sympathy with the going down of a man who carried a universe in the lobes of his brain, and who counted an ally and a friend wherever nature had a studedent or science a home. Chairman, and when we say “Law," we say God. And when we affirm the constancy of that order and the certainty of that law, we bear witness of one at least of the attributes of Deity,-his unchangeable veracity. Those stated processes which make the life of nature and which HUMBOLDT So loved to note,-the stars in their course, the ever-recurring phases of earth and sky, precession of equinoxes, succession of seasons, gravitation, magnetism,-these are Nature's comment on the text of the Spirit, One thing more. The professor "God is true." And when HUMBOLDT has told us of the service which HUм- applied the methods he had learned BOLDT rendered to humanity by free-in academic Europe and the laws ing men from the pressure of Jew-announced by students of nature in ish tradition. I accept the state- other centuries,--applied these to ment. From all that was puerile and the measurement of mountains on the inadequate in Jewish or Jew-Christian other side of the globe, knowing them theology he was free himself, and to be as apt and applicable then as in helped to make others free. But the all past time, he unwittingly concentral truth of Judaism, the truth of fessed his belief in a God whose Semitic monotheism, was as true to truth endureth through all generahim as to any before or since. An im-tions." pression went abroad at the time of his death that HUMBOLDT was an athe-be the case-if that were possible ist. We all know how loosely, how which I deny--that the greatest sciunthinkingly, that term is applied. entist of modern time, in his search That he did not receive the authro- after truth, had missed the first and pomorphism of the conception I can most essential of all truths,-the being well suppose. But that he rejected of God,-what then? Why then I che idea of a conscious intelligence at should say that the man himself is the the heart of the world-that intelli- most convincing proof of the truth he gence which all his life was spent in missed. I should feel that the marvel tracing-nothing shall convince me, of such a mind, a wonder surpassing not even an unguarded saying of his any of those it explored, must have For I am persuaded that with had its adequate cause; that the finite out the belief in such an Intelligence, intelligence which looked creation and a purpose and a method corres- through presupposes an infinite Inponding therewith, he would not have telligence as its origin and ground. had the heart to prosecute his in The highest mortal can only be exquiries. For what use or instruction, plained as the product of a more than or what satisfaction would there be in inortal power. own. ་་ But if, after all, it should prove to THE DAWN OF HISTORY: An Introduction to Pre-historic Study. EDITED BY C. F. KEARY, M.A., OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. IN TWO PARTS-PART ONE. PREFACE. The advance of pre-historic study has been during the last ten years exceptionally rapid; and, considering upon how many subsidiary interests it touches, questions of politics, of social life, of religion almost, the science of pre-historic archæology might claim to stand in rivalry with geology as the favorite child of this century; as much a favorite of its declining years as geology was of its prime. But as yet, it will be confessed, we have little popular literature upon the subject, and for want of it the general reader is left a good deai in arrear of the course of discovery. Ilis ideas of nationalities and kindredship among peoples are, it may be guessed, still hazy. We still hear the Russians described as Tartars: and the notion that we English are descendants of the lost Israelitish tribes finds innumerable supporters. I am told that a society has been formed in London for collecting proofs of the more than Ovidian metamorphosis. The reason of this public indifference is very plain. Pre-historic science has not yet passed out of that early stage when workers are too busy in the various branches of the subject to spare much time for a comparison of the results of their labors; when, one may say, fresh contributions are pouring in too fast to be placed upon their proper shelves in the storehouse of our knowledge. In such a state of things the reader who is not a specialist is under peculiar disadvantages for a discovery of what has been done. He stands bewildered, like the sleeping partner in a firm, to whom no one-though he is after all the true beneficiary-explains the work which is passing before his eyes. It will not be thought a misplaced object to attempt some such explanation, and that is the task of the following chapters. And as at some great triumph of mechanism and science-a manufactory, an observatory, an ironclad,- -a junior clerk or a young engineer is told off to accompany the intelligent visitor and explain the workings of the machinery : or as, if the simile serve better, in those cities which are sought for their treasures of art and antiquity, the lower class of the population become self-constituted into guides to beauties which they certainly neither helped to create nor keep alive; so this book offers itself to the interested student as a guide | King EADWINE (so runs the legend) being over some parts of the ground covered by pre-historic inquiry, without advancing pretensions to stand beside the works of specialists in that field. The peculiar objects kept in view have been, to put the reader in possession of (1) the general results up to this time attained, the chief additions which prehistoric science has made to the sum of our knowledge, even if this knowledge can be given only in rough outline; (2) the method or mechanism of the science, the way in which it pieces together its acquisitions, and argues upon the facts it has ascertained; and (3) to put this information in a form which might be attractive and suitable to the general reader. The various labors of a crowd of specialists are needed to give completeness to our knowledge of primitive man, and it is scarcely necessary to say that there are a hundred questions which in such a short book as this have been left untouched. The intention has been to present those features which can best be combined to form a continuous panorama, and also to avoid, as far as possible, the subjects most under controversy. No apology surely is needed for the joint character of the work; as in every chapter the conclusions of many different and sometimes contradictory writers had to be examined and compared, and as these chapters, few as they are, spread over various special fields of inquiry. It is to be hoped that some readers to whom pre-historic study is a new thing may be sufficiently interested in it to desire to continue their researches. For the assistance of such, lists are given, at the end, of the chief authorities consulted on the subject of each chapter, with some notes upon questions of peculiar interest. minded to hear him, and wishing that his people should do so too, called together a council of his chief men and asked them whether they would attend to hear what the saint had to tell and one of the king's thegns stood up and said, "Let us certainly hear what this man knows, for it seems to me that the life of man is like the flight of a sparrow through a large room, where ycu, King, are sitting at supper in winter, whilst storms of rain and snow rage abroad. The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and straightway out again at another is, while within, safe from the storm; but soon it vanishes out of sight into the darkness whence it came. So the life of man appears for a short space; but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are always ignorant." (Bæda ii. 13). This wise and true saying of the Saxon thegn holds good too for the human race as far as its progress is revealed to us by history We can watch this progress through a brief interval for the period over which real, continuous authentic history extends; and beyond that is a twilight space, wherein, amid many fantastic shapes of mere tradition or mythology, here and there an object or event stands out more clearly, lit up by a gleam from the sources of more certain knowledge which we possess. 2. To draw with as much accuracy as may be the outline of these shapes out of the past is the business of the pre-historic student; and to assist him in his task, what has her First-He has the Bible narrative, wherein some of the chief events of the world's history are displayed, but at uncertain distances apart; then we have the traditions preserved in other writings, in books, or on old temple stones-in these the truth has generally to be The vast extent of the field, the treasures cleared from a mist of allegory, or at least of of knowledge which have been already gath- mythology. And, lastly, besides these conered, and the harvest which is still in the ear, scious records of times gone by, we have impress the student more and more the other dumb memorials, old buildings-cities deeper he advances into the study. Surely, or temples-whose makets are long since forif from some higher sphere, beings of a pure-gotten, old tools or weapons, buried for ly spiritual nature-nourished, that is, not by material meats and drinks, but by ideas-look down upon the lot of man, they must be before everything amazed at the complaints of poverty which rise up from every side. When every stone on which we tread can yield a history, to follow up which is almost the work of a lifetime; when every word we use is a thread leading back the mind through centuries of man's life on earth; it must be confessed that, for riches of any but a material sort, for a wealth of ideas, the mind's nourishment, there ought to be no lack. CHAPTER I. THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN. 1. When ST. PAULINUS came to preach Christianity to the people of Northumbria, thousands of years, to come to light in our days; and again, old words, old beliefs, old customs, old arts, old forms of civilization which have been unwittingly handed down to us, can all, if we know the art to interpret their language, be made to tell us histories of the antique world. It is, then, no uninteresting study by which we learn how to make these silent records speak. "Of man's activity and attainment," finely says CARLYLE, “the chief results are aeriform, mystic, and preserved in tradition only: such are his Forms of Government with the Authority they rest on; his Customs or Fashions both of Clothhabits and Soul-habits; much more his collective stock of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty he has acquired of manipulating nature all these things, as indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in any way be fixed under lock and key, but must flit, spirit-like, on impalpable vehicles from Father to Son; | orama, we shall do this freely and without if you demand sight of them they are no- danger of harm, so long as we are ready to where to be met with. Visible Ploughmen modify or enlarge it when more knowledge is and Hammermen there have been, even from forthcoming. As the eye can in a moment CAIN and TUBALCAIN downward; but where supply the deficiencies of some incompleted does your accumulated Agricultural, Metal picture, a landscape of which it gets only a lurgic and other Manufacturing skill lie partial glance, or a statue which has lost a warehoused? It transmits itself on the at- feature, so the mind selects from its knowmospheric air, on the sun's rays (by Hearing ledge those facts which form a continuous and by Vision); it is a thing aeriform, im- story, and loses those which are known only palpable, of quite spiritual sort." as isolated fragments. Set a practiced and 3. How many of these intangible spiritual an unpracticed draughtsman to draw a circle, possessions must man have acquired before and we may witness how differently they go he has learned the art of writing history, and to work. The second never takes his pencil so of keeping a record of what had gone off the paper, and produces his effect by one before; how much do we know that any in- continuous line, which the eye has no choice dividual race of men has learned before it but at once to condemn as incomplete. The brings itself forward with distinctness in this wiser artist proceeds by a number of short, way. For as a first condition of all man consecutive strokes, splitting up, as it were, must have learned to write, and writing, as his divergence over the whole length of the we shall hereafter see, is a slowly developing figure he is drawing, and so allows the eye, or art, which mau acquired by ages of gradual perhaps one should rather say the mind, by experiment. His language, too, must ere that faculty it has, to select the complete this have reached a state of considerable cul- figure which it can conceive more casily than tivation, and it will be our object in the express. No one of the artist's strokes is course of these papers to show through what the true fraction of a circle, but the result is a long history of its own the language of any infinitely more satisfactory than if he had nation must go before it becomes fit for the tried to make his pencil follow unswervingly purposes of literature-through how many the curve he wished to trace. Or again, changes it passes, and what a story it reveals notice how a skillful draughtsman will patch to us by every change. And then, again, up by a number of small strokes any imperbefore a nation can have a history it must be fect portion of a curve he is drawing, and we a nation, must have a national life to record; have another like instance of this selective that is to say, the people who compose it faculty of the eye or of the mind. Just in must have left the simple pastoral state which the same way is it with memory; our ideas belongs to the most primitive ages, must have must be carried on continuously, we cannot drawn closer the loose bonds which held afford to remember spaces and blanks. Thus men together under the conditions of a in the Bible narrative, wherein, as has before patriarchial society and constituted a more been said, certain events of the world's hispermanent system of society. Whether under tory are related with distinctness, but where the pressure of hostile nations, or only from as a rule nothing is said of the times which the growth of a higher conception of social intervened between them, we are wont to life, the nation has to rise from out a mere make very insufficient allowance for these collection of tribes, until the head of the unmentioned times, and form for ourselves a family becomes the king-the rude tents rather arbitrary picture of the real course of grow into houses and temples, and the pens things, fitting two events close on to one of their sheepfolds into walled cities, like another which were really separated by long Corinth, or Athens, or Rome. Such changes ages. To correct this view, to enlarge the as these must be completed before history series of known facts concerning the early comes to be written, and with such changes history of the human race, comes in pre-hisas these, and with a thousand others, changes toric inquiry; and again, to correct the picand growths in Art, in Poetry, in Manufacture we now form, doubtless fresh informatures, in Commerce, and in Laws, the pre- tion will continue to pour in. All this is no historical student has to deal. On all these reason why we should pronounce our picture subjects we shall have something to say. to be untrue, t is only incomplete. must be always ready to enlarge it, and to fill in the outlines, but still we can only remember the facts which we have already acquired, if we look at them, not as fragments only, but as a complete whole. 4. Before, however, we enter upon any one of these it is right that we remind the reader-and remind him once for all-that our knowledge upon all these points is but partial and uncertain, and never of such a character as will allow us to speak with dogmatic assurance. Our information can necessarily never be direct; it can only be built upon inferences of a higher or lower degree of probability. As, however, it is a necessity of our minds that from the information which we possess we must form an unbroken pan We 5. In representing, therefore, in the fol lowing chapters the advance of the human race in the discovery of all those arts and faculties which go to make up civilization as a continuous progress, it will not be necessary to pause and remind the reader in every case that these steps of progress which seem to spread themselves out so clearly before us have been made in an uncertain manner, sometimes rapidly, sometimes very slow.y and painfully, sometimes by immense strides, sometimes by continual haltings and goings backward and forward. On the whole, our history will be a history of events rather than a strictly chronological one, just as the periods of geology are not measured by days and years, but by the mutations through which our solid seeming earth has passed. 6. First we turn to what must needs be our earliest inquiry-the search after the oldest traces of man which have been found upon the earth. It has been said that one of the first fruits of knowledge is to show us our own ignorance, and certainly in the early history of the world and of man there is nothing which science points out so clearly as the vast silent periods whereof until recently we had no idea. It is difficult for us of the present age to remember how short a time it is since all our certain knowledge touching the earth on which we live, lay around that brief period of its existence during which it has come under the notice and the care of man. When all we knew of Europe, and especially of our own islands, belonged to the comparatively short time during which they have been known to history, we had in truth much to wonder at in the political changes they have undergone, and our imaginations could be busy with the contrast between the unchanged features of our lands and seas and the ever varying character of those who dwelt upon or passed over them. It is interesting to think that on such a river bank or on such a shore CÆSAR or CHARLEMAGNE have actually stood, and that perhaps the grass or flowers or shells under their feet looked just the same as they do now, that the waves beat upon the strand in the same cadence, or the water flowed by with the same trickling sound. But when we open the pages of geology, we have unrolled before us a history of the earth itself, extending over periods compared with which the longest epoch of what is commonly called nistory seems scarcely more than a day, and of mutations in the face of nature so grand and awful that as we reflect upon them, forgetting for an instant the enormous periods required to bring these changes about, they sound like the fantastic visions of some seer, telling in allegorical language the history of the creation and destruction of the world Of such changes, not the greatest, but the most interesting to the question we have at present in hand, were those vicissitudes of climate which followed upon the time when the formation of the crust of the earth had been practically completed. We learn of a time when, instead of the temperate climate which now favors our country, these islands, with the whole of the north of Europe, were wrapped in one impenetrable sheet of ice. The tops of our mountains, as well as of those of Scandinavia and the north of continental Europe, bear marks of the scraping of this enormous glacier which must have risen to a height of two or three thousand feet. Not a single green thing, therefore, might be seen between our latitudes and the pole, while the ice-sheet, passing along the floor of the North Sea, united these islands with Scandinavia and spread far out into the deep waters of the Atlantic. For thousands of years such a state of things endured, but at last it slowly passed away. As century followed century the glacier began to decreas in size. From being colder than that of any explored portion of our hemisphere, the cl.mate of northern Europe began to amenu, until at last a little land beca:ne visible, whi n was covered first with lichens, then with thicker moss, and then with grass; then shrubs began to grow, and they expand, d into trees, and the trees into forests, while still the ice-sheet went on decreasing, until now the glaciers remained only in the hills. Animals returned from warmer climates to visit our shores. The birds and beasts and fishes of the land and sea were not much different from those which now inhabit them; the species were different, but the genera were for the most part the same. Everything seemed to have been preparing for the coming of man, and it is about this time that we find the earliest traces of his presence upon earth. 7. We may try and imagine what was the appearance of the world, and especially of Europe-for it is in Europe that most of these earliest traces of our race have as yet been found, though all tradition and liki hood point out man's first home to have been in Central Asia-when we suppose that man first appeared upon these western shore. At this time the continent of Europe stood at a higher level than it does now. The hole of the North Sea, even between Scotland and Denmark, is not more than fifty fathoms, or three hundred feet deep, while the Irish Sea is not more than sixty fathoms; and at this period undoubtedly the British isles, besides being all joined together, formed part of the mainland, not by being united to France only, but by the presence of dry land all the way from Scotland to Denmark, over all that area now called the German Ocean. Our Thames and our other eastern rivers were then but tributaries of one large stream, which bore through this continent, and up into the northern seas, their waters united with those of the Rhine, and perhaps of the Weser and the Elbe. The same upheaval turned into land a portion of the Atlantic Ocean, extending from Spain and Africa out as far as the Azores and the Canaries. north of Africa was joined on to this continent and to Spain, for the narrow straits of Gibraltar had not yet been formed; but a great sea stood where we now have the Great Sahara, and joined the Mediterranean and The |