Chapter I: 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

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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.”

Mr Wilson entitles the chapter which treats on this subject ‘The Promethean Instinct: Fire.’ The next chapter is headed ‘The Maritime Instinct: the Canoe.’ Then we have ‘The Technological Instinct,’ and so on. Why this ostentatious use of the term Instinct? Did men hunt after fire even before they had seen it, as an animal might be supposed to hunt after food even before it had eaten? Do men build canoes as birds their nests or beavers their dams? What is the leading idea of Mr Wilson when he thus liberally applies to us the term Instinct? We have desires and we have intelligence suggesting means to an end. Is it the desire that is instinctive, or the apprehension of the means whereby the desire can be gratified? Men have a desire to pass from one side of the river to the other; perhaps the animal they were in chase of has swam the stream; they have observed that wood will float, that a large piece of wood will float with a man on it; they procure such piece of wood, and paddle themselves across. The knowledge which the man displays in all this follows from his previous perceptions. Perception, memory, judgment, are all exercised in a quite normal manner, and the desire to float across the stream has arisen from the peculiar circumstances in which the man was placed. What element of mystery is there in this transaction which calls for the name of Instinct? For the word Instinct is applied to certain actions of animals because the ordinary laws of psychology are, or seem, inadequate to explain them—because a certain mystery hangs over the event which we mark by the name Instinct. When we see animals acting, without the teaching of experience, in the same sort of way in which we act after that teaching of experience, we, perplexed to explain this anomaly, pronounce the action instinctive. The bee and the bird build in this inexplicable manner. Probably a more minute investigation may enable us to resolve whatever we call Instinct into some delicacy of the senses, or some rapidity of the judgment, peculiar to the animal. Meanwhile the term is serviceable as marking a class of unexplained phenomena. But how is it applicable to man in his capacity of boat-builder? The sort of canoe he will build, the materials he will use, the tools he will work with, are all determined for him by existing circumstances, and the actual amount of his knowledge. Or is it the vague desire to put to sea, prompting some manner of boat-building, that Mr Wilson calls our “maritime instinct?” Are we driven to sea like ducks to a pond? The peasantry of an inland country are not conscious of any such instinct, and would be very unfortunate if they possessed it.

We have no wish to expel the terms instinct and instinctive from our popular diction, even when applied to human actions. There are cases when men act with a suddenness and decision which remind us of the animal in his promptest moods, and we naturally apply to these the term instinctive; and sometimes we apply the term to a tendency or desire which we cannot at the time trace to our senses, or to the usual operations of the mind. But when an author formally—in the very titles of his chapters—supplies us with “Promethean and maritime instincts,” we may be excused if we ask for some precise definition of the term.

“_Speech_ is one of the instincts of man, but it is by the voluntary exercise of his intellectual faculties, as we conceive, that he is enabled to develop it into _language_.” This sounds oracular, but, like most oracles, it is very obscure. What does Mr Wilson mean by speech as contrasted with language? Is speech the mere giving of names to things, and language the formation of a grammar? But grammar is only a naming of a more complex kind, a naming of things and events in their more complicated relations. And what speech was ever formed that had not some grammar, that was not also a language? If by speech, in contrast to language, is meant the mere utterance of articulate sounds which have no meaning attached to them, then what proof have we that men ever passed through a stage of unmeaning gibberish? or could anything so purposeless be dignified with the name of an instinct? The _desire_ to speak, or to communicate our thoughts or our wants, is sometimes spoken of as an instinct. But the need man has of co-operation, and the ability he has to co-operate, and those general sympathies and affections which render him a social being, are sufficient to explain this desire. Such a desire may be contemplated as existing apart and prior to the possession of language, but there can be no reason for applying the term instinct to it, unless we apply that term to all our desires. So strong and inevitable is this desire to express our thoughts, that we have not the least doubt that, if the human larynx had not been fitted for speech, man would have invented a language of signs. His hands and feet would have talked, if his tongue and palate did not. His larynx being mute and all other faculties remaining the same, he would have talked with his fingers and written as the Chinese write, whose characters are signs for things, not for words.

The maritime or boat-building instinct has, at all events, been very much under the control of circumstances. Sometimes the tree was felled and hollowed, sometimes the bark was stretched over wicker-work, or skins of beasts were employed, or planks were made into a raft. The Egyptian bound some of his water-jugs together and made a raft of them. Some tribes have limited themselves to the paddle or the oar; some have spread the sail, and spread it very boldly. The Malay hoists his large sail over a couple of planks of wood sewed together with bark, and balances this fragile craft by means of two long spars fastened athwart and projecting to windward. In such a vessel as this he will scud fearlessly through tempestuous seas from one island to another. We may boast, and very justly, of our steam-engines, our electric telegraphs, and of other triumphant employments of the powers of nature; but even to this day there is not a more pleasing or thrilling spectacle, or a more glorious instance of the powers of nature turned to the service of man, than when some solitary boatman sits, at the helm with sail outspread, borne by the wind along the surface of the sea. The water floats him, the wind speeds him; he is for the moment master of the two great elements. Verily the savage has his joy, his hour of pride and exultation.

It is curious that the natives of North America limited themselves to the oar or the paddle. The Peruvians appear to have been the only people of this continent who, at the time of its discovery by Columbus, employed the sail. This is a striking instance of the very general fact, almost amounting to a law, that when a people have attained to a certain proficiency in the arts, sufficient to render life tolerable, there ensues a long pause in the career of progress. It requires the stimulus of an urgent want to set at work the inventive faculties of the savage; and when his invention has secured to him an agreeable existence, or what he considers such, there intervenes the force of habit and the attachment to familiar customs. Fortunately the differences of climate, or other external circumstances, require or suggest different inventions, even in this early stage of society, and thus one barbarian may be able to teach another. A people who had brought the canoe propelled by oars to perfection, would probably rest contented with it; they could not have invented the sail themselves; they might receive it from another people with whom it had been, from the commencement, their favourite mode of traversing the sea. Our “technological instincts,” as Mr Wilson calls them, go to sleep in the savage when he is no longer pinched by hunger or cold, or other pressing inconvenience. They awake again in the civilised man, with whom invention itself has become an agreeable effort or an intellectual triumph. Some sort of culinary vessels are wanted, and if these have been once shaped out of clay, the same kind of pottery will content a people for ages. If nature has thrown them the calabash, a ready-made vessel, their _instinct of pottery_ will not be developed at all; they will content themselves with the calabash.

Mr Wilson brings together in a very pictorial manner the two extremes of this human art of boat-building:—

“On the banks of the Scottish Clyde the modern voyager from the New
World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those
huge steamers, with ribs of steel, and planks, not of oak, but of
iron, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier
to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and
pleasure to us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the
forehammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel
appliances of iron shipbuilding, tell of the modern era of steam; but
meanwhile, underneath these very shipbuilders’ yards, lie the
memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back up the
stream of human industry far into prehistoric times. The earliest
recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of
twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt
designation of St Enoch’s Croft. This primitive canoe, hewn out of a
single oak, rested in a horizontal position on its keel; and within
it, near the prow, there lay a curiously suggestive memorial of the
mechanical arts of the remote era to which the ancient ship of the
Clyde must be assigned. This was a beautifully finished stone axe or
celt, doubtless one of the simple implements of the allophylian
Caledonian to whom the canoe belonged, if not, indeed, the tool with
which it had been fashioned into shape.”

From the hollowed trunk of a tree, hewn with a stone axe by this “allophylian,” as Mr Wilson delights in calling him, to the iron steam-vessel that would have carried him and all his tribe across the Atlantic, the advance is great indeed. And a very curious sentiment must arise in the man who has seen this canoe dug up from under the busy streets of Glasgow, and then afterwards in another continent, on some lake or river not yet quite appropriated by the white man, has watched some prowling Indian paddling about in a canoe not much unlike it. The past and the present seem to live together before him: it is not the ends of the earth only that are brought together for him; he appears to embrace the first and the last of the generations of mankind.

We turn from the rude arts of men to their still ruder thinking—to customs springing from some sentiment or some strange imagination. Of these the most universal and the most significant are customs connected with the burial of the dead. To the habit of interring with the dead man the implements he most valued in life—his tools or weapons—we owe the little knowledge we possess of our very primitive ancestors. It is generally said that these articles were buried with the man, that he might have them ready for use in another world; and, no doubt, some vague idea of this kind has extensively prevailed: but if we may speculate on a subject so obscure as the imaginations of the savage, we should say that this idea grew out of the custom of burying with the dead man his own previous possessions, and that the custom itself at first originated in simple regret and respect for the dead. We cannot have any strong sentiment without feeling the desire in some way to manifest it. The dead man was loudly lamented—wept and wailed over—and the mourners often cut and wounded themselves as an exhibition of their grief. Well, at such a moment, instead of appropriating to themselves the possessions of the deceased, the survivors threw them into the grave with him. They were still in a manner his property. It would manifest a disrespect to the dead if at once, as soon as the hand of his chief was cold, another man had seized upon his spear and carried it to his own hut. Thus this one passionate desire to manifest grief and respect to a late friend or chief would sufficiently account for the act of interring with the body the instruments or weapons he had been in the habit of using. The custom once adopted, superstition would step in and enforce it, and the imagination would invest it with a new significance. Some poet of the land would first suggest that, if the dead man rose from his tomb, he would find himself equipped for the chase or for war. Sometimes the buried arms, vessels, or other implements, were broken before they were deposited in the grave, which does not seem to accord with the idea that they were laid there for any future use. It looks like the interpretation of a subsequent generation when it is said that the savage expected the broken tool or perforated vessel, like the decayed human body, to be restored again and made fit for his use. Here is an Indian, a Chinook, buried in his canoe. Within the canoe a broken sword is deposited. Am I to gather that the Chinook expected a maritime life hereafter, and even to revive floating upon the waters? Does not the whole act seem, at least in its initiation, to be symbolical? All was at an end. The man would float no more—would fight no more. The canoe was buried, the sword was broken.

But whether we are right or not in our supposition as to the origin of this idea—namely, that the articles buried in the tomb with the deceased would be useful to him in an after life—it is plain that such an idea has been entertained, and certainly all our learned writers upon these ancient customs of burial attribute this motive to our imaginative forefathers. When, in the old pagan burrows of the wold of Yorkshire or elsewhere, some British or Saxon charioteer has been exhumed, with the iron wheel-tires and bronzed horse-furniture (the wreck of the decayed war-chariot), and the skeletons of the horses, eloquent antiquarians have not failed to say (as Mr Wilson does) that the dead chief was buried thus “that he might enter the Valhalla of his gods, proudly borne in the chariot in which he had been wont to charge amid the ranks of his foes.” We presume they find themselves justified in this interpretation.

Here, again, we find that the new continent sets almost before the eyes of our traveller scenes similar to those which, as a European archæologist, he had been laboriously endeavouring to reconstruct in some remote antiquity.

“Upwards of forty years since, Black Bird, a famous chief of the
Omahaws, visited the city of Washington, and on his return was seized
with smallpox, of which he died on the way. When the chief found
himself dying, he called his warriors around him, and, like Jacob of
old, gave commands concerning his burial, which were as literally
fulfilled. The dead warrior was dressed in his most sumptuous robes,
fully equipped with his scalps and war-eagle’s plumes, and borne about
sixty miles below the Omahaw village to a lofty bluff on the Missouri,
which towers far above all the neighbouring heights, and commands a
magnificent extent of landscape. To the summit of this bluff a
beautiful white steed, the favourite war-horse of Black Bird, was led;
and there, in presence of the whole nation, the dead chief was placed
with great ceremony on its back, looking towards the river, where, as
he had said, he could see the canoes of the white men as they
traversed the broad waters of the Missouri. His bow was placed in his
hand, his shield and quiver, with his pipe and medicine-bag, hung by
his side. His store of pemmican and his well-filled tobacco-pouch were
supplied, to sustain him on the long journey to the hunting-grounds of
the great Manitou, where the spirits of his fathers awaited his
coming. The medicine-men of the tribe performed their most mystic
charms to secure a happy passage to the land of the great departed;
and all else being completed, each warrior of the chiefs own band
covered the palm of his right hand with vermilion, and stamped its
impress on the white sides of the devoted war-steed. This done, the
Indians gathered turfs and soil, and placed them around the feet and
the legs of the horse. Gradually the pile arose under the combined
labour of many willing hands, _until the living steed and its dead
rider were buried together under the memorial mound_; and high over
the crest of the lofty tumulus which covered the warrior’s eagle
plumes a cedar post was reared, to mark more clearly to the voyagers
on the Missouri the last resting-place of Black Bird, the great chief
of the Omahaws.”

But there is one passage in Mr Wilson’s book which, we think, to the student of the ancient myth or religious legend must be replete with interest. It occurs in the chapter which treats on the use of tobacco and that custom of smoking which we have imported from the savage, much to the delectation, no doubt, of those who inhale the fumes of what they are pleased to call the fragrant weed, and much, assuredly, to the disgust and suffering of those who are involved, most unwillingly, in the smoke which others are _ex_haling around them. Never were two parties more sharply divided than the smokers and the non-smokers. The first will doubtless agree with the Indian in the belief that tobacco was of divine origin. Did not two hunters of the Susquehannas share their venison with a lovely squaw who mysteriously appeared before them in the forest? and did they not, “on returning to the scene of their feast thirteen moons after, find the tobacco-plant growing where she had sat?” and do not Indians tell us that the Great Spirit freely indulges in the intoxicating fumes which they themselves love so well? The non-smokers hold a different faith. They see no celestial gift in this black, fuliginous amusement; and if they do not ascribe to it a devilish origin, they assert that it is enjoyed with a devilish indifference to those to whom their beloved smoke is but stench and sickness. Into this custom of tobacco-smoking Mr Wilson enters at large, and bestows much learning on the inquiry; but it is especially to the institution of the pipe of peace amongst the Indians that we would now direct the attention of the reader.

We have, as Mr Wilson tells the story, the complete _dissection_ of a myth; we see how a legend arises, or may arise, partly from the most trivial causes, and partly from generous impulses and high imaginations. Between the Minnesota and the Missouri rivers there stands a bold perpendicular cliff, “beautifully marked with distinct horizontal layers of light grey and rose or _flesh-coloured_ quartz.” Near this a famous red pipe-stone is procured; a material, we presume, better fitted than any other for making pipes. Traces of both ancient and modern excavation prove that it has been the resort, during many generations, of Indian tribes, seeking this famous red pipe-stone. A spot to which independent tribes came for this purpose, and for this only, became neutral ground; became a spot on which they might meet in peace—perhaps to discuss their points of difference. But in process of time it became a sacred spot, and the peace between hostile tribes was preserved by a religious sanction. There are marks on the rock resembling the track of a large bird. These were converted into the footsteps of the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit, therefore, at one time descended upon the rock and taught—what else could he be supposed to teach?—the sacred neutrality of the spot, and the privilege and duty of all tribes to renew their pipes there, and especially the calumet, or pipe of peace. The last version of the tradition runs thus:—

“Many ages,” say the Sioux, “after the red men were made, when all the
different tribes were at war, the Great Spirit called them all
together at the Red Rocks. He stood on the top of the rocks, and the
red nations were assembled in infinite numbers in the plain below. He
took out of the rock a piece of the red stone, and made a large pipe.
He smoked it over them all; told them that it was part of their flesh;
that though they were at war they must meet at this place as friends;
that it belonged to them all; that they must make their calumets from
it, and smoke them to him whenever they wished to appease him or get
his goodwill. The smoke from his big pipe rolled over them all, and he
disappeared in the cloud.”

The Sioux, notwithstanding this good teaching of the very tradition which they still repeat to the stranger, have, by the right of the strongest, taken possession of the sacred neutral ground; and they, and all other tribes of the red race, are either being absorbed into the white population or exterminated by it. The development of the myth and the people of the myth has been therefrom alike arrested. But how clearly we see its growth and formation! To what a mystical faith that flesh-coloured quartz was conducting! And what mingling of the divine and human would have been suggested by the act recorded of the Great Spirit! If these Indian tribes had finally coalesced in one nation, the myth would have been exalted, and the Great Spirit would have taught them an eternal bond of peace and brotherhood. If civilisation and culture had still further advanced, this peace and brotherhood would have embraced all mankind, and assumed the form of the highest moral teaching.

A considerable portion of Mr Wilson’s book is occupied with those ancient remains, whether in the valley of the Mississippi or in the forests of Central America, which speak of a civilisation, or at least of nations and of cities that had existed and left their ruins behind them, anterior to what we call the discovery of the New World. The subject is highly interesting, and it loses none of its interest in the hands of our author. He speaks very decidedly on the great antiquity of the mounds and the earthworks of the valley of the Mississippi; less decidedly on the antiquity of the monumental pillars and other architectural remains which were first brought to the knowledge of the English public through the travels of Mr Stephens in Central America. The work of Mr Squiers still contains, we believe, the fullest account we possess of those vast circular mounds, and other extraordinary earthworks, discovered within the territory of the United States. Both these writers, Mr Stephens and Mr Squiers, produced at the time of the publication of their several works a very vivid impression on the reading public of England. Both of them broke ground into quite new fields of inquiry, but both of them left the mind rather excited than informed. This was to be expected when the subject was of so novel and surprising a character. Mr Squiers saw evidences of serpent-worship and of other religious rites which his study of the antiquities of the Old World had made familiar to his imagination, in the circular mounds which he traced in the open field: and Mr Stephens, as he broke his way through the forests, saw the ruins of another Egypt stand before him.

That no tradition should exist amongst the present race of Indians with respect to these primitive “mound-builders,” is not surprising; nor would this alone indicate any very great antiquity. Mr Wilson thinks the state in which the skeletons were found within the tumuli—crumbling to dust on being touched—is sufficient proof of their great age. One must know all the circumstances of the burial, all the influences to which the skeleton has been exposed, before any safe conclusion can be drawn from this fact. But, leaving undetermined the antiquity of these remains, we think it plain that the first discoverers of them, whether of the mounds or of the ruined cities, have, with the natural enthusiasm pertaining to all discoverers, exaggerated the evidence they display of civilisation, or progress in the arts. After all, the soundest opinion seems to be that the “mound-builders” and the builders of the deserted cities were but the intellectual progenitors of those half-civilised Mexicans and Peruvians whom the Spaniards encountered and destroyed. It is not likely that any higher or equal state of civilisation had been attained and lost before the arrival of the Spaniards.

The quite circular form of an extensive mound or earthwork is thought to imply a knowledge of geometry or trigonometry, because a modern surveyor would proceed in a certain scientific manner to lay out such a circle. But the slow process of measuring a number of radii from a given centre, and connecting their terminal points, would probably have sufficed for all that these early geometers executed. Or they might have drawn a smaller circle, in the first instance, by a movable radius, and then traced a larger and a larger one outside of this, till they had obtained one of the requisite magnitude. Time and labour will accomplish much, and with very little help from art or science. But where imagination seems to play the subtlest tricks with our antiquarians is in their appreciation of the beautiful in such relics of the fine arts as are discovered in these mounds and cities. We have prints given us here of carved pipes found in the tombs, which we are told are very beautiful. To our eye they do not look beautiful at all, and very little in advance of other prints which represent pipes carved by the present race of Red Indians. But it is when the antiquarian critic finds himself amongst the remains of the rude sculptures of Central America that he shows himself most under the influence of this _glamour_. If we had not the pictures or engravings by which to check the text, we should think that Thebes and Memphis had been long ago outrivalled on the other side of the Atlantic.

Our readers, we are sure, have not forgotten Mr Stephens’s book of travels; they will remember how he entered with his guide into what seemed an untrodden forest at Copan, apparently undisturbed from its very creation; and how, as he made his way with his axe through the brushwood, he found himself face to face with an upright column of stone elaborately carved. In the centre of this a human face of gigantic proportions stared out upon him. Some of these monuments had been overpowered by the vigorous growth of the surrounding trees, and displaced from their upright position by huge branches that half encircled them; others lay upon the ground, as if bound down by the vines and other great creepers of the American forest. Nothing disturbed the solitude of the scene except a grimacing procession of monkeys, who from the branches of the trees were looking alternately at the traveller, and at the mysterious objects which had attracted the traveller’s attention. As he proceeded he came upon a truncated pyramid, with a flight of steps leading to a broad surface, on which evidently some other structure had been raised; and then again he entered a square enclosure with steps, which might have been intended for seats, running up on all sides, reminding him of a Roman amphitheatre. No books had told him of the existence even of this ruined city. Who had built it, who had lived in it, no one could say. The people of the country could only answer him with their “_Quien sabe?_” who knows?—an answer always sufficient for themselves. There was not even a tradition, not even a palpable lie, to be heard. Men were as silent about these cities as the forest itself.

What wonder that the enthusiasm of the traveller should be excited, and that he should see more than the eye—as a simple optical instrument—disclosed to him? Assuredly his enthusiasm as to the beauty of the sculpture is not supported by the drawings he has given us. He commends to us these drawings of the artist as being, “next to the stones themselves,” the most perfect materials on which to form our judgment. And of one thing we may be certain, that a modern artist, trained to the correct representation of the human figure, would err, if he erred at all, by _improving the drawing_ in these grotesque sculptures. It would require a distinct effort in the modern artist to depart from the true outline and proportions of the human form; and whenever his attention relaxed, he would infallibly become more correct than his original. Well, we see in the delineation here given us a mere pillar, in the centre of which is carved a human face, and lower down two fat arms, which the imagination is to connect with the unmeaning face above them; and we are told in the text “that the character of this image is grand, and it would be difficult to exceed the richness of the ornament.” We turn the page and see another gigantic head, with huge saucer eyes, such as a child would draw, and we are told that “the style is good,” and that “the great expansion of the eyes seems intended to inspire awe.” So are the masks sold in our toy-shops to mischief-loving boys. But very silly savages must those have been in whom such absurd figures could have inspired awe. Mr Stephens is constantly being “arrested by the beauty of the sculpture.” The bas-reliefs at Palenque are indeed superior to anything he met with at Copan, and some drawings from these exhibit an unexpected grace, and an outline _perhaps_ unconsciously improved by the hand of the artist. But here also we are startled at the discrepancy between the description of the enraptured traveller and the representation in the engravings. We have, in one of them, a figure sitting cross-legged upon a narrow bench; his legs are tucked up under him painfully tight, and his balance must be preserved with great difficulty; his large nose is in manifest danger of breaking itself upon the floor. We are told that this figure sits “on a couch, ornamented with two leopards’ heads,” and that “the _attitude is easy_, and the expression calm and benevolent.” The first discoverer must evidently have looked with something of a lover’s eye.