The history of the human race is of course even more interesting than that of the plants and animals which lived so long before man and prepared the way for him, because man is the “crown of creation.”

When first placed on this Earth he must have been but little superior to the animals in his outward life, though he had very different powers within him. He could gather the fruits of the Earth like them, and perhaps used some of the smaller creatures as food, but he could do little more. He scarcely knew that he possessed the faculties which would in time make him lord of the Earth and the creatures inhabiting it. By slow and painful experience he was to gather those stores of knowledge that were to enable him to overcome difficulties, to provide him with shelter from the weather and protection from dangerous animals, give increasing comfort and power, and set him so far above all other created things. He found plants and animals for his use, and the dwellings in caves and holes ready made by Nature. He could neither build houses nor make weapons. The first weapon he ever used probably was a stone, which he could throw at small animals. Then he would find out that long, sharp-pointed sticks could be thrown like spears, and he also found that a long pliant piece of wood when bent would fly back, and in this he would see a means of throwing smaller pointed sticks like arrows, and I dare say the discovery of the way of making a bow with a string of twisted animal skin was a great invention, and it certainly would be a very valuable one. Many generations must have passed away before he got even as far as this. It is very easy for us, who see bows and arrows from our childhood, to understand their use at once: but the first human inhabitants of the world had to find them out for themselves. They began with no knowledge at all. The beasts of the field and the fruits of the Earth were given them, but they could MAKE nothing. They had not even the natural covering of hair, or wool, or feathers, which animals and birds have, and they must first have clothed themselves with skins of these. The wants of their daily life were so great that they had no time to think of anything else, but when it became easier to satisfy these bodily wants their minds turned to other things. They must have seen that when the seeds and fruits of plants fall upon the ground they grow and produce the same kind of plant, but they did not at first think of gathering a great number of these seeds and sowing them in one place and making a garden. They could wander about and gather all they needed as they became ripe, for there were few people then. Their life was like that of the lilies of the field, they “toiled not neither did they spin,” as Christ says of the flowers, but when they began to increase in number something more was wanted. People began to feel something within them which we call “intellect,” and this must be satisfied. It was not enough to live as if they were no nobler than the animals. Something stirred in their minds which told them they must not stand still.

The Creator has made both us and the wood and stone and metals, and has given to us the power to make other things out of them. Thus we are nearer to Him in power than any of the animals who cannot change the rough materials into other forms. We admire the simple and really beautiful nest of the bird, but we feel that our power is greater when we consider our splendid buildings and steam-engines, our ships, and our many conquests over difficulties. But if we did not use these greater powers of mind and hand well, we should find them grow weaker and weaker until we might almost lose them.

You may easily suppose that there was a time when men could not write, and there were no books of any kind, nor any other means of exchanging thoughts except through spoken language. The earliest histories about the human race always speak of men who lived before those histories were written. We have nothing about the earliest men written by themselves. It is always someone else who writes of them, referring to their deeds, and to events which happened long before.

The art of writing has grown up gradually and very slowly, for when the inhabitants of the Earth became numerous they felt the need of some way of expressing themselves to those at a distance from them, and for making a record of things that happened and might be forgotten. Some of the earliest means of writing were by pictures, like the picture writings of Mexico[22] found by the Spanish conquerors, and something of the same kind is even now used by the Chinese and Japanese. Their writing is made up partly of pictures and partly of queer signs which stand for the names of things, as you know if you have ever seen one of their books. One of the oldest forms of writing known is the hieroglyphic, which is said to have been first used by the Egyptians about 2,100 years before Christ, and another is the arrow-shaped writing of the Assyrians. These were cut on stone and metal tablets, and most of them are the histories of their kings. But there are some writings on stone in India which are thought to be older still. The Egyptians made great progress in writing afterwards when papyrus was invented.[23] This is a kind of paper made from a reed which grows abundantly in the river Nile, and many of these papyrus writings are preserved in the British Museum, as well as the writings on stone of the Egyptians and Assyrians, and learned men have spelled out a great deal of the history of these nations from them, though the language is quite different from any spoken or written now.

Picture writing was most likely one of the earliest inventions in this way: but it was so troublesome that signs were used to express the same things as the picture. For instance, suppose a history of a king was to be written. The word “king” would be shown by something he always wore, such as his crown, and this sign would become more simple until at last it might not be anything like a crown; but it would be remembered that the sign stood for a king all the same. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, means an ox, and the letter is something like the shape of the head of that animal with its horns; and another letter, called shin, which in Hebrew means a tooth, is actually very like a tooth with three points. In many languages these signs have become so altered that they do not now resemble the things they at first stood for; but the first steps in the invention of written language were certainly made by signs representing the thing of which the person wished to give an idea. But you will learn all about these ancient writings from other books.

The men whose lives I am going to describe lived long before any of these writings were invented. They spoke a language of course, though there is nothing left to show that they knew of any kind of writing, and they are called Pre-historic men because they lived before there were any histories either written by themselves or about them. But they could draw a little, as we know from the pictures of animals, birds, and fishes scratched upon pieces of slate, and bone, and stone found in their graves. Perhaps these pictures were memorials of their great or wise men, or showed that they were clever hunters, or fishermen.

They knew the use of fire. Half burnt bones and wood and ashes are plentiful in the caves where they lived. They had none of the means we possess for kindling fire, and there are only two ways by which they could have got it. They might have rubbed two pieces of very dry wood together until the heat lighted them, as many savages do at the present time; or they might have struck sparks from flint upon rotten wood and blown the spark into a flame. We may be sure that when once a fire was lighted they would take care it did not go out, and if they wanted to travel they would carry with them a piece of smouldering wood to light the fire again. I do not suppose that these pre-historic men were any more civilized than the savages of Australia and other countries, and I have often thought when looking at these savages that they live in almost exactly the same way as the earliest inhabitants of Europe did. They have the same shaped weapons and tools made of stone, and these are fixed to the handles in the same way. They have the same kinds of needles and fish-hooks made of bone, and they sew skins together with threads made from the sinews of animals. Thus we see men living now in many parts of the world who are quite as uncivilized as the old inhabitants of Europe, who lived perhaps thousands of years before the Egyptians and Assyrians.

These very ancient men knew nothing about metals. All their tools were made of flint, or bone, or stone, and they were of the rough shape you see in the pictures on the next page, and it is for this reason that this has been called the Stone Age. These were chipped out with great trouble and labour, and most of them were not even polished. With these they had to kill animals for food, to cut down trees, and fight against their enemies. The skeleton of a mastodon was found in the state of Missouri in America about thirty-five years ago with numbers of these flint arrow-heads underneath and near it. Perhaps it had been shot at with arrows, and when it died the flint points fell out of its decaying flesh. But it is not likely that these pre-historic men could have killed many such large animals, unless they caught them in pits covered over with branches of trees and earth, into which they might fall, as elephants are sometimes caught in Africa.

Nothing shows us so well the immense time which must have passed since the men of the stone age lived as that these flint weapons and tools are found nearly all over the world, in Northern Europe, including our own country, in Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Palestine, Africa, Japan, America, &c.; and yet none of the present inhabitants of these countries have any history or tradition of the time when they were used. Metals are now used instead, and there is no record of the time when flint only was known. We are quite certain however that the stone age men lived at the same period as the great animals of the Tertiary age, the mammoth, the mastodon, the woolly rhinoceros, the Irish stag, the cave bear, and others you have read of in former chapters, because flint and stone weapons are found in the same beds of earth with these animals.[24]

Suppose one of the present Indian or African elephants with his rider were to fall into a river and they were to sink to the bottom and be covered with mud, and suppose his rider had in his pocket some of our sovereigns. If that elephant should be accidentally dug up thousands of years to come, when most likely all elephants will have died off the earth, people would know for certain, from the date and figure of the Queen on the money, that elephants were used by the English in this reign, even if all our books and monuments had perished, and a new people inhabited the Earth. Something of the same kind has happened to prove to us that the stone-age men saw the mammoth alive. In one of their graves there is a slice of a mammoth’s great back tooth with a beautiful picture of the animal, with his bristly hair, scratched on the ivory, and there are also many of the flint and stone weapons which show that the skeleton in the grave was that of a primeval man. This little picture tells its tale more faithfully than any history. It is all the more certain to tell it truly because it was never meant to tell one. When that man was buried with this sign that he was a mighty hunter of the mammoth, or an artist, no one could imagine that he would ever be dug up to show us, who come so long afterwards, that he saw the mammoth roaming through the forests of the far away past. There can be no doubt that it is a very good drawing of the mammoth with its long turned-up tusks, like those in the picture at the beginning of the book.

In another place a picture of a fight between some reindeer scratched upon a piece of slate has been found. This was in a cave in France, and it, as well as the numbers of bones of these animals in the caves, shows that the reindeer, which now only inhabits the Arctic regions, must have been common then in France. You will see drawings of both these on page 135.

These primeval people built no houses. They lived in natural caves, and scattered the remains of their food about the floor, so that we know what they ate. Among the animals they used for food were the horse, the reindeer, the ox, the cave-lion and bear, the wolf, the hyena, the goat, the hare and several others, besides salmon and other fish. They were very fond of the marrow of the bones, which they cracked with stone hammers, and had little spoons made of bone with which to pick it out.

They had places for making flint weapons too. At Cissbury Camp, near Worthing, there is one of their old workshops. There are galleries dug into the chalk where they got the flints, and there are thousands of chips of flint lying about, with half finished arrow-heads, and some of the tools they dug with. They had no spades or pickaxes; but they used the broad, flat, shoulder-blade bone of the ox as a spade, and the sharp brow antler of a deer’s horn for a pickaxe, to get these flints out with. It must have been very hard work for them, because bone spades and horn pickaxes would soon wear out, and would not be nearly so useful as ours made of iron.

It is difficult to be certain how these stone-age people cooked their food. Of course they could have roasted it, and the half-burnt bones in some caves show that they did so; but in some caves in France there is not a single burnt bone to be found. In these French cave dwellings, too, there are no pieces of earthenware, as there are in some others; so that the people could not have boiled it, unless they had wooden pots and dropped red-hot stones into the water in them until the meat got boiled, as some savages do now. Or they might have cooked it under the hot ashes.

The people who used earthenware must have made more progress. It is easy to understand how they made this useful discovery. Suppose they had lighted a fire upon a damp clay soil, the earth would get baked hard and crack off in pieces, and they would see that this soil could be worked in the hands while soft into the shape of pans and dishes, which could be dried quite hard in the sun or baked in hot ashes, just as boys make clay marbles now. They could live much more comfortably even with these rough earthenware things, and cook their food more conveniently; but they still used the stone and flint tools and weapons, and iron was still unknown to them.

The people of whom I have been speaking are principally the men of the First Stone Age, when the art of polishing tools and weapons had not been found out. They simply chipped these things out of the flints and left them very rough; but the men of the next, or Second Stone Age, made great improvements. They ground their flint knives and axes with other stones, and rubbed them down to sharp edges and points, so that they must have been much more useful for killing and cutting up the animals they hunted. All their bone and horn tools are much better made, and sometimes ornamented prettily with marks cut upon them. The Second Stone Age men evidently wore clothing, most probably made of the skins of animals—for the long strips of bone with a hole at one end which you see in the picture could not have been used for any other purpose, except to draw threads through something. The threads were very likely either the sinews of animals pulled out of the flesh, or thin strips of their skins, or perhaps the inner bark of a tree twisted into a kind of string. In the colder parts of Europe and America these ancient people would need some protection from the weather. How then did the people of the First Stone Age manage, if they had no bone needles, as I think they had not, with which to make clothing? They must have wrapped themselves in the skins just as they came from the backs of the animals.

It is not easy to be always sure, when we find a cave and all these relics of pre-historic man, whether the inhabitants belonged to the First or the Second Stone Age. Sometimes there are signs of polishing and grinding on the tools, and then we may suppose that men were gradually getting more skilful, until they finished off all their weapons beautifully. But there is such a very great difference in the perfection of these useful articles found in some places and those found in others that we have no doubt men made slow progress, from the rough or First Stone Age, to the polished or Second Stone Age.

In neither the first nor second stone period had men yet learned to build any kind of habitations. They lived in caves simply, like wild animals. On the banks of the river Vezère in France, which has cut its way deeply through the rock, there are some celebrated caves once inhabited by pre-historic men, and some of them are very large. They were most likely hollowed out in the cliff by water, and many generations of men lived here. In one of them four human skeletons were found, with plenty of stone and flint tools, besides the bones of the mammoth and lion, reindeer and other animals. The mammoth then as well as the reindeer lived at that time in the valley of the Vezère. There is no doubt that these caves were inhabited at separate times by people who used only the roughest and simplest stone tools, and by others who had made some progress and could polish their tools and make them of bone and could scratch pictures of animals upon slips of bone and slate. It is curious that all these drawings are side-view drawings, and they are only outlines, just like the drawings of children now, and the Esquimaux of the Arctic regions; because these people, although they were grown up, had not discovered the art of drawing in perspective and shading the figures. Still the pictures are wonderfully true to nature, and must have been copied from living animals. There is no earthenware in any of these caves, so that the useful art of making pottery had not been discovered, neither is there any in the caves in Switzerland, where the bones of the mammoth, lion, and rhinoceros are also found, and the tools and weapons are much the same as those in the French caverns. It is impossible to say whether the cave-dwellers of France and Switzerland lived at the same time exactly, but they were in about the same condition of civilization, and they must both have been quite familiar with the appearance of the mammoth and lion, and other animals, which are not mentioned in any history, however old it may be, as inhabitants of these countries.

A discovery has lately been made in France of a large cavern near Belfort, in the limestone rock, which has been covered up for ages. The quarrymen while cutting out the stone came upon a small opening leading into a very large cave, in which there was a great quantity of human skeletons and bones and some beautifully ornamented vases, polished stone bracelets, and a mat of plaited rushes. To these people, then, the arts of pottery and weaving were known, and this was probably one of their burying-places. They were evidently much more civilized than the ancient people of the valley of the Vezère; but this cave must also be of a great age, and its inhabitants have left no record of their history in any kind of writing.

Quite lately, too, we have learned something of the early races of man in Colorado. Many of the caves in that country have been altered and made more like regular houses, and some appear even to have been cut out of the rock entirely by human hands; and in the plains there are ruins of large cities.

Though still in the stone age, for all the weapons yet found among these ruins are of stone, the Colorado people were more civilized than the stone-age people of the Vezère caverns, because they had begun to build and knew how to make pottery. It is strange, too, that the present natives of Colorado are not so civilized as the early people, and if they have descended from them they have not improved, but rather the contrary. There are other caverns in various parts of the world containing these curious relics of races long since passed away, but some of the principal have been mentioned, enough perhaps to interest you and show you that men were living in Europe together with the large animals of the Tertiary period, and that they had made very little progress in the arts and manufactures, and had not even begun to build the roughest houses.

In many parts of the world even now there are savages nearly as uncivilized as the cave-dwellers of Europe were then. When Captain Cook visited New Zealand, more than a hundred years ago, the natives there had nothing but stone and bone tools, very like those found in the European caverns, and the inhabitants of some of the islands in the Pacific Ocean still use stone axes and hammers and bone needles.[25] Captain Moresby, too, who made a voyage to the south-east coast of New Guinea a few years ago, tells us that the natives have beautiful stone axes, but they were so ignorant of the use of iron that they refused to give him one of their stone axes for a new iron hatchet which he offered them. No doubt the stone weapon cost a great deal of labour and patience to make, and perhaps the iron one was made by machinery in a few minutes, and was really more useful, but the native had proved his own axe and knew nothing of the iron one, so that it is no wonder that he refused it. But what a history these two axes tell—the stone and the iron! The stone shows us man in his childhood, and the iron man in his manhood, and what an immensely long time there is between the two. How much thought, and trial and failure, and patience and industry, were spent by mankind before the stone axe grew into the iron!

In Europe man has long since grown out of his childhood, but in many parts of the world he is no more civilized than the men who saw the mammoth crashing through the forests of England and France, and heard the lion roar at night on the banks of the Thames, and watched the hippopotamus swimming across the river at Westminster. It is most likely, then, that Europe and parts of Asia and America were inhabited long before those places where men are even now in the stone age—such as the islands in the Pacific Ocean, New Guinea, Australia, &c.

What a life the pre-historic men of Europe must have lived! Here they were surrounded by huge dangerous animals, and had no means of protecting themselves against them but with these rough stone weapons. Where London now stands with its miles of streets and busy life there was a mighty forest, and the mammoth and rhinoceros tramped through it by day, and the lion and hyena hunted the deer at night. When the pre-historic men came down to the banks of the Thames in the day-time to spear salmon, they saw the hippopotamus plunging about in the water among the rushes, sweeping the long grass into their wide mouths, and swimming from side to side with their young ones perched upon their necks. It must have been a grand sight, but a fearful one too, and it is no wonder that men thought the caves the only safe places to live in.

Sometimes in India the elephants come into the villages at night and throw down wooden houses and kill people, and they are very much feared, so that we can suppose how much more terrible the mammoth might have been to the uncivilized cave-dwellers. If they shot at him with the flint-pointed arrows they could scarcely hurt him, and it is more likely that they got out of his way as quickly as possible whenever they met him, and took good care never to interfere with the lion and rhinoceros.

THE LAKE-DWELLERS.

Among the earliest inhabitants of Europe, there were some who did not live in caves; but I think they must have lived a long time after the cave-dwellers, when they built their houses out in the middle of the lakes. These houses were built in a very curious way, and the remains of them have been discovered in Ireland and Scotland, Switzerland and other countries. The people carried quantities of stones, and earth, and sticks out into the lake and let them sink to the bottom. Then when they had piled up enough to make an island, they laid wood across and set up their huts, and lived there surrounded by water. These were very poor houses of course; but when men had begun to build for themselves, they would find how much more comfortable they were than in damp and dark caves. They must have had some kind of boats or canoes, or they could not have passed between their lake-dwellings and the land unless they swam to them; but I do not think that any of these boats have been found. Perhaps they were made of the dried skins of animals stretched over wooden frames, as I have seen savages make boats.

There was another way of building these lake-dwellings, and a better way too. Long poles were driven into the earth at the bottom of the water, and when the builders had got enough of these together they laid other poles across them, and built their huts on this floor above the water. People are living now in much the same way near the Orinoco river in South America, in New Guinea, and in Central Africa.[26] The land all round is covered with water from the overflowing of the rivers, which are very large, and the huts are built up on these poles out of the way of it. The lake-dwellers of Europe would thus be safer in their houses from dangerous animals than if they were on land. They were more civilized than the cave-dwellers, but still a great many of their tools and weapons were of stone and bone; yet we know that they had made wonderful progress, because they had learned to make pottery, and even to weave cloths out of hemp or flax. They had most likely begun to plant and cultivate the land, too, for corn is found about these dwellings, and the bones of domestic animals are very numerous. They had left the cave-dwellers a long way behind in many things, in wearing artificial clothing, in cultivating the land, and in keeping domestic animals; but their implements—that is, their weapons and tools—were not much improved, and were very much like those of the cave-dwellers, though better finished and more polished than some of theirs.

But not all the articles used by the lake people were of stone and bone. Some of those who lived in the Swiss lakes had ornaments, such as bracelets and hair-pins, made of the metal called bronze, and no doubt they made spear-heads of the metal, because they would look to usefulness before ornament.

Now you see how these people seem to have lived: first the old stone age men, then those of the newer or polished stone age, and lastly the lake-dwellers. The people of both the first and second stone ages certainly saw the mammoth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, lion, and reindeer alive in France, Switzerland, and England; but when the lake-dwellings were built, all these animals, except perhaps the reindeer, had died, and most of the animals were the same as they are now. None of these people have left us any kind of history whatever, except that which their simple works tell us, their flint and bone weapons, and their dwellings. They have set up no gigantic monuments like the Egyptians or the Druids. They thought of no men to come after them who would take an interest in their ways; but it is fortunate that what they did make was of such lasting materials as stone and flint, or we should have known next to nothing about their lives.

It is impossible to say how many thousands of years may have passed before the rough stone weapons were replaced by the polished stone, or the cave was exchanged for an artificial house in a lake; but you must feel in your minds that the time was immense, and the more we study the ways and works of pre-historic man, the more certain we become that it is longer than the whole time that has passed since men first began to use any kind of writing.

KITCHEN-MIDDENS.

I dare say you have seen untidy people in country places, and even in towns, throw oyster-shells and broken dishes and dirt outside their doors until quite a heap is formed. This is called a “midden,” and the habit of doing this is a very old one. We learn just a little more of the history of man from great middens made by ancient people in several countries. They were first discovered in Denmark, and since then they have been found in Scotland, Brazil, and New Zealand. They are sometimes very large, and must have been used by the whole village as places to throw the refuse of their cookery in. When these heaps have been dug into all sorts of things have been found in them—the shells of oysters and mussels, bones of fishes, birds, and animals, pieces of broken earthenware, little ornaments, stone axes, arrow-heads, wood ashes, burnt bones, and other odds and ends. In Brazil many of these kitchen-middens are on the sea shore, and it seems as if the people who made them came there to live on the shell-fish, for the shells are the same as those living in the sea close by now. In New Zealand the middens contain many of the bones of the Moa, which was described in “The Animal Part,” and has now perished, and these are cracked in such a manner that the people evidently wanted to get at the marrow in them, and it shows too that this gigantic bird was common in New Zealand then. The midden makers seemed to have lived in the open air, and wherever food was most plentiful. Perhaps they built huts of the bark and small branches of trees like the Australian savages, but such houses would not last. We only know of the life of the midden makers from these heaps. Their weapons are of the same kind and pattern as those of the Second Stone Age, but they had learned to make rough earthenware dishes and basins, and some pieces of a woven material have been found, and pieces of wood and bone worked with a little skill. Whether they lived after or before the lake-dwellers I cannot say, but I should think about the same time.

These pre-historic people, nevertheless, were not always thinking of making things which were useful. They thought too of making ornaments, many of which are found in their dwellings and graves. Like ourselves, they had an idea that little trinkets improved their appearance. In one grave a skeleton was found with a small pile of shells under its neck, which no doubt had been strung together as a necklace, and when the string rotted the shells parted and fell in a heap under the head, to be a memorial of that ancient man or woman’s possession of the same feelings as our own. Various little articles, too, found about the lake-dwellings show that people liked to decorate themselves.

We shall never know what language they spoke, but they must have been able to tell their thoughts to one another. It was most likely a simple language with few words as names for things and a simple grammar, like the language of savages, because they had not so many things to talk about as we have. The names of animals would perhaps be imitated from their cries and the noises they made. These cries would be among the most familiar sounds to them, and when they wished to speak of some animal the simplest way would be to imitate the noise it generally makes. If we think of our own language, we shall see how very likely this was. We have many such words. We teach our children the names of animals by the sounds they make. The dog we call “bow-wow,” the cow “moo-moo,” the duck “quack-quack,” and many other names of the same kind which you will think of yourselves. At the present time even the name by which the Egyptians call the donkey has almost exactly the same sound as our “hee-haw.” This trick of doubling or repeating the sound, too, is very common among savages, who are as far behind us as the pre-historic men were. The natives of Australia give these double names to a great many animals and things, and sometimes do the same with English words. They call fish “ningy-ningy,” and a certain tree the “bunya-bunya,” and their language is full of such words. But it is not only the names of things which have been made in this way. Verbs as well as nouns have grown up thus. When we whisper to one another, that word imitates the low sound we make.

I shall leave you to trace the natural origin of the following words, and think how much of man’s spoken language is taken from common sounds. Thus we have roar, shriek, whistle, hiss, sigh, sing, ring, thump, bump, clash, clang, bang, twang, clap, smack, slap, smash, swish, swirl, gong, thong, boom, bellow, batter, chatter, clatter, snap, snip, whip, gurgle, shiver, quiver, rumble, roll, rattle, prattle, and a hundred more. Words thus derived from familiar sounds abound in all languages, and they, no doubt, are the easy steps by which men climbed to a more complicated speech. The earliest men must have been obliged to pay great attention to animals and birds, which have voices of their own; for to hunt and catch them was the principal occupation of their lives; therefore, when speaking of them to one another, they would naturally call them by names resembling the sounds they made. Our verbs “to squeak” and “to squeal” are certainly taken from the cries of animals when in pain; but I have said enough to show you how language grew up among pre-historic people.

We do not know for certain that they had any musical instruments, but they would hear the sighing of the wind among the trees, and it would almost certainly be found out that blowing down a hollow stick or reed, open at one end and closed at the other, would make a whistle; but if they used any of these things they would not last like the stone tools, and have decayed away; and we do know that they had begun to draw upon such imperishable materials as bone and slate.

There is a very interesting specimen of a human fossil in the British Museum, which you ought to go and see, if you can; but in case you are not able there is a drawing of it on page 159.[27] This specimen was brought to England about the year 1814. Others like it have since been found imbedded in the hard breccia limestone rock at the same place on the shore of the island of Guadaloupe. The skeleton most likely was that of a woman, from the shape of some of the bones, and most probably was of the race of Caribs, of whom there are none living now. Perhaps this was originally a burying place of the ancient inhabitants of the island, and when the sea washed the small broken pieces of shells and corals over it (all of which contain lime) they hardened into breccia rock, and the skeleton became completely imbedded in it. This must have taken a very long time, at all events; but I do not think the Guadaloupe fossils are as old as the people who lived in the caves in France. Some little ornaments and articles of human workmanship are found with these skeletons, which show that the people to whom they belonged were still in the Stone Age. There is very little to judge from when we wish to get some idea of the time these fossils have been in this breccia: but at this particular place the rock is formed pretty quickly, as we can see; and it is quite likely that these skeletons were buried there long after the mammoth, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus died out of Europe. However, they are the most complete specimens we have of any fossil human beings. In looking at the drawing you will see the leg bones and hips, part of the backbone, the ribs of one side, and an arm bone; but you see no skull, because the bones of the skull are very thin, and have become crushed down into the limestone. In one of these fossils, which they have in Paris, taken from near the same place, the bones are much more distinct, and part of the lower jaw with some teeth in it can be seen. These fossil men no doubt lived before the period of written human history began; but they are not considered to be at all the oldest of pre-historic men.

Two periods in the life of mankind followed all these long-lost and forgotten people, and they are called the Bronze Age and the Iron Age; but now history comes in, and there are plenty of old records and books to tell you about these. Bronze is a mixed metal of copper and tin, and it was used by the oldest nations who have left any histories—the Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. It was better than stone because it could be made sharper and would not chip, and swords and armour, vases, axes, hammers, needles, &c., were made of it.[28]

The Stone Age is beyond all history, the Bronze begins with it, and the Iron Age began at some distant time before the dawn of authentic history. Thus we are told, in Genesis iv. 22, that Tubal Cain taught people to make it. It was used also by the Egyptians for perhaps 2,000 years before the Christian era; but the real Iron Age is that in which we are living now. We can, indeed, make all metals much better than any of the older nations.

But there is a wide gap between the time when people left off using stone and discovered bronze and iron; and if one of the Druids could come to life he might help us to fill it up, because those old British priests had many secrets, which they told to one another from generation to generation.

If the Spanish conquerors had not destroyed the civilization of Mexico and Peru, we might know something of the discovery of the metals there, and the people of India and China must have used them long ago; but the first use of metal in any country where it was found out would most likely be before the people had begun to put their language into any kind of writing, so that the time would be forgotten among the many scraps of lost knowledge which we have tried to collect from the remains of the industry of pre-historic man.

We have seen how much these ancient people differed from us in their civilization, and how far they were behind us in everything; but we must not suppose that they were very different in bodily size and shape. Some of their skulls might have belonged to a philosopher, or they might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage. The skulls from the Cromagnon and Engis caves are quite equal in size and shape to those of several uncivilized, and even of some civilized races of the present time, and there are people in all large cities whose heads are not better formed. Though the outward signs of their civilization then were so different from ours, it is not certain that their mental capacity was much less.

A race possessing considerable civilization may, we know, pass away, as the Assyrians and the Pyramid builders have. In one of the Pacific islands—Easter Island—a thousand miles from the nearest land, there are hundreds of carved images of stone, fifty or sixty feet high, and weighing perhaps a hundred tons each. The people who made these must have been very numerous and must have had considerable skill. Yet they have passed away. The arts of Nineveh and Babylon have only lately become known, so that, you see, the works of a race may easily become hidden from us who follow. Quite lately, too, the works of a partly civilized people have been discovered in Ohio in America. There are there hundreds of mounds and earth embankments forming fortified camps. Some of them are several miles round, and they could only have been made by a very numerous and intelligent people who knew something about geometry; for the circles, squares, and angles of these earthworks are quite as correct as we could make them. Among the multitude of things found here are copper tools made by hammering, ornamental pottery, silver beads, plates of mica with scrolls and designs engraved on them, and carefully carved pieces of stone. These carvings are most curious and excellently finished. They represent human heads and many animals, such as the bear, otter, wolf, beaver, raccoon, frog, rattlesnake, heron, crow, &c. A people, then, who could do these things and took pleasure in doing them must have possessed great intelligence and a knowledge of things far beyond a simple state. They even had religious ideas, such as they were, for they had places for sacrifice. All their works are now overgrown by forests, but it is impossible to mistake them; yet the native Indians of Ohio living now have no idea that such a people lived in their country before them, and no tradition at all about a people whose civilization was so far superior to their own.

We may come nearer to our own times, and look at the Assyrians and Egyptians. Until quite recently nothing was known about the Assyrians except what could be learned from the few references made to them in Scripture and some ancient writers; but Mr. Layard dug up their cities, and found that they possessed the arts of building, sculpture, working in metals, and a written language. All this was buried under the sand of a desert! Then there is the great Pyramid of Egypt, built in a way that we could not surpass, and with much knowledge of geometry and other sciences.[29] The men who designed and constructed these works could not have lived among a half-barbarous people; and as these are the highest works of the people, how much there must have been that went before, of which there is no trace now, when Assyria and Egypt were in their age of stone axes and flint arrow-heads.

I do not think that the Stone-Age men of Europe were nearly so civilized. At all events, they have not left any such imperishable monuments as the gigantic images of Easter Island, the earthworks of the Ohio people, or the sculptures, writings, and buildings of the Assyrians and Egyptians; but they might have been more civilized than they seem to have been from their simple weapons and tools. They might have made many things which were perishable, and have been destroyed by time—things which would have given us a higher belief in their intelligence and civilization.

The past history of the human race may be compared to the rise and fall of the tide. Wave after wave has risen higher and higher on the everlasting shore of Time, and when the tide was at its highest it has fallen again slowly, to rise again and again in the same way through many ages. We know that man may rise slowly from a simple condition to much civilization and power, and may again sink back almost to barbarism, as has been the case with the people of whom we have been speaking, and then again a new civilization may grow up. It is possible that all now savage nations are the sinking descendants of some, in comparison, once civilized people. Modern nations are taking up the ground of savages all over the world, and soon there will be no trace of these simple people. Thus it may have been with mankind throughout all the time during which they have occupied the earth, and so it may be perhaps again.