of Things. Despite its errors, it remains among the most remarkable examples of prophetic insight in the history of our race. The inspiration of Lucretius gave him almost miraculous glimpses of truth; his view of the development of civilization from the rudest beginnings to the height of its achievements is a wonderful growth, rooted in observation and thought, branching forth into a multitude of striking facts and fancies; and among these is the statement regarding the sequence of inventions: "Man's earliest arms were fingers, teeth, and nails, And stones and fragments from the branching woods; The tyrant, iron." Thus did the poet prophesy one of the most fruitful achievements of modern science: the discovery of that series of epochs which has been so carefully studied in our century. Very striking, also, is the statement of Horace, though his idea is evidently derived from Lucretius. He dwells upon man's first condition on earth as low and bestial, and pictures him lurking in caves, progressing from the use of his fists and nails, first to clubs, then to arms which he had learned to forge, and, finally, to the invention of the names of things, to literature, and to laws.* During the medieval ages of faith this view was almost * For the passage in Hesiod, as given, see the Works and Days, lines 109-120, in Banks's translation. As to Horace, see the Satires, i, 3, 99. As to the relation of the poetic account of the Fall in Genesis to Chaldean myths, see Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, pp. 13, 17. For a very instructive separation of the Jehovistic and Elohistic parts of Genesis, with the account of the "Fall" as given in the former, see Lenormant, La Génése, Paris, 1883, pp. 166-168; also Bacon, Genesis of Genesis. Of the lines of Lucretius “ Arma antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt, Sed prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus " the translation given is that of Good. For a more exact prose translation, see Munro's Lucretius, fourth edition, which is much more careful, at least in the proof-reading, than the first edition. As regards Lucretius's prophetic insight into some of the greatest conclusions of modern science, see Munro's translation and notes, fourth edition, book v, notes ii, p. 335. On the relation of several passages in Horace to the ideas of Lucretius, see Munro as above. For the passage from Luther, see the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, p. 242. entirely obscured, and at the Reformation it seemed likely to remain so. Typical of the simplicity of belief in "the Fall" cherished among the Reformers is Luther's declaration regarding Adam and Eve. He tells us, "they entered into the garden about noon, and having a desire to eat, she took the apple; then came the fall-according to our account at about two o'clock." But in the revival of learning the old eclipsed truth reappeared, and in the first part of the seventeenth century we find that, among the crimes for which Vanini was sentenced at Toulouse to have his tongue torn out and to be burned alive, was his belief that there is a gradation extending upward from the lowest to the highest form of created beings. Yet, in the same century, the writings of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal were evidently undermining the old idea of "the Fall." Bodin especially, brilliant as were his services to orthodoxy, argued lucidly against the doctrine of general human deterioration. Early in the eighteenth century Vico presented the philosophy of history as an upward movement of man out of animalism and barbarism. This idea took firm hold upon human thought, and in the following centuries such men as Lessing and Turgot gave new force to it. The investigations of the last forty years have shown that Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets: what they saw by the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius, has been now thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained and arranged-until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern archæologists, have brought these prophecies to evident fulfilment, by presenting a scientific classification dividing the age of prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an old stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten copper, a period of bronze, and a period of iron, and arraying vast masses of facts from all parts of the world, fitting thoroughly into each other, strengthening each other, and showing beyond a doubt that, instead of a fall, there has been a rise of man, from the earliest indications in the Quaternary, or even, possibly, in the Tertiary period.* * For Vanini, see Topinard, Éléments d'Anthropologie, p. 52. For a brief and careful summary of the agency of Eccard in Germany, Goguet in France, Hoare in England, and others in various parts of Europe, as regards this development of the The first blow at the fully developed doctrine of "the Fall" came, as we have seen, from geology. According to that doctrine, as held quite generally from its beginnings among the fathers and doctors of the primitive Church down to its culmination in the minds of great Protestants like John Wesley, the statement in our sacred books that "death entered the world by sin" was taken as a historic fact, necessitating the conclusion that, before the serpent persuaded Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, death on our planet was unknown. Naturally, when geology revealed, in the strata of a period long before the coming of man on earth, a vast multitude of carnivorous tribes fitted to destroy their fellow-creatures on land and sea, and within the fossilized skeletons of many of these the partially digested remains of animals, this doctrine was too heavy to be carried, and it was quietly dropped. But about the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrine of the rise of man as opposed to the doctrine of his "fall" received a great accession of strength from a source most unexpected. As we saw in the last chapter, the facts proving the great antiquity of man foreshadowed a new and even more remarkable idea regarding him. We saw, it is true, that the opponents of Boucher de Perthes, while they could not deny his discovery of human implements in the drift, were successful in securing a verdict of "Not proven " as regarded his discovery of human bones; but their triumph was short-lived. Many previous discoveries, little thought of up to that time, began to be studied, and others were added which resulted not merely in confirming the truth regarding the antiquity of man, but in establishing another doctrine which the opponents of science regarded with vastly greater dislike-the doctrine that man has not fallen from an scientific view during the eighteenth century, see Mortillet, Le Préhistorique, Paris, 1885, chap. i. For the agency of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal, see Flint, Philosophy of History, introduction, pp. 28 et seq. For a shorter summary, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Man. For the statements by the northern archæologists, see Nilsson, Worsaae, and the other main works cited in this article. For a generous statement regarding the great services of the Danish archæologists in this field, see Quatrefages, introduction to Cartailhac, Les Ages Préhistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal. original high estate in which he was created about six thou. sand years ago, but that, from a period vastly earlier than any warranted by the sacred chronologists, he has been, in spite of lapses and deteriorations, rising. A brief review of this new growth of truth may be useful. As early as 1835 Prof. Jaeger had brought out from a quantity of Quaternary remains dug up long before at Cannstadt, near Stuttgart, a portion of a human skull, apparently of very low type. A battle raged about it for a time, but this finally subsided, owing to uncertainties arising from the circumstances of the discovery. In 1856, in the Neanderthal, near Düsseldorf, among Quaternary remains gathered on the floor of a grotto, another skull was found bearing the same evidence of a low human type. As in the case of the Cannstadt skull, this again was fiercely debated, and finally the questions regarding it were allowed to remain in suspense. But new discoveries were made: at Eguisheim, at Brux, at Spy, and elsewhere, human skulls were found of a similarly low type; and, while each of the earlier discoveries was open to debate, and either, had no other been discovered, might have been considered an abnormal specimen, the combination of all these showed conclusively that not only had a race of men existed at that remote period, but that it was of a type as low as the lowest, perhaps below the lowest, now known. Research was now redoubled, and, as a result, human skulls and complete skeletons of various types began to be discovered in the ancient deposits of many other parts of the world, and especially in France, Belgium, Germany, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America. But soon began to emerge from all these discoveries a fact of enormous importance. The skulls and bones found at Cro Magnon, Solutré, Furfooz, Grenelle, and elsewhere, were compared, and it was thus made certain that various races had already appeared and lived in various grades of civilization, even in those exceedingly remote epochs; that even then there were various strata of humanity ranging from races of a very low to those of a very high type; and that upon any theory-certainly upon the theory of the origin of mankind from a single pair-two things were evi dent: first, that long, slow processes during vast periods of time must have been required for the differentiation of these races, and for the evolution of man up to the point where the better specimens show him, certainly in the early Quaternary and perhaps in the Tertiary period; and, secondly, that there had been from the first appearance of man, of which we have any traces, an upward tendency.* This second conclusion, the upward tendency of man from low beginnings, was made more and more clear by bringing into relations with these remains of human bodies and of extinct animals the remains of human handiwork. As stated in the last chapter, the river drift and bone caves in Great Britain, France, and other parts of the world, revealed a progression, even in the various divisions of the earliest Stone period; for, beginning at the very lowest strata of these remains, on the floors of the caverns, associated mainly with the bones of extinct animals, such as the cave bear, the hairy elephant, and the like, were the rudest implements; then, in strata above these, sealed in the stalagmite of the cavern floors, lying with the bones of animals extinct but more recent, stone implements were found, still rude, but, as a rule, of an improved type; and, finally, in a still higher stratum, associated with bones of animals like the reindeer and bison, which, though not extinct, have departed to other climates, were rude stone implements, on the whole of a still better workmanship. Such was the foreshadowing, even at that early rude Stone period, of the proofs that the tendency * For Wesley's statement of the amazing consequences of the entrance of death into the world by sin, see citations from his sermon on The Fall of Man in the chapter on Geology. For Boucher de Perthes, see his Life by Ledieu, especially chapters v and xix; also letters in the appendix; also Les Antiquités Celtiques et Antediluviennes, as cited in previous chapters of this work. For an account of the Neanderthal man and other remains mentioned, see Quatrefages, Human Species, chap. xxvi; also Mortillet, Le Préhistorique, Paris, 1885, pp. 232 et seq.; also other writers cited in this chapter. For the other discoveries mentioned, see the same sources. For an engraving of the skull and the restored human face of the Neanderthal man, see Reinach, Antiquités Nationales, etc., vol. i, p. 138. For the vast regions over which that early race spread, see Quatrefages as above, p. 307. See also the same author, Histoire Général des Races Humaines, in the Bibliothèque Ethnologique, Paris, 1887, p. 4. In the vast mass of literature bearing on this sub ject, see Quatrefages, Dupont, Reinach, Joly, Mortillet, Tylor, and Lubbock, in works cited through these chapters. |