+ ~ -
 
Please report pronunciation problems here. Select and sample other voices. Options Pause Play
 
Report an Error
Go!
 
Go!
 
TOC
 

"unquestionably fashioned by human hands"
(alas ! poor Scientific World !), and Sir Charles
Lyell expresses his conviction of " a vast lapse
of ages separating the era in which the fossil
implements were formed and that of the invasion
of Gaul by the Romans."

Accordingly, it is no longer scientific to doubt
that weapons made by the rude warriors of
primeval days are to be found in strata containing
remains of the mammoth. That human
bones have not yet been met with, is no argument.
The writer is old enough to remember the
time when so few remains had been found of
the megatherium, and so dark a cloud still
rested on the subject, that a writer in the
Times pronounced the views of geologists to be
"disgusting nonsense unsupported by a shadow
of proof." It is, indeed, scarcely possible that
the puny races who seem to have first peopled
the globe could have warred with these feeble
implements against cavern bears as big as a
horse; hyaenas often larger than the largest
modern tiger; the gigantic old English tiger, which,
if coloured like that of Bengal, must have been
the most magnificent creature that ever trod
the earth; the machairodus, a terrific animal
of a genus now altogether lost, provided with
weapons which rendered it, if possible, more
formidable than the tiger, its teeth being shaped
like a saw; swarms of huge elephants so
numerous, that from a bank off the little
village of Happisbury, in Norfolk, upwards of
two thousand grinders of the mammoth have
been dredged up by fishermen within thirteen
yearsand even this is not the richest locality, as
the coast from Essex to Norfolk (including, of
course, the spot where Mr. Frere found the
remains) swarms with them; to which monsters, add
the rhinoceros of that time with two huge horns,
and buffaloes as large as elephants. It is more
probable, from the little commingling of the
remains, that man had rarely to defend himself
except against the great pachydermis, and then
only when they were fast verging to extinction.
Perhaps, like some other races, he only made
his appearance on the scene when the hour was
already at hand which was to overwhelm all
together beneath the devouring floods of the
glacial drift.

It is singular that the discovery of this drift,
by which so many of his contemporaries, and
most probably pre-Adamite man himself, perished,
should have been made so independently of the
other, and so nearly at the same time. Like
the theory of the pre-Adamites, to which it
adapts itself like the counterpart in a puzzle, it
was rejected by the scientific world, until, as
Agassiz said, " the power of truth constrained a
recognition of the justness of what used to
produce only a compassionate smile as the lamentable
aberration of an over-strained fancy."

There is now very little doubt that Britain,
Sweden, Norway and Russia, Germany and
France, with the mountainous parts of Tyrol
and Switzerland, together with great part of
Northern Asia, were at one time covered with
ice. The British tourist may trace the path of
the huge boulders and crags hurled along by
these mighty floods, or borne away on the
icebergs, by the scratches on the rocks in the vale
of Darberis in North Wales, on those of the
mountain region which overlooks Windermere
in Westmoreland, and in the gorge near
Killarney known as the Gap of Dunloe. On the
flanks of Mount Jura, not far from Neufchâtel,
are to be seen enormous boulders of protogine
(a peculiar kind of granite), the nearest site of
which is the valley of the Rhône above its
embouchure where it falls into the lake of Geneva,
seventy miles from the spot where the boulders
are found. The great boulder-stone of Borrowdale,
and that on which the statue of Peter the
Great now stands, must have been transported
from a distance. North Germany is strewn
with boulders rent from the mountains of
Scandinavia, and which, it is most strongly argued,
could only have been carried by such agency as
icebergs.

All honour, then, to MM. Agassiz and Boucher
de Perthes for the heroic resolution with which,
they held on their way through many long
years, disregarding alike cold indifference and
active hostility, studied sneers and time-serving
criticism; but the honour of the discovery
that man really waged war against the great
pachyderms and sloths is due (under correction)
to a long-forgotten name: one which, so far as I
can discover, has not been mentioned by any of the
writers who have entered upon the controversy.
It is that of Albert Koch, who, in 1841,
published at Louisville an account of the finding of
the Missourium or mastodon of the Missouri,
the skeleton of which creature now forms a noble
and imposing object in the British Museum, and
furnishes certain proofs that this huge brute had
been assailed by hunters. "There was embedded,"
he says, in his quaint half German, half Yankee
style, "immediately under the femur, or hind
leg-bone, of this animal, an arrow-head of rose-
coloured flint, resembling those used by the
American Indians, but of larger size. This was
the only arrow-head 'immediately' with the
skeleton; but in the same strata, at a distance
of five or six feet, in a horizontal direction, four
more arrow-heads were found; three of these
were of the same formation as the preceding;
the fourth was of a very rude workmanship. One
of the last-mentioned three was of agate, the
others of blue flint. These arrow-heads are
indisputably the work of human hands. I examined
the ' deposite' in which they were embedded, and
raised them out of the ' embedment' with my own
hands."

Mr. Koch distinctly expresses his belief that
there was a human race " existing contemporary"
with the mastadons, and that the fact of
their remains not having been found was owing
to these "relicts" of the ancient world having
been generally investigated by persons not aware
of the necessity for a minute examinationa
view which he supports by the following narrative:

A farmer living on the banks of the Burbois
River, in the Gasconade country, Missouri,