So far the picture is true to nature; but no dream of a millennial era for the Red Man, in which all were thenceforth to live together as brothers, can have fashioned itself in the mind of Indian seer. The Sioux, the Crees, and the Blackfeet, still continued to nurse the same feud of ages, and thirsted for each other’s blood, while European emigrants crowd in to take possession of their vast prairies, destined to become the granaries of the world. The buffalo, on which they mainly depended for their food, and their téepees or tents, have vanished from their prairies, and will ere long be as extinct as the fossil urus or mastodon. The Red Man of the North-West exhibits no change from his precursors of the fifteenth century; and for aught that appears in him of a capacity for self-development, the forests and prairies of the American continent may have sheltered hunting and warring tribes of Indians, just as they have sheltered and pastured its wild herds of buffaloes, for countless centuries since the continent rose from its ocean bed.

Only by prolonged hereditary feuds, more insatiable, and therefore more destructive in their results than the ravages of tigers or wolves, is it possible to account for such an unprogressive condition of humanity as the archæological disclosures of the northern continent seem to reveal? Its numerous rivers and lakes, and its boundless forests and prairies, afforded inexhaustible resources for the hunter, and both soil and climate have proved admirably adapted for agriculture. Still more, the great copper region of Lake Superior provided advantages such as have existed in few other countries of the known world for developing the first stages of metallurgic art on which civilisation so largely depends. Whether brought with them from Asia, or discovered for themselves, the grand secret of the mastery of the ores by fire was already familiar to Peruvian metallurgists, and not unknown to those of Mexico. Unalloyed copper, such as that which abounds in the igneous rocks of the Keweenaw peninsula on Lake Superior, is extremely difficult to cast; and the addition of a small percentage of tin not only produces the useful bronze alloy, but renders the copper more readily fusible. This all-important secret of science the metallurgists of Peru had discovered for themselves, and turned largely to practical account. The pictured chronicles of the Mexicans throw an interesting light on the value they attached to the products of this novel art. It appears from some of their paintings that the tribute due by certain provinces was paid in wedges of copper. The forms of these, as well as of chisels and other tools of bronze, are simple, and indicate no great ingenuity in adapting the moulded metal to the artificer’s or the combatant’s requirements. The methods of hafting the axe-blade appear to have been of nearly the same rude description as are in use by modern savages in fitting the handle to a hatchet of flint or stone; and the whole characteristics of their implements suggest the probability that their metallurgy was a recently acquired art, derived from the civilised races on whom they had intruded as conquerors.

Such knowledge, partial as it was, must have been derived from the south. Everywhere to the north of the Mexican Gulf we look in vain for anything more than the mere hammered native copper, untouched by fire. Dr. J. W. Foster does indeed quote Mr. Perkins, who himself possesses sixty copper implements, including knives, spear heads, chisels, and objects of anomalous form, as having arrived at the conclusion “that, by reason of certain markings, it was evident that the Mound-Builders possessed the art of smelting copper,”^[69] but the illustrations produced in proof of it scarcely bear out the opinion. The same idea has been repeatedly advanced; but the contents of the Mounds amply prove that if such a knowledge had dawned on their builders it was turned to no practical account. Mr. Charles Rau, in his Ancient Aboriginal Trade in North America, says: “Although the fire on the hearths or altars now enclosed by the sacrificial mounds was sometimes sufficiently strong to melt the deposited copper articles, it does not seem that this proceeding induced the ancient inhabitants to avail themselves of fire in working copper; they persisted in the tedious practice of hammering. Yet one copper axe, evidently cast, and resembling those taken from the mounds of Ohio, has been ploughed up near Auburn, in Cayuga, in the State of New York. This specimen, which bears no trace of use, may date from the earlier times of European colonisation. It certainly would be wrong to place much stress on such an isolated case.”^[70] The well-known volume of Messrs. Squier and Davis furnishes illustrations of copper and other metallic relics from the mounds of Ohio.^[71] Mr. J. T. Short engraves a variety of similar relics from Wisconsin, where they appear to have been found in unusual abundance.^[72] In the Annual Report of the Historical Society of Wisconsin for 1878 the copper implements in their collection are stated to number one hundred and ninety implements, classified as spear or dirk heads, knives, chisels, axes, augurs, gads, and drills, in addition to beads, tubes, and other personal ornaments made out of thin sheets of hammered copper. Dr. J. W. Foster has furnished illustrations of the various types from the valuable collection of Mr. Perkins.^[73] Colonel Charles C. Jones engraves a specimen of the rarely known copper implements of Georgia;^[74] and Dr. Abbott shows the prevailing forms of the same class of relics found along the whole northern Atlantic seaboard.^[75] All tell the same tale of rudest manipulation by a people ignorant of the working of metals with the use of fire.

And yet the native copper was ready to hand in a form and in quantity unknown elsewhere. No such supplies of the pure metal invited the industry of the first Asiatic or European metallurgists. The Cassiterides yielded in abundance the ores of copper and tin, but these had to be smelted and worked with all the accumulated results of tentative skill before they yielded the copper or more useful bronze. By whom or where this first knowledge was mastered is unknown: the tendency is still to look to Asia, perhaps to Phœnicia, or to the still undetermined cradle of the Aryans, wherever that may prove to have been, for the birth of this phase of metallurgic art which constituted so important a stage in early civilisation. Yet if the ancient American missed it, it was not for want of opportunity. Examples of the accidental fusion of copper by the sacrificial fires of the Mound-Builders repeatedly occur in the mounds of the Ohio valley. But no gifted native alchymist was prompt to read the lesson and turn it to practical account.

Asia and Europe appear to have passed by a natural transition, step by step, from their rudest stages of lithic art to polished stone, and then to implements of metal. Some of the steps were doubtless very slow. Worsaae believed that the use of bronze prevailed in Denmark “five or six hundred years before the birth of Christ.”^[76] In Egypt it undoubtedly was known at a greatly earlier date. I still incline to my early formed opinion, that gold was the first metal worked. Found in nuggets, it could scarcely fail to attract attention. It was easy to fashion into shape; and some of the small, highly polished stone hammers seem fitter for this than any other work.^[77] The abundant gold ornaments of the New World at the time of the discovery of Mexico and Peru accord with this idea. The like attraction of the bright native copper, is proved by its employment among the southern Indians for personal ornaments; and in this way the economic use of the metals may have been first suggested.

From the working of gold nuggets, or of virgin copper, with the hammer, to the smelting of the ores, was no trifling step; but that knowledge once gained, the threshold of civilisation and true progress had been reached. The history of the grand achievement is embodied in the earliest myths both of the Old and the New World. Tubal-cain, Dædalus, Hephæstus, Vulcan, Vœlund, Galant, the Luno or the Celtic Fingal, and Wayland, the Saxon smith-god, are but legendary variations of the first worker by whom the gift of metallurgy was communicated to man; and so too the New World has its Quetzalcoatl, or Vœlund of the Aztecs, the divine instructor of their ancestors in the use of the metals. But whatever be the date of this wise instructor, no share of the knowledge communicated by him to that favoured race appears to have ever penetrated northward of the Mexican Gulf.

It is vain to urge such dubious evidence as the fancied traces of a mould-ridge, or the solitary example of a casting of uncertain age, in proof of a knowledge of the furnace and the crucible among any North American tribe. Everywhere in Europe the soil yields not only its buried relics of gold, copper, and bronze, but also stone and bronze moulds in which implements and personal ornaments were cast. When the ingenious systematising of Danish archæologists had familiarised the students of antiquity with the idea of a succession of Stone, Bronze, and Iron periods in the history of Europe, the question naturally followed, whether metallurgy did not begin, there, as elsewhere, in the easy working of virgin copper. Dr. Latham accordingly remarked, in his Ethnology of the British Islands, on the supposition that no unalloyed copper relics had been found in Britain: “Stone and bone first; then bronze, or copper and tin combined; but no copper alone. I cannot get over this hiatus; cannot imagine a metallurgic industry beginning with the use of alloys.” It was a mistake, however, to assume that no copper relics had ever been found. At first it had been taken for granted that all such implements were of the familiar alloy. But so soon as the importance of the distinction was recognised, examples of pure copper were forthcoming. So early as 1822, Sir David Brewster described a large axe of peculiar shape, and formed of copper, which was found in the hard black till-clay at a depth of twenty feet under Ratho Bog, near Edinburgh. This is no solitary example. The Scottish Museum of Antiquities has other implements of pure copper; and Sir William Wilde states in reference to the collections of the Royal Irish Academy: “upon careful examination, it has been found that thirty of the rudest, and apparently the very oldest celts, are of red, almost unalloyed copper”; as is also the case with some other rudely formed tools in the same collection.

It was a temporary advantage, doubtless, but a real loss, to the Indian miners of Lake Superior that they found the native copper there ready to hand, a pure ductile metal, probably regarded by them as only a variety of stone which—unlike its rocky matrix,—they could bend, or hammer into shape, without fracture. Its value as such was widely appreciated. Copper tools, everywhere retaining the specs, or larger crystals of silver, characteristic of the Lake Superior veins, tell of the diffusion of the metal from that single source throughout all the vast regions watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries, and eastward by lake and river to the gulf of the St. Lawrence and the mouth of the Hudson.

There was a time when this traffic must have been systematically carried on; when the ancient miners of Lake Superior worked its rich copper veins with industrious zeal; and when, probably as part of the same aggressive energy, the valley of the Ohio was filling with a settled population; its great earthworks were in process of construction, and a native race entered on a course that gave promise of social progress. But, from whatever cause, the work of the old miners was abruptly terminated;^[78] the race of the Mounds vanished from the scenes of their ingenious toil; and rudest barbarism resumed its sway over the whole northern continent. The same Aryan race that, before the dawn of history, before the Sanskrit-speaking people of India, or the Zends of Persia, entered on their southern homes, spoke in its own cradleland the mother tongue of Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic, and German, at length broke up and went forth on its long wanderings. Whatever peoples it found there; they were replaced by Celts, Romans, Greeks, Slavs, and Teutons, who broke in upon the barbarism of prehistoric Europe; displaced the older races, Allophylian, Neolithic, Iberian, Finnic, or by whatever other name we may find it convenient to designate them; but not without a considerable intermingling of the old blood with that of the intruders. The sparsely settled continent gradually filled up. Forests were cleared, swamps drained, rivers confined by artificial banks and levées to their channels; and there grew up in their new homes the Celtic, Classic, Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, with all the varied culture and civilisation which they represent. Agriculture, the special characteristic of the whole Aryan race, flourished. They brought with them the cereals; and, with plenty, the favoured race multiplied, till at length it has grown straitened within the bounds of the old continent which it had made its own.

With the close of the fifteenth century one great cycle, that of Europe’s mediæval era, came to an end; and then we trace the first beginnings of that fresh scattering of the Aryan clan, and its new western movement across the Ocean. It seems in a very striking manner once more to repeat itself under our own eyes, as we look abroad on the millions crowding from Europe and filling up the western wilderness; hewing down the forests, cultivating the waste prairies, and everywhere displacing the rude aborigines: yet here also not without some interblending of the races; though the two types, Aryan and pre-Aryan, meet under all the repellent influences of high civilisation and the lowest barbarism. In the Canadian North-West alone, the young province of Manitoba began its political existence with a population of between 10,000 and 12,000 half-breeds; in part at least, a hardy race of hunters and farmers; the representatives of what is as certainly destined to constitute an element in the new phases which the Aryan race already begins to assume, under the diverse conditions of a new continent, as that curious trace of Europe’s pre-Aryan people which attracted the observant attention of Tacitus among the ancient Britons; and which we are learning to recognise, with a new significance, as the Melanochroi: the representatives of the old half-breed of Europe’s prehistoric dawn.

The ingenious arts of the palæolithic cave-dwellers of the Vézère abundantly prove that it needed no wanderers from the cradlelands of Old World civilisation to that strange Atlantis lying in the engirdling ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to engraft their artistic capacities on the “Achoriens” by whom it was peopled. The innate faculty for art has manifested itself in individuals and in nations, among widely diverse Assyrian, Egyptian, Hellenic, Arabian, and mediæval races, as in later Frank, Fleming, and Dane, with unaccountable partiality. For its absence, or very subordinate manifestation, is seen to be compatible with the highest intellectual triumphs in other directions. The arts of Britain’s Allophyliæ manifest no instinctive aim at a reproduction of familiar natural objects, such as is characteristic of some races at a very primitive stage. Nor was it till a recent generation that the stock from which Shakespeare and Newton sprung put forth its first efforts at rivalling the great masters of the Renaissance, or entering into competition with the skilled painters of the Low Countries. It is otherwise with the nations of the New World. The highest stage of civilisation attained there is a very partial one. But among the various characteristics of the American aborigines which invite attention, the very wide diffusion of an aptitude for imitative art is one that merits careful study as typical of American man. It is not, indeed, to be overlooked that if due allowance be made for the narrow range in degrees of civilisation among the races of the New World, the same diversity of racial characteristics is observable there as elsewhere. The tendency, moreover, of civilisation is to efface, or greatly to modify, such distinctions. Civilised nations habitually borrow the arts and imitate the social habits of neighbouring races, or accept some common standard of intellectual and moral pre-eminence. Nevertheless, while the capacity for imitative art is neither peculiar to the New World, nor characteristic of all its diverse nationalities, it appears to be more generally diffused among the races of America than elsewhere. It is prevalent among tribes in nearly every condition, from the rude Indian nomad, or the Eskimo, to the semi-civilised Zuñi, and the skilled metallurgists and architects of Central America and Peru.

This development of a feeling for art in savage races is at all times interesting as indicative of intellectual capacity and powers of observation, even when manifested, as it frequently is, within a very narrow range. It is by no means a general characteristic either of savage or civilised man. Yet recent archæological discoveries prove it to have been one of the earliest forms of intellectual activity among the cave-dwellers of Europe’s palæolithic dawn. The most civilised nations have differed widely in the manifestations of this æsthetic faculty. The city of Dante was the Athens of the Middle Ages in art as well as letters; while the land which gave birth to Shakespeare can scarcely be said to have had a native school of painting or sculpture till late in the eighteenth century. The like differences are observable among barbarous nations. Races are met with, to whom the drawing of a familiar object suggests no idea of the original; while others, in nearly the same stage of savage life, habitually practise the representation of natural objects in the decorative details of their implements and articles of dress, and in the carvings which furnish occupation for many leisure hours.

A special interest attaches to the disclosures of archæology relative to the prehistoric races of Europe, owing to the evidence thereby furnished of striking resemblances in their arts and conditions of life to those of uncultured races of our own day. In many respects it seems as though the present condition of some existing races of America only repeats that of Europe’s infancy. But so far as imitative art is concerned, the analogy fails when the more recent contents of the barrows, cairns, and grave mounds of prehistoric Europe are brought into comparison with those of the New World. If, indeed, we leave behind us the age of cromlechs, kistvaens, cairns, and barrows, and seek to estimate aright the disclosures of artistic ability pertaining to the far more ancient men of Europe’s Mammoth and Reindeer periods, it is otherwise. But, before reviewing the wonderfully definite glimpses thereby furnished of tribes of rude yet skilful hunters of that post-glacial world, it may be of some help, in the comparisons which they suggest, to recall impressions derived from a study of that Stone period in which the natives of the British Islands appear to have approximated, in many respects, to the Red Indian nomad of the American forest.

One little-heeded point of evidence of this correspondence, to which I long since drew attention, is to be found in the traces of artificial modification of the head-form in ancient British crania; a comparison of which with skulls recovered from Indian grave mounds helps to throw light on the habits and social life of the British Islands in prehistoric times. In illustration of this I may refer to an exploration, now of old date. In the early summer of 1851, I learned of the accidental exposure of a stone cist, in trenching a garden at Juniper Green, a few miles distant from Edinburgh, and immediately proceeded to the spot. There, under a slightly elevated knoll—the remains, in all probability, of the ancient barrow,—lay a rude sarcophagus of unhewn sandstone, within which was a male skeleton, still in good preservation. The body had been laid on its left side, with the arms folded over the breast, and the knees drawn up so as to touch the elbows. A flat water-worn stone formed the pillow, from which the skull had rolled to the bottom of the cist. Above the right shoulder stood a gracefully formed clay vase, containing only a little sand and black dust, the remains, it may be presumed, of food which it originally contained when deposited there by affectionate hands, in some long-forgotten century. It was recovered uninjured, and is now deposited, along with the skull, in the Archæological Museum of Edinburgh.

The primitive grave, thus discovered within sight of the Scottish capital, has a curious interest as a link connecting the present with a remote past. But the special point which throws light on the habits of the ancient race, is a parieto-occipital flattening, such as is of common occurrence in skulls recovered from American ossuaries and grave mounds. This feature is clearly traceable to the use of the cradle-board in infancy. The mode of nursing the Indian papoose, by bandaging it on a cradle-board, is specially adapted to the vicissitudes of a nomad forest life. The infant is carried safely, slung on the mother’s back, leaving her hands free; and in the pauses of her journey, or when engaged in field work, it can be laid aside, or suspended from the branch of a tree, without risk of injury. But one result of this custom is that the soft bones of the skull are subjected to a continuous pressure in one direction during the whole term of suckling, which is necessarily protracted, among a nomad people, much longer than is usual in settled communities; and to this cause is undoubtedly traceable the occipital flattening of many skulls recovered from European cists and barrows. Dr. L. A. Gosse, after discussing in his Essai sur les déformations artificielles du Crâne certain artificial modifications of the skull, of common occurrence among the aborigines of the New World, thus proceeds: “Passant dans l’ancient continent, ne tardons-nous pas à reconnaître que ce berceau plat et solide y a produit des effets analogues. Les anciens habitants de la Scandinavie et de la Calédonie devaient s’en servir, si l’on en juge par la forme de leurs crânes.”^[79]

Full-sized representations of the Juniper Green skull, and others of the same type, are given in Crania Britannica.^[80] Bateman also, in his Ten Years’ Diggings in Celtic and Saxon Gravehills, concurs with earlier writers in ascribing to the use of the cradle-board the flattened occiput observed in skulls recovered from British barrows. The employment, indeed, of the cradle-board among prehistoric races of Northern Europe, and their nomad life of which it is so characteristic a feature, may now be considered as generally recognised. The implements and pottery recovered from graves of the period show their constructors to have been, for the most part, devoid of any knowledge of metals; or, at best, in the mere rudimentary stage of metallurgic arts. But the Juniper Green cist, that of the large Staffordshire barrow of Wotton Hill, that of Roundway Hill, North Wilts, another of Green Lowe, Derbyshire, and others described in the works above referred to, while all disclosing evidence of correspondence in habits and social condition between ancient races of the British Isles and the Indians of the New World, also furnished characteristic examples of their fictile ware; and here the analogy fails. There are, indeed, abundant specimens of broken Indian pottery on many of their deserted village sites, which might be mingled with the fragments of a like kind from early European grave mounds without attracting special attention. Simple chevron and saltier or herring-bone patterns, scratched with a pointed bone on the soft clay, are common to both; and many of the more elaborate linear and bead patterns of the primitive British potters reappear with slight variation on the Indian ware. But besides those, few ancient Indian village sites fail to yield fragments of pottery, including clay tobacco pipes, ornamented with more or less rude imitations of the human face and of familiar animals, such as the beaver, the bear, the lynx, and the deer. Before my first visit to the American continent, while still preoccupied with the arts of the ancient British savage, and the more graceful devices of the metallurgists of Europe’s Bronze period, I noted the prevalence of a conventional ornamentation, consisting mainly of improvements on what may be called the accidents of manufacture, or possibly of linear decorations borrowed from patterns of the plaiter or knitter.^[81] No attempt appears to have been made by the old European decorator at such imitations of familiar natural objects as are now known to have been practised among the far more ancient cave-dwellers of Europe, the contemporaries of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, and which are familiar to us in the primitive arts of the New World. Objects recovered from the mounds of the Ohio and the Mississippi valleys, as well as the diversified products of the native artificers of Mexico and Peru, attract special attention by their endless variety of imitative design; and similar skill and ingenuity are apparent in the pottery, the plaited manufactures, the stone and bone carvings, and even in many of the great animal mounds and other earthworks of the North American continent. An observant recognition of analogies, traceable in the rhetorical construction of many American Indian holophrasms, appears to be only another phase of this widely prevalent imitative faculty. At the same time, whether we study the physical form or the intellectual characteristics of native American races, it becomes more and more apparent that the New World has been peopled from different centres, and still presents essentially distinct types of race. It had its ferocious Caribs, its Mexicans, with their revolting human sacrifices and other bloody rites, and its stealthy, treacherous nomads, less courageous but not less cruel. But it has also gentler races, in whom, as in the Peruvians, the Zuñis, and others of the Pueblo Indians, the æsthetic faculty predominates, and overlays with many a graceful concomitant the utilitarian products of their industrial arts.

Whether barbarous or civilised nations are classified in accordance with their linguistic affinities, both are found to manifest other specialties according with the diverse families of speech. The differences which separate the Aryan from the Semitic races are not more marked than the intellectual and moral divergencies among barbarous tribes. But while this is apparent on the American continent, its diverse races appear to be characterised by a more general aptitude for artistic imitation than is observable elsewhere, except among the long-civilised nations of the Old World, whose composite vocabularies reveal the sources of many borrowed arts. The Peruvian potter sketched and modelled endless quaint devices in clay; the Zuñian decorated his gracefully fashioned ware with highly effective parti-coloured designs; and the old Mound-Builder wrought in intaglio on his domestic and sepulchral vessels conventional flower patterns; and in his miniature sculptures reproduced the fauna of an area extending from the Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico. Native artificers of widely different American races manifest this imitative faculty. Not only is the Indian pipe sculptor found copying animate and inanimate objects with an observant eye and a ready hand, but even the linear patterns on pottery and straw basket-work are frequently made to assume combinations obviously suggested by flowers and other familiar objects of nature. The perception of such analogies, and even the capacity for appreciating the linear or pictorial representation of objects on a flat surface, varies greatly in different races. Travellers have repeatedly described the manifestation by savage races of an utter incapacity to comprehend pictured representations. Mr. Oldfield, for example, tells how a large coloured engraving of a native of New Holland was shown to some Australians. “One declared it to be a ship, another a kangaroo, and so on, not one of a dozen identifying the portrait as having any connection with himself.”^[82] The artistic faculty is unquestionably hereditary. There are artistic families and artistic races. But if so, the pictorial skill of the palæolithic cave-dwellers of Western Europe was not transmitted to their successors. Guided not only by a comparison of their tools and weapons with those of the Neolithic period, but also by cranial and other physical evidence, we are led to assume the absence of affinity between the men of the Perigord caves and the greatly more modern races of Europe’s later Stone period; and their lack of the imitative faculty, so characteristic of the elder race, adds confirmation to this opinion.

Artistic sympathies, and a capacity for high achievements in painting and sculpture, are neither the direct results of civilisation, nor in many cases the product of culture and training. From the days of Giotto, the shepherd boy, to those of Thorwaldsen, Wilkie, and Turner, art-power is not only seen to be a direct and exceptional gift of nature, but it is frequently the product of a singularly partial intellectual development. Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo are examples of men of rare and comprehensive genius, who sought in art the form in which to give expression to their many-sided powers. But, on the other hand, instances are not rare of artists like Thorwaldsen or Turner, who, except within the range of their own special art, seemed exceptionally defective in the exercise of ordinary mental powers. The same is true of races as of individuals. Some show an aptitude for art wholly wanting in others, who nevertheless equal or surpass them in more important qualities. The æsthetic faculty may, indeed, be described as curiously capricious in its manifestations. The Papuans of New Guinea and of New Caledonia, a race of Negrillos, in some points presenting analogies to the Australian, are nevertheless remarkable for a seemingly instinctive ingenuity and aptitude for art. Mr. Wallace describes them as contrasting with the Malay race in the habitual decoration of their canoes, houses, and almost every domestic utensil, with elaborate carving. The Fijians, who are allied to this Negrillo race, present in many respects an unfavourable contrast to the true Polynesian. In their physiognomy and whole physical aspect they are inferior to other island races of the Pacific; and are further notable for repulsive habits and a general condition of social and moral degradation. But their ferocity and the cruel customs in which they so strikingly differ from the Malays are vices of a vigorous race. They have frequently been observed to indicate energy capable of being directed to useful ends, as has been the case with the Maori cannibals of New Zealand, and was seen of old in the Huns and the Northmen, whose descendants are now among the most civilised races of the world. It is obvious, at any rate, that the savage vices of the Fijians are compatible with considerable skill in such arts as pertain to their primitive condition. Their musical instruments are superior to those of the Polynesians, and include the pan-pipe and others unknown in the islands beyond their range. Their pottery exhibits great variety of form; and some of the vessels combined in groups present a curious correspondence to familiar examples of Peruvian art. Their fishing-nets and lines are remarkable for neat and skilful workmanship, and they carry on agriculture to a considerable extent. “Indeed,” remarked the ethnologist of the United States Expedition, in summing up the characteristics of the Fijians, “we soon began to perceive that the people were in possession of almost every art known to the Polynesians, and of many others besides. The highly-finished workmanship was unexpected, everything being executed until recently, and even now for the most part, without the use of iron. In the collection of implements and manufactures brought home by the Expedition, the observer will distinguish in the Fijian division something like a school of arts for the other Pacific islands.”

All this has to be kept in view, in any attempt to gauge the intellectual development, or determine the degree of civilisation, of the palæolithic draughtsmen and carvers of the Garonne. One of the scenes introduced by M. Figuier, in the fanciful illustrations of his L’Homme primitif, represents a group of artists, such as, except for their costume, might have been sketched from the students of the École des Beaux Arts. Their mode of work was probably much more akin to the intermittent labours of the Indian, whose elaborately sculptured pipe is laid aside, and resumed again—often after prolonged intervals,—before it receives the finishing touch. But though the drawings and the carvings of those primitive artists alike manifest remarkable skill and observant imitation, the former are the objects of special interest. Their carvings appear to have been executed, with rare exceptions, for the decoration of favourite implements and weapons, in accordance with a practice common to many diverse races and conditions of society. But the drawings have no such motive. They more nearly correspond to the sketch or drawing from nature of the modern artist; and furnish evidence of peculiar attributes, strikingly distinguishing the race of that remote age from most others that have succeeded them.

Certain it is that, so far as present evidence goes, the greatly prolonged Neolithic period was characterised by no such artistic feeling or imitative skill. Specimens of the ingenious handiwork of the artificers of Europe’s later Stone age abound. We have numerous relics from the kitchen middens of Denmark, the pile villages of Switzerland, the crannoges of Scotland and Ireland, as well as the varied contents of cromlechs, cists, cairns, and barrows, diligently explored throughout Europe. But no such examples of carvings, or graven representations of animals or other natural objects, have been found. The “clay in the hands of the potter” is a familiar symbol of plastic response to the will of the designer. It is, indeed, easier for the practised modeller to fashion the clay into any desired form, than to draw it, subject to rules of perspective, on a flat surface. Linear devices and the representation of objects in intaglio, or in low relief, are also accomplished with great facility on the soft clay. Hence the art of diverse races, periods, and stages of progress, finds its aptest illustration in fictile ware; and the imitative faculty of widely different American races may be studied in their pottery. In Mexico, apparently, we have to look for the northern school of ceramic art. There, the aggressive races of the North first came in contact with the civilisation of Central America; and the native aptitude for imitative representation received a fresh impulse. The Indian modeller learned to work skilfully in clay; and the variety of design, combined with the quaint humour of the caricaturist, displayed in many of the Mexican terra-cottas, serves to indicate this class of work as specially significant in relation to the present inquiry. The inventive fancy and skill of the Peruvian potter illustrates in ampler variety the progress achieved by the races of the southern continent. But this will more fitly come under review along with other examples of modern native art. For no analogous traces of contemporary modelling in clay furnish material for comparison with the art of the Palæolithic era; though the skill of its bone and ivory carvers was in no degree inferior to that of the Mexican or Peruvian modeller. But the æsthetic aptitude of that old race of Europe’s intellectual dawn is in some respects unique. In so far as their ingenious arts furnish any evidence of true racial characteristics, the men of the Neolithic era inherited none of their æsthetic feelings; nor did the imitative faculty manifest itself with exceptional power until the advent of the Aryan races brought with it the potentialities of Hellenic inspiration.

The absence of nearly every trace of imitative art in the prehistoric remains of Britain has already been noted. It made a strong impression on my mind at an early stage of my archæological researches; for this characteristic of European art extends over a period of greatly prolonged duration, marked by the advent and disappearance of races, dissimilar alike in physical and mental characteristics. We have the laboriously finished implements of neolithic art, the pottery of at least two distinct races seemingly prior to the Celts, and then the graceful artistic productions of the Bronze period, but still only the rarest traces of any effort at imitation. Long before the imitative arts of the American continent were known to me otherwise than from description, I remarked, of the archaic art of the first British metallurgists: “The ornamentation consists, almost without exception, only of improvements on the accidents of manufacture. The incised decorations of the pottery appear, in many cases, to have been produced simply by passing twisted cords round the soft clay. More complicated designs, most frequently consisting of chevron, saltire, or herring-bone patterns, where they are not merely the results of a combination of such lines, have been suggested, as I conceive, by the few and half-accidental patterns of the industrious female knitter. In no single case is any attempt made at the imitation of a leaf or flower, of animals, or any other simple objects.”^[83] At the date of those remarks the art of Europe’s Palæolithic era was unknown; but with the arts of other primitive races, and especially those of the American continent, in view, I then added: “It is curious, indeed, and noteworthy, to find how entirely every trace of imitative art is absent in British archaic relics; for it is by no means an invariable characteristic of primitive arts.” Dr. Hoffman, when commenting on aboriginal American art among the Indians of California, adds: “I have not met with any attempts at objective drawings or etchings which may be attributed to the Tshuma Indians, who were the former occupants of the island;^[84] but ornamentations upon shells and bone beads, soap-stone pipes, shell pendants, and other ornaments, seem to consist entirely of straight or zigzag lines, cross-lines, circles,” etc. The earliest examples of native metallurgy in Britain are to be found in the works of the primitive goldsmith; but the same conventional ornamentation which occurs on early pottery, is characteristic of the beautiful personal ornaments of gold belonging, for the most part, to the first period of working in metals. It is not till a late stage of the European Bronze period that imitative art reappears, and zoomorphic decorations become common.

The discovery in 1868, and subsequent years, of numerous specimens of the artistic ability of the cave-men of palæolithic Europe, revealed a singularly interesting phase of primitive history. Remains of the so-called “Reindeer period” are now familiar to us from many localities; for the range of this animal in palæolithic times appears to have extended from the Baltic to the Pyrenees. But a special interest was conferred on the first disclosures by the locality itself, where the Vézère, an affluent of the river Dordogne, winds its way through the cretaceous limestone, in which occur numerous caves and rock-shelters, rich in remains of primitive art. In this region of South-western France, where many historical and legendary associations carry the fancy back to elder centuries, the Dordogne unites with the Garonne at its estuary below Bordeaux. The upper waters of the Dordogne form the boundary between Limousin and Auvergne, and the Vézère is one of its highest tributaries in Limousin. There, nearly in the latitude of Montreal, but with the genial climate which, throughout the whole historic period, has characterised Southern France, lie the caves of Cro-Magnon, La Moustier, Gorge d’Enfer, Laugerie Haute and Basse, and La Madelaine: the long-sealed art galleries of prehistoric Gaul. The reindeer and the aurochs haunted its forests; the woolly rhinoceros and the mammoth still frequented its glades; and the long-extinct fossil horse was not only an object of the chase, but was possibly already subdued to the companionship and service of man. Such, at least, is the idea suggested by a scene graven on the portion of a baton or staff, found by M. Lartet and Mr. Christy in La Madelaine cave, which represents a man between two horses’ heads, apparently walking past, with a staff or spear over his shoulder. Nor were those man’s sole contemporaries.

The drawings of the ancient cave-men are of varying degrees of merit, showing the efforts of the unskilled tyro as well as of the practised artist. Some of the examples found at Laugerie Basse—as, for instance, the assumed representation of an ibex, with its legs folded as if sitting,—are the crude efforts of unpractised draughtsmen, and would compare unfavourably with many examples of graphic art, the work of modern Eskimo and Indian gravers and draughtsmen. But other specimens—such as the mammoth from La Madelaine cave, and the Alpine ibex and reindeers from Laugerie Basse, in Southern France, and, still more, the remarkably spirited drawing of the reindeer grazing, from the Kesserloch, near Thayingen, sketched on a piece of reindeer horn,—evince powers of observation, and a freedom of hand in sketching from nature, such as would be found exceptional among pupils of our best training schools of art. On this point my friend, Sir Noel Paton, writes me: “I entirely concur in your view as to the immense superiority as works of art of the engravings on horn and ivory found in the prehistoric caves, over any modern work of the same kind which I have seen, executed by the Eskimos or other savage, tribes of our own day. As compared with the latter, the prehistoric productions are like the swift and direct studies from nature of Landseer, compared with the laboured scrawlings from memory of a rather dull schoolboy.”

I have elsewhere drawn attention to the fact that some of the drawings of the Perigord cave-men and their palæolithic contemporaries, especially, among the latter, the Kesserloch sketch of a reindeer grazing, are left-hand drawings.^[85] So far as this class of evidence is of value, the examples from the caves in the valley of the Vézère are exceptionally numerous. There, it may be, a family, or possibly a tribe, dwelt, among whom left-handedness prevailed to an unusual extent, along with a degree of skill and dexterity, such as is frequently found to accompany the instinctive use of the left hand.

In this, as in other respects, the recovery of evidences of a well-developed æsthetic faculty among the men of Europe’s Mammoth and Reindeer period, furnishes materials for many suggestive inferences; for we shall very imperfectly estimate the significance of the primitive drawings so unexpectedly discovered, if we regard them as no more than the pastimes of those ancient cave-men, whose artistic ability they so unmistakably reveal. They are rather to be classed with the picture-writing of the American aborigines—including its most advanced Mexican stage abundantly illustrated in Lord Kingsborough’s folios,—as one of the primitive supplements of language among uncultured races. As such it is a form of visible speech, and an important step in advance of the stage of gesture-language. The historical value of the palæolithic drawings is indisputable. They furnish a record, more trustworthy than any written chronicle, of the strange conditions of life in a region familiar to us throughout the whole historic period for its genial climate and social civilisation. It is in this aspect, as a contemporary chronicling of current events, that palæolithic art has its chief value. It furnishes a graphic picturing of the habits of life, and of many of the attendant circumstances of that remote period, recorded with such vivid truthfulness, that we realise very definitely the character of its long-extinct fauna, and, to some considerable extent, the occupations and modes of life of the cave-men by whom they were hunted, and in leisure hours were reproduced graven or carved, on bone, horn, or ivory, or traced in free outline on slabs of schist or other soft stone.

Viewed simply as examples of imitative art among a people still in the rudest Stone age, the drawings are significant and instructive. They furnish evidence of observation and artistic capacity, and consequently of intellectual powers capable of very different results from anything that could be realised in the absence of all knowledge of metallurgy, or of anything beyond the crudest appliances for developing mechanical skill. The conditions of climate probably forbade any attempt at agriculture. They were hunters, fowlers, fishers, subsisting mainly, if not wholly, by the chase. They not only successfully pursued the wild horse, the reindeer, and other swift-footed herbivora, but assailed the cave-bear, the cave-lion, and other formidable carnivora, as well as the huge rhinoceros and the mammoth. They also made excursions to the sea-shore, and no doubt left there shell mounds similar to those which have been explored with such interesting results on the Danish coast; and which have their New World equivalents on the seaboards of Massachusetts, Georgia, and Florida, where at certain seasons the Indians resorted to feast on the shell-fish. From their drawings and carvings we not only learn this, but also that they were not unfamiliar with the whale, the seal, and other marine fauna. The presence of the whale and seal in the same latitude as the reindeer need not surprise us. The occupation of Europe by palæolithic man contemporary with the Elephas primigenius and other extinct mammalia, belongs to an era when the relative levels of sea and land, and the relations of the Atlantic coast-line to the ancient continent, differed widely from their present conditions. If the genial current of the Gulf Stream then reached the shores of Europe, its influence extended over areas very diverse from those now affected by it. But the range of the fauna of that Palæolithic era was a wide one. Tusks of the mammoth and antlers of the reindeer occur in the Scottish boulder-clay; and the discovery of skeletons of the whale far inland in the carse of Stirling, accompanied in more than one case by implements made of perforated stag’s horn, tells of the presence of the Greenland whale on the ancient Scottish sea coast, while the stag haunted its forests, and the Allophylian savage paddled his canoe in estuaries marked for us now by old sea-margins that preceded the last great rise of the land. Skulls and horns of the elk occur in the Scottish peat-bogs, seemingly indistinguishable from those of the Cervus alces, or North American moose.^[86] As to the reindeer, not only are its remains found in Scottish mosses and the underlying marl, but they have been dug up in the ruined brochs, as at Cill-Trolla, Sutherlandshire, and Keiss in Caithness. The favourite haunts of the Greenland whale are in seas encumbered with floating ice; and when they were stranded in the estuary of the Forth by a tide rising on a shore-line now nearly thirty feet above the tide-mark of the present day, the highlands of Scotland were capped with perpetual snow, and great changes of level had still to occur. But neither the whale nor the Eskimo retreated within the Arctic circle because they could only be at home among polar ice and snow. Remains of the whale in Scottish kitchen middens of greatly more modern date show that it must have haunted the Scottish shores when the temperature of the surrounding ocean differed little from that of the present day. There is preserved in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries a drinking-cup fashioned from the vertebra of a whale, which was found in a weem, or subterranean dwelling, on the Isle of Eday, Orkney, along with implements of stone, horn, bone, bronze, and iron; and other evidences of the presence of the whale in the Scottish seas are of frequent occurrence.

As to the ivory of the narwhal and the rostungr, or walrus, it was in use by Scoto-Scandinavian carvers after the disappearance of the reindeer from Scotland. A curious large sword, probably of the fourteenth century, at Hawthornden, near Edinburgh, has the hilt made of the narwhal’s tusk; and the famous Lewis chessmen, found at Uig in the Isle of Lewis, as well as examples of chess and tablemen recovered from time to time in other Scottish localities, are all made of the walrus ivory, the “huel-bone” of Chaucer. But when the whale haunted the shores to which the hunters of the Perigord resorted, it is doubtful if Britain was an island. In that age of the mammoth and the reindeer of the Pyrenees, when art flourished in the valley of the Vézère, and men, scarcely less strange than the long-extinct fauna on which they preyed, sheltered in their rock-dwellings from the ice and snow, the relative levels of sea and land, and the lines of the Atlantic coast, bore no relation to their present aspect; for the old region of ice and snow was what is now familiar to us as the vine-clad sunny land of France. All this we learn from the archæological remains of those old times, and especially from the carvings and gravings which, happily for us, were then executed, whether for pastime or as actual records. Like many of the native races of the American continent at the present day, the old cave-dwellers employed their leisure time in carving in bone, horn, or ivory; and like them too, as we believe, they applied their skill in graphic art as a means of recording events and communicating facts to others. The broad palinated antlers of the reindeer, prepared sections of mammoth ivory, and slabs of schist, all furnished tablets on which they not only delineated the objects of the chase, but incidents and observations of daily experience. And if so, we have in such drawings the germ of ideographic symbolism, and of hieroglyphic writing. By just such a process of recording facts in a form readily intelligible to others, the early dwellers in the Nile valley originated the mode of object-drawing and ideographic chronicling, from which hieroglyphic, demotic, and ultimately, phonetic writing were evolved.

It is not solely by inference that we are led to surmise that the ingenious draughtsmen of Southern France had a higher aim than mere pastime in some, at least, of their graphic devices. The relics recovered from the ancient caves include what appear to be tallies and numerical records, unmistakably indicative, not only of a method of numeration, but of the growth of a system of mnemonic symbolism, and distinctive graven characters, not greatly inferior to the primitive alphabets of Celtic or Scandinavian lithology. It is curious, indeed, to find in use in Europe’s early Post-Glacial period symbols which, but for their undoubted execution by the ancient cave-men of Aquitania, might be assigned with every probability to some Druid scribe, familiar with the ogham characters of the Gauls and British Celts. Among the objects recovered from the Dordogne caves, including tallies and inscribed tablets of horn and ivory, with their enumeration in simple units, M. Broca specially noted a deer’s tyne, marked with a series of notches, which he assumed to be a hunter’s memoranda of the produce of the chase. A more complex record, found in the rock-shelter of Gorge d’Enfer, is inscribed on a plate of ivory. Its groups of horizontal and oblique lines along the edges, and symmetrical rows of dots on the flat surface, combine to furnish a record graven in characters as well-defined as many a runic or ogham inscription. If it be no more than the memoranda of a successful hunt, with a classification of the different kinds of game secured for distribution among the members of the tribe, it is not greatly inferior to the early system of numeration among the Egyptians. But when such a piece of arithmetic was supplemented by a pictorial record of the hunt; or by the incident, so acceptable to a bevy of hunters over their camp-fire, of the fight of the male deer in the rutting season; or the charge of the enraged elephant with elevated trunk, trumpeting wrath and defiance: much had been accomplished that admits of comparison with records of the modern penman.^[87]

It is difficult for the men of a lettered age, with all the facilities of the printing-press in fullest use, to realise the condition of intellectual activity, or the natural modes of its expression, among an unlettered people. The transmission of Homeric or Ossianic poems, of a Niebelungen Lied or an Albanic Duan, from generation to generation, by the mere aid of memory, is scarcely conceivable to us now. Yet I recall the account given by Ozahwahguaquzuebe, an Ojibway Indian, who told of his habitually accumulating his tobacco till he saved enough to bribe an aged chief of the tribe to repeat to him, again and again, in all its marvellous details, the legend of Nanaboozo and the post-diluvial creation, in order that he might be able, in his turn, to recount it in full, as it had come down from elder generations of his people.

There are some results of the introduction of the printing-press still very partially appreciated. Its direct influence on social and intellectual progress receives ample recognition; but not so all indirect influences traceable to its operations. In elder centuries, before Gutenberg and Faust superseded the labours of the scribe, not a few ballad-epics and lyrics were consigned to the wandering minstrels, to whose tenacious memories we are so largely indebted. But there were other avenues in those old centuries for fancy and passion, not greatly dissimilar to those by which the observation and descriptive powers of the post-glacial Troglodytes found vent. It is vain for a Pugin or a Ruskin to bewail the mechanical character of modern art. It was easier for the mediæval satirist to find free scope for his humour in a sculptured corbel, or on a boss of the beautiful groined ceiling, or to carve his grosser caricature within easy access under the miserere in the choir, than to spend long hours at his lectern in the scriptorium, committing his fancies with laborious pains to less accessible parchments. And so, both satires and sermons were then graven in stone, which now find utterance in ways more suited to the age in which we live:—