In the previous chapters we have seen how science, especially

within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has thoroughly

changed the intelligent thought of the world in regard to the

antiquity of man upon our planet; and how the fabric built upon

the chronological indications in our sacred books--first, by the

early fathers of the Church, afterward by the medieval doctors,

and finally by the reformers and modern orthodox

chronologists--has virtually disappeared before an entirely

different view forced upon us, especially by Egyptian and

Assyrian studies, as well as by geology and archeology.



In this chapter I purpose to present some outlines of the work of

Anthropology, especially as assisted by Ethnology, in showing

what the evolution of human civilization has been.



Here, too, the change from the old theological view based upon

the letter of our sacred books to the modern scientific view

based upon evidence absolutely irrefragable is complete.  Here,

too, we are at the beginning of a vast change in the basis and

modes of thought upon man--a change even more striking than that

accomplished by Copernicus and Galileo, when they substituted for

a universe in which sun and planets revolved about the earth a

universe in which the earth is but the merest grain or atom

revolving with other worlds, larger and smaller, about the sun;

and all these forming but one among innumerable systems.



Ever since the beginning of man's effective thinking upon the

great problems around him, two antagonistic views have existed

regarding the life of the human race upon earth.  The first of

these is the belief that man was created "in the beginning" a

perfect being, endowed with the highest moral and intellectual

powers, but that there came a "fall," and, as its result, the

entrance into the world of evil, toil, sorrow, and death.



Nothing could be more natural than such an explanation of the

existence of evil, in times when men saw everywhere miracle and

nowhere law.  It is, under such circumstances, by far the most

easy of explanations, for it is in accordance with the

appearances of things:  men adopted it just as naturally as they

adopted the theory that the Almighty hangs up the stars as lights

in the solid firmament above the earth, or hides the sun behind a

mountain at night, or wheels the planets around the earth, or

flings comets as "signs and wonders" to scare a wicked world, or

allows evil spirits to control thunder, lightning, and storm, and

to cause diseases of body and mind, or opens the "windows of

heaven" to let down "the waters that be above the heavens," and

thus to give rain upon the earth.



A belief, then, in a primeval period of innocence and

perfection--moral, intellectual, and physical--from which men for

some fault fell, is perfectly in accordance with what we should

expect.



Among the earliest known records of our race we find this view

taking shape in the Chaldean legends of war between the gods, and

of a fall of man; both of which seemed necessary to explain the

existence of evil.



In Greek mythology perhaps the best-known statement was made by

Hesiod:  to him it was revealed, regarding the men of the most

ancient times, that they were at first "a golden race," that "as

gods they were wont to live, with a life void of care, without

labour and trouble; nor was wretched old age at all impending;

but ever did they delight themselves out of the reach of all

ills, and they died as if overcome by sleep; all blessings were

theirs:  of its own will the fruitful field would bear them

fruit, much and ample, and they gladly used to reap the labours

of their hands in quietness along with many good things, being

rich in flocks and true to the blessed gods."  But there came a

"fall," caused by human curiosity.  Pandora, the first woman

created, received a vase which, by divine command, was to remain

closed; but she was tempted to open it, and troubles, sorrow, and

disease escaped into the world, hope alone remaining.



So, too, in Roman mythological poetry the well-known picture by

Ovid is but one among the many exhibitions of this same belief in

a primeval golden age--a Saturnian cycle; one of the constantly

recurring attempts, so universal and so natural in the early

history of man, to account for the existence of evil, care, and

toil on earth by explanatory myths and legends.



This view, growing out of the myths, legends, and theologies of

earlier peoples, we also find embodied in the sacred tradition of

the Jews, and especially in one of the documents which form the

impressive poem beginning the books attributed to Moses.  As to

the Christian Church, no word of its Blessed Founder indicates

that it was committed by him to this theory, or that he even

thought it worthy of his attention.  How, like so many other

dogmas never dreamed of by Jesus of Nazareth and those who knew

him best, it was developed, it does not lie within the province

of this chapter to point out; nor is it worth our while to dwell

upon its evolution in the early Church, in the Middle Ages, at

the Reformation, and in various branches of the Protestant

Church:  suffice it that, though among English-speaking nations

by far the most important influence in its favour has come from

Milton's inspiration rather than from that of older sacred books,

no doctrine has been more universally accepted, "always,

everywhere, and by all," from the earliest fathers of the Church

down to the present hour.



On the other hand appeared at an early period the opposite

view--that mankind, instead of having fallen from a high

intellectual, moral, and religious condition, has slowly risen

from low and brutal beginnings.  In Greece, among the

philosophers contemporary with Socrates, we find Critias

depicting a rise of man, from a time when he was beastlike and

lawless, through a period when laws were developed, to a time

when morality received enforcement from religion; but among all

the statements of this theory the most noteworthy is that given

by Lucretius in his great poem on The Nature of Things.  Despite

its errors, it remains among the most remarkable examples of

prophetic insight in the history of our race.  The inspiration of

Lucretius gave him almost miraculous glimpses of truth; his view

of the development of civilization from the rudest beginnings to

the height of its achievements is a wonderful growth, rooted in

observation and thought, branching forth into a multitude of

striking facts and fancies; and among these is the statement

regarding the sequence of inventions:





"Man's earliest arms were fingers, teeth, and nails,

And stones and fragments from the branching woods;

Then copper next; and last, as latest traced,

The tyrant, iron."





Thus did the poet prophesy one of the most fruitful achievements

of modern science:  the discovery of that series of epochs which

has been so carefully studied in our century.



Very striking, also, is the statement of Horace, though his idea

is evidently derived from Lucretius.  He dwells upon man's first

condition on earth as low and bestial, and pictures him lurking

in caves, progressing from the use of his fists and nails, first

to clubs, then to arms which he had learned to forge, and,

finally, to the invention of the names of things, to literature,

and to laws.[189]



[189] For the passage in Hesiod, as given, see the Works and

Days, lines 109-120, in Banks's translation. As to Horace, see

the Satires, i, 3, 99. As to the relation of the poetic account

of the Fall in Genesis to Chaldean myths, see Smith, Chaldean

Account of Genesis, pp. 13, 17. For a very instructive separation

of the Jehovistic and Elohistic parts of Genesis, with the

account of the "Fall" as given in the former, see Lenormant, La

Genese, Paris, 1883, pp. 166-168; also Bacon, Genesis of Genesis.

Of the lines of Lucretius--



"Arma antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt,

Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami,

Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta,

Sed prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus"---



the translation is that of Good. For a more exact prose

translation, see Munro's Lucretius, fourth edition, which is much

more careful, at least in the proof-reading, than the first

edition. As regards Lucretius's propheitc insight into some of

the greatest conclusiuons of modern science, see Munro's

translation and notes, fourth edition, book v, notes ii, p. 335.

On the relation of several passages in Horace to the ideas of

Lucretius, see Munro as above. For the passage from Luther, see

the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, p. 242.





During the mediaeval ages of faith this view was almost entirely

obscured, and at the Reformation it seemed likely to remain so.

Typical of the simplicity of belief in "the Fall" cherished among

the Reformers is Luther's declaration regarding Adam and Eve.  He

tells us, "they entered into the garden about noon, and having a

desire to eat, she took the apple; then came the fall--according

to our account at about two o'clock."  But in the revival of

learning the old eclipsed truth reappeared, and in the first part

of the seventeenth century we find that, among the crimes for

which Vanini was sentenced at Toulouse to have his tongue torn

out and to be burned alive, was his belief that there is a

gradation extending upward from the lowest to the highest form of

created beings.



Yet, in the same century, the writings of Bodin, Bacon,

Descartes, and Pascal were evidently undermining the old idea of

"the Fall."  Bodin especially, brilliant as were his services to

orthodoxy, argued lucidly against the doctrine of general human

deterioration.



Early in the eighteenth century Vico presented the philosophy of

history as an upward movement of man out of animalism and

barbarism.  This idea took firm hold upon human thought, and in

the following centuries such men as Lessing and Turgot gave new

force to it.



The investigations of the last forty years have shown that

Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets:  what they saw by

the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius, has been now

thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained and

arranged--until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern archaeologists,

have brought these prophecies to evident fulfilment, by

presenting a scientific classification dividing the age of

prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an old

stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten copper, a

period of bronze, and a period of iron, and arraying vast masses

of facts from all parts of the world, fitting thoroughly into

each other, strengthening each other, and showing beyond a doubt

that, instead of a FALL, there has been a RISE of man, from the

earliest indications in the Quaternary, or even, possibly, in the

Tertiary period.[190]



[190] For Vanini, see Topinard, Elements of Anthropologie, p. 52.

For a brief and careful summary of the agency of Eccard in

Germany, Goguet in France, Hoare in England, and others in

various parts of Europe, as regards this development of the

scientific view during the eighteenth century, see Mortillet, Le

Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, chap. i.  For the agency of Bodin,

Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal, see Flint, Philosophy of History,

introduction, pp. 28 et seq.  For a shorter summary, see Lubbock,

Prehistoric Man.  For the statements by the northern

archaeologists, see Nilsson, Worsaae, and the other main works

cited in this article.  For a generous statement regarding the

great services of the Danish archaeologists in this field, see

Quatrefages, introduction to Cartailhac, Les Ages Prehistoriques

de l'Espagne et du Portugal.





The first blow at the fully developed doctrine of "the Fall"

came, as we have seen, from geology.  According to that doctrine,

as held quite generally from its beginnings among the fathers and

doctors of the primitive Church down to its culmination in the

minds of great Protestants like John Wesley, the statement in our

sacred books that "death entered the world by sin" was taken as a

historic fact, necessitating the conclusion that, before the

serpent persuaded Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, death on our

planet was unknown.  Naturally, when geology revealed, in the

strata of a period long before the coming of man on earth, a vast

multitude of carnivorous tribes fitted to destroy their

fellow-creatures on land and sea, and within the fossilized

skeletons of many of these the partially digested remains of

animals, this doctrine was too heavy to be carried, and it was

quietly dropped.



But about the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrine of

the rise of man as opposed to the doctrine of his "fall" received

a great accession of strength from a source most unexpected.  As

we saw in the last chapter, the facts proving the great antiquity

of man foreshadowed a new and even more remarkable idea regarding

him.  We saw, it is true, that the opponents of Boucher de

Perthes, while they could not deny his discovery of human

implements in the drift, were successful in securing a verdict of

"Not prove " as regarded his discovery of human bones; but their

triumph was short-lived.  Many previous discoveries, little

thought of up to that time, began to be studied, and others were

added which resulted not merely in confirming the truth regarding

the antiquity of man, but in establishing another doctrine which

the opponents of science regarded with vastly greater

dislike--the doctrine that man has not fallen from an original

high estate in which he was created about six thousand years ago,

but that, from a period vastly earlier than any warranted by the

sacred chronologists, he has been, in spite of lapses and

deteriorations, rising.



A brief review of this new growth of truth may be useful.  As

early as 1835 Prof. Jaeger had brought out from a quantity of

Quaternary remains dug up long before at Cannstadt, near

Stuttgart, a portion of a human skull, apparently of very low

type.  A battle raged about it for a time, but this finally

subsided, owing to uncertainties arising from the circumstances

of the discovery.



In 1856, in the Neanderthal, near Dusseldorf, among Quaternary

remains gathered on the floor of a grotto, another skull was

found bearing the same evidence of a low human type.  As in the

case of the Cannstadt skull, this again was fiercely debated, and

finally the questions regarding it were allowed to remain in

suspense.  But new discoveries were made:  at Eguisheim, at Brux,

at Spy, and elsewhere, human skulls were found of a similarly low

type; and, while each of the earlier discoveries was open to

debate, and either, had no other been discovered, might have been

considered an abnormal specimen, the combination of all these

showed conclusively that not only had a race of men existed at

that remote period, but that it was of a type as low as the

lowest, perhaps below the lowest, now known.



Research was now redoubled, and, as a result, human skulls and

complete skeletons of various types began to be discovered in the

ancient deposits of many other parts of the world, and especially

in France, Belgium, Germany, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and

South America.



But soon began to emerge from all these discoveries a fact of

enormous importance.  The skulls and bones found at Cro Magnon,

Solutre, Furfooz, Grenelle, and elsewhere, were compared, and it

was thus made certain that various races had already appeared and

lived in various grades of civilization, even in those

exceedingly remote epochs; that even then there were various

strata of humanity ranging from races of a very low to those of a

very high type; and that upon any theory--certainly upon the

theory of the origin of mankind from a single pair--two things

were evident:  first, that long, slow processes during vast

periods of time must have been required for the differentiation

of these races, and for the evolution of man up to the point

where the better specimens show him, certainly in the early

Quaternary and perhaps in the Tertiary period; and, secondly,

that there had been from the first appearance of man, of which we

have any traces, an UPWARD tendency.[191]



[191] For Wesley's statement of the amazing consequences of the

entrance of death into the world by sin, see citations in his

sermon on The Fall of Man in the chapter on Geology.  For Boucher

de Perthes, see his Life by Ledieu, especially chapters v and

xix; also letters in the appendix; also Les Antiquities Celtiques

et Antediluviennes, as cited in previous chapters of this work.

For an account of the Neanderthal man and other remains

mentioned, see Quatrefages, Human Species, chap. xxvi; also

Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, pp. 232 et seq.; also

other writers cited in this chapter.  For the other discoveries

mentioned, see the same sources.  For an engraving of the skull

and the restored human face of the Neanderthal man, see Reinach,

Antiquities Nationales, etc., vol. i, p. 138.  For the vast

regions over which that early race spread, see Quatrefages as

above, p. 307.  See also the same author, Histoire Generale des

Races Humaines, in the Bibliotheque Ethnologique, Paris, 1887, p.

4.  In the vast mass of literature bearing on this subject, see

Quatrefages, Dupont, Reinach, Joly, Mortillet, Tylor, and

Lubbock, in works cited through these chapters.





This second conclusion, the upward tendency of man from low

beginnings, was made more and more clear by bringing into

relations with these remains of human bodies and of extinct

animals the remains of human handiwork.  As stated in the last

chapter, the river drift and bone caves in Great Britain, France,

and other parts of the world, revealed a progression, even in the

various divisions of the earliest Stone period; for, beginning

at the very lowest strata of these remains, on the floors of the

caverns, associated mainly with the bones of extinct animals,

such as the cave bear, the hairy elephant, and the like, were the

rudest implements then, in strata above these, sealed in the

stalagmite of the cavern floors, lying with the bones of animals

extinct but more recent, stone implements were found, still rude,

but, as a rule, of an improved type; and, finally, in a still

higher stratum, associated with bones of animals like the

reindeer and bison, which, though not extinct, have departed to

other climates, were rude stone implements, on the whole of a

still better workmanship.  Such was the foreshadowing, even at

that early rude Stone period, of the proofs that the tendency of

man has been from his earliest epoch and in all parts of the

world, as a rule, upward.



But this rule was to be much further exemplified.  About 1850,

while the French and English geologists were working more

especially among the relics of the drift and cave periods, noted

archaeologists of the North--Forchammer, Steenstrup, and

Worsaae--were devoting themselves to the investigation of certain

remains upon the Danish Peninsula.  These remains were of two

kinds:  first, there were vast shell-heaps or accumulations of

shells and other refuse cast aside by rude tribes which at some

unknown age in the past lived on the shores of the Baltic,

principally on shellfish.  That these shell-heaps were very

ancient was evident:  the shells of oysters and the like found in

them were far larger than any now found on those coasts; their

size, so far from being like that of the corresponding varieties

which now exist in the brackish waters of the Baltic, was in

every case like that of those varieties which only thrive in the

waters of the open salt sea.  Here was a clear indication that at

the time when man formed these shell-heaps those coasts were in

far more direct communication with the salt sea than at present,

and that sufficient time must have elapsed since that period to

have wrought enormous changes in sea and land throughout those

regions.



Scattered through these heaps were found indications of a grade

of civilization when man still used implements of stone, but

implements and weapons which, though still rude, showed a

progress from those of the drift and early cave period, some of

them being of polished stone.



With these were other evidences that civilization had progressed.

With implements rude enough to have survived from early periods,

other implements never known in the drift and bone caves began to

appear, and, though there were few if any bones of other domestic

animals, the remains of dogs were found; everything showed that

there had been a progress in civilization between the former

Stone epoch and this.



The second series of discoveries in Scandinavia was made in the

peat-beds:  these were generally formed in hollows or bowls

varying in depth from ten to thirty feet, and a section of them,

like a section of the deposits in the bone caverns, showed a

gradual evolution of human culture.  The lower strata in these

great bowls were found to be made up chiefly of mosses and

various plants matted together with the trunks of fallen trees,

sometimes of very large diameter; and the botanical examination

of the lowest layer of these trees and plants in the various

bowls revealed a most important fact:  for this layer, the first

in point of time, was always of the Scotch fir--which now grows

nowhere in the Danish islands, and can not be made to grow

anywhere in them--and of plants which are now extinct in these

regions, but have retreated within the arctic circle.  Coming up

from the bottom of these great bowls there was found above the

first layer a second, in which were matted together masses of oak

trees of different varieties; these, too, were relics of a

bygone epoch, since the oak has almost entirely disappeared from

Denmark.  Above these came a third stratum made up of fallen

beech trees; and the beech is now, and has been since the

beginning of recorded history, the most common tree of the Danish

Peninsula.



Now came a second fact of the utmost importance as connected with

the first.  Scattered, as a rule, through the lower of these

deposits, that of the extinct fir trees and plants, were found

implements and weapons of smooth stone; in the layer of oak

trees were found implements of bronze; and among the layer of

beeches were found implements and weapons of iron.



The general result of these investigations in these two sources,

the shell mounds and the peat deposits, was the same:  the first

civilization evidenced in them was marked by the use of stone

implements more or less smooth, showing a progress from the

earlier rude Stone period made known by the bone caves; then

came a later progress to a higher civilization, marked by the use

of bronze implements; and, finally, a still higher development

when iron began to be used.



The labours of the Danish archaeologists have resulted in the

formation of a great museum at Copenhagen, and on the specimens

they have found, coupled with those of the drift and bone caves,

is based the classification between the main periods or divisions

in the evolution of the human race above referred to.



It was not merely in Scandinavian lands that these results were

reached; substantially the same discoveries were made in Ireland

and France, in Sardinia and Portugal, in Japan and in Brazil, in

Cuba and in the United States; in fact, as a rule, in nearly

every part of the world which was thoroughly examined.[192]



[192] For the general subject, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique,

p. 498, et passim.  For examples of the rude stone implements,

improving as we go from earlier to later layers in the bone

caves, see Boyd Hawkins, Early Man in Britain, chap. vii, p. 186;

also Quatrefages, Human Species, New York, 1879, pp. 305 et seq.

An interesting gleam of light is thrown on the subject in De

Baye, Grottes Prehistoriques de la Marne, pp. 31 et seq.; also

Evans, as cited in the previous chapter.  For the more recent

investigations in the Danish shell-heaps, see Boyd Dawkins, Early

Man in Britain, pp. 303, 304.  For these evidences of advanced

civilization in the shell-heaps, see Mortillet, p. 498.  He, like

Nilsson, says that only the bones of the dog were found; but

compare Dawkins, p. 305.  For the very full list of these

discoveries, with their bearing on each other, see Mortillet, p.

499.  As to those in Scandanavian countries, see Nilsson, The

Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, third edition, with

Introduction by Lubbock, London, 1868; also the Pre-History of

the North, by Worsaae, English translation, London, 1886. For

shell-mounds and their contents in the Spanish Peninsula, see

Cartailhac's greater work already cited. For summary of such

discoveries throughout the world, see Mortillet, Le

Prehistorique, pp. 497 et seq.





But from another quarter came a yet more striking indication of

this same evolution.  As far back as the year 1829 there were

discovered, in the Lake of Zurich, piles and other antiquities

indicating a former existence of human dwellings, standing in the

water at some distance from the shore; but the usual mixture of

thoughtlessness and dread of new ideas seems to have prevailed,

and nothing was done until about 1853, when new discoveries of

the same kind were followed up vigorously, and Rutimeyer, Keller,

Troyon, and others showed not only in the Lake of Zurich, but in

many other lakes in Switzerland, remains of former habitations,

and, in the midst of these, great numbers of relics, exhibiting

the grade of civilization which those lakedwellers had attained.



Here, too, were accumulated proofs of the upward tendency of the

human race.  Implements of polished stone, bone, leather, pottery

of various grades, woven cloth, bones of several kinds of

domestic animals, various sorts of grain, bread which had been

preserved by charring, and a multitude of evidences of progress

never found among the earlier, ruder relics of civilization,

showed yet more strongly that man had arrived here at a still

higher stage than his predecessor of the drift, cave, and

shell-heap periods, and had gone on from better to better.



Very striking evidences of this upward tendency were found in

each class of implements.  As by comparing the chipped flint

implements of the lower and earlier strata in the cave period

with those of the later and upper strata we saw progress, so, in

each of the periods of polished stone, bronze, and iron, we see,

by similar comparisons, a steady progress from rude to perfected

implements; and especially is this true in the remains of the

various lake-dwellings, for among these can be traced out

constant increase in the variety of animals domesticated, and

gradual improvements in means of subsistence and in ways of

living.



Incidentally, too, a fact, at first sight of small account, but

on reflection exceedingly important, was revealed.  The earlier

bronze implements were frequently found to imitate in various

minor respects implements of stone; in other words, forms were

at first given to bronze implements natural in working stone, but

not natural in working bronze.  This showed the DIRECTION of the

development--that it was upward from stone to bronze, not

downward from bronze to stone; that it was progress rather than

decline.



These investigations were supplemented by similar researches

elsewhere.  In many other parts of the world it was found that

lake-dwellers had existed in different grades of civilization,

but all within a certain range, intermediate between the

cave-dwellers and the historic period.  To explain this epoch of

the lake-dwellers, history came in with the account given by

Herodotus of the lake-dwellings on Lake Prasias, which gave

protection from the armies of Persia.  Still more important,

Comparative Ethnography showed that to-day, in various parts of

the world, especially in New Guinea and West Africa, races of men

are living in lake-dwellings built upon piles, and with a range

of implements and weapons strikingly like many of those

discovered in these ancient lake deposits of Switzerland.



In Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, and

other countries, remains of a different sort were also found,

throwing light on this progress.  The cromlechs, cranogs, mounds,

and the like, though some of them indicate the work of weaker

tribes pressed upon by stronger, show, as a rule, the same upward

tendency.



At a very early period in the history of these discoveries,

various attempts were made--nominally in the interest of

religion, but really in the interest of sundry creeds and

catechisms framed when men knew little or nothing of natural

laws--to break the force of such evidences of the progress and

development of the human race from lower to higher.  Out of all

the earlier efforts two may be taken as fairly typical, for they

exhibit the opposition to science as developed under two

different schools of theology, each working in its own way.  The

first of these shows great ingenuity and learning, and is

presented by Mr. Southall in his book, published in 1875,

entitled The Recent Origin of the World.  In this he grapples

first of all with the difficulties presented by the early date of

Egyptian civilization, and the keynote of his argument is the

statement made by an eminent Egyptologist, at a period before

modern archaeological discoveries were well understood, that

"Egypt laughs the idea of a rude Stone age, a polished Stone age,

a Bronze age, an Iron age, to scorn."



Mr. Southall's method was substantially that of the late

excellent Mr. Gosse in geology.  Mr. Gosse, as the readers of

this work may remember, felt obliged, in the supposed interest of

Genesis, to urge that safety to men's souls might be found in

believing that, six thousand years ago, the Almighty, for some

inscrutable purpose, suddenly set Niagara pouring very near the

spot where it is pouring now; laid the various strata, and

sprinkled the fossils through them like plums through a pudding;

scratched the glacial grooves upon the rocks, and did a vast

multitude of things, subtle and cunning, little and great, in all

parts of the world, required to delude geologists of modern times

into the conviction that all these things were the result of a

steady progress through long epochs.  On a similar plan, Mr.

Southall proposed, at the very beginning of his book, as a final

solution of the problem, the declaration that Egypt, with its

high civilization in the time of Mena, with its races, classes,

institutions, arrangements, language, monuments--all indicating

an evolution through a vast previous history--was a sudden

creation which came fully made from the hands of the Creator.  To

use his own words, "The Egyptians had no Stone age, and were born

civilized."



There is an old story that once on a time a certain jovial King

of France, making a progress through his kingdom, was received at

the gates of a provincial town by the mayor's deputy, who began

his speech on this wise:  "May it please your Majesty, there are

just thirteen reasons why His Honour the Mayor can not be present

to welcome you this morning.  The first of these reasons is that

he is dead."  On this the king graciously declared that this

first reason was sufficient, and that he would not trouble the

mayor's deputy for the twelve others.



So with Mr. Southall's argument:  one simple result of scientific

research out of many is all that it is needful to state, and this

is, that in these later years we have a new and convincing

evidence of the existence of prehistoric man in Egypt in his

earliest, rudest beginnings; the very same evidence which we

find in all other parts of the world which have been carefully

examined.  This evidence consists of stone implements and weapons

which have been found in Egypt in such forms, at such points, and

in such positions that when studied in connection with those

found in all other parts of the world, from New Jersey to

California, from France to India, and from England to the Andaman

Islands, they force upon us the conviction that civilization in

Egypt, as in all other parts of the world, was developed by the

same slow process of evolution from the rudest beginnings.



It is true that men learned in Egyptology had discouraged the

idea of an earlier Stone age in Egypt, and that among these were

Lepsius and Brugsch; but these men were not trained in

prehistoric archaeology; their devotion to the study of the

monuments of Egyptian civilization had evidently drawn them away

from sympathy, and indeed from acquaintance, with the work of men

like Boucher de Perthes, Lartet, Nilsson, Troyon, and Dawkins.

But a new era was beginning.  In 1867 Worsaae called attention to

the prehistoric implements found on the borders of Egypt; two

years later Arcelin discussed such stone implements found beneath

the soil of Sakkara and Gizeh, the very focus of the earliest

Egyptian civilization; in the same year Hamy and Lenormant found

such implements washed out from the depths higher up the Nile at

Thebes, near the tombs of the kings; and in the following year

they exhibited more flint implements found at various other

places.  Coupled with these discoveries was the fact that Horner

and Linant found a copper knife at twenty-four feet, and pottery

at sixty feet, below the surface.  In 1872 Dr. Reil, director of

the baths at Helouan, near Cairo, discovered implements of

chipped flint; and in 1877.  Dr. Jukes Brown made similar

discoveries in that region.  In 1878 Oscar Fraas, summing up the

question, showed that the stone implements were mainly such as

are found in the prehistoric deposits of other countries, and

that, Zittel having found them in the Libyan Desert, far from the

oases, there was reason to suppose that these implements were

used before the region became a desert and before Egypt was

civilized.  Two years later Dr. Mook, of Wurzburg, published a

work giving the results of his investigations, with careful

drawings of the rude stone implements discovered by him in the

upper Nile Valley, and it was evident that, while some of these

implements differed slightly from those before known, the great

mass of them were of the character so common in the prehistoric

deposits of other parts of the world.



A yet more important contribution to this mass of facts was made

by Prof. Henry Haynes, of Boston, who in the winter of 1877 and

1878 began a very thorough investigation of the subject, and

discovered, a few miles east of Cairo, many flint implements.

The significance of Haynes's discoveries was twofold:  First,

there were, among these, stone axes like those found in the

French drift beds of St. Acheul, showing that the men who made or

taught men how to make these in Egypt were passing through the

same phase of savagery as that of Quaternary France; secondly, he

found a workshop for making these implements, proving that these

flint implements were not brought into Egypt by invaders, but

were made to meet the necessities of the country.  From this

first field Prof. Haynes went to Helouan, north of Cairo, and

there found, as Dr. Reil had done, various worked flints, some of

them like those discovered by M.  Riviere in the caves of

southern France; thence he went up the Nile to Luxor, the site of

ancient Thebes, began a thorough search in the Tertiary limestone

hills, and found multitudes of chipped stone implements, some of

them, indeed, of original forms, but most of forms common in

other parts of the world under similar circumstances, some of the

chipped stone axes corresponding closely to those found in the

drift beds of northern France.



All this seemed to show conclusively that, long ages before the

earliest period of Egyptian civilization of which the monuments

of the first dynasties give us any trace, mankind in the Nile

Valley was going through the same slow progress from the period

when, standing just above the brutes, he defended himself with

implements of rudely chipped stone.



But in 1881 came discoveries which settled the question entirely.

In that year General Pitt-Rivers, a Fellow of the Royal Society

and President of the Anthropological Institute, and J. F.

Campbell, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of England,

found implements not only in alluvial deposits, associated with

the bones of the zebra, hyena, and other animals which have since

retreated farther south, but, at Djebel Assas, near Thebes, they

found implements of chipped flint in the hard, stratified gravel,

from six and a half to ten feet below the surface; relics

evidently, as Mr. Campbell says, "beyond calculation older than

the oldest Egyptian temples and tombs."  They certainly proved

that Egyptian civilization had not issued in its completeness,

and all at once, from the hand of the Creator in the time of

Mena.  Nor was this all.  Investigators of the highest character

and ability--men like Hull and Flinders Petrie--revealed

geological changes in Egypt requiring enormous periods of time,

and traces of man's handiwork dating from a period when the

waters in the Nile Valley extended hundreds of feet above the

present level.  Thus was ended the contention of Mr. Southall.



Still another attack upon the new scientific conclusions came

from France, when in 1883 the Abbe Hamard, Priest of the Oratory,

published his Age of Stone and Primitive Man.  He had been

especially vexed at the arrangement of prehistoric implements by

periods at the Paris Exposition of 1878; he bitterly complains

of this as having an anti-Christian tendency, and rails at

science as "the idol of the day."  He attacks Mortillet, one of

the leaders in French archaeology, with a great display of

contempt; speaks of the "venom" in books on prehistoric man

generally; complains that the Church is too mild and gentle with

such monstrous doctrines; bewails the concessions made to science

by some eminent preachers; and foretells his own martyrdom at the

hands of men of science.



Efforts like this accomplished little, and a more legitimate

attempt was made to resist the conclusions of archaeology by

showing that knives of stone were used in obedience to a sacred

ritual in Egypt for embalming, and in Judea for circumcision, and

that these flint knives might have had this later origin.  But

the argument against the conclusions drawn from this view was

triple: First, as we have seen, not only stone knives, but axes

and other implements of stone similar to those of a prehistoric

period in western Europe were discovered; secondly, these

implements were discovered in the hard gravel drift of a period

evidently far earlier than that of Mena; and, thirdly, the use of

stone implements in Egyptian and Jewish sacred functions within

the historic period, so far from weakening the force of the

arguments for the long and slow development of Egyptian

civilization from the men who used rude flint implements to the

men who built and adorned the great temples of the early

dynasties, is really an argument in favour of that long

evolution.  A study of comparative ethnology has made it clear

that the sacred stone knives and implements of the Egyptian and

Jewish priestly ritual were natural survivals of that previous

period.  For sacrificial or ritual purposes, the knife of stone

was considered more sacred than the knife of bronze or iron,

simply because it was ancient; just as to-day, in India, Brahman

priests kindle the sacred fire not with matches or flint and

steel, but by a process found in the earliest, lowest stages of

human culture--by violently boring a pointed stick into another

piece of wood until a spark comes; and just as to-day, in Europe

and America, the architecture of the Middle Ages survives as a

special religious form in the erection of our most recent

churches, and to such an extent that thousands on thousands of us

feel that we can not worship fitly unless in the midst of

windows, decorations, vessels, implements, vestments, and

ornaments, no longer used for other purposes, but which have

survived in sundry branches of the Christian Church, and derived

a special sanctity from the fact that they are of ancient origin.



Taking, then, the whole mass of testimony together, even though a

plausible or very strong argument against single evidences may be

made here and there, the force of its combined mass remains, and

leaves both the vast antiquity of man and the evolution of

civilization from its lowest to its highest forms, as proved by

the prehistoric remains of Egypt and so many other countries in

all parts of the world, beyond a reasonable doubt.  Most

important of all, the recent discoveries in Assyria have thrown a

new light upon the evolution of the dogma of "the fall of man."

Reverent scholars like George Smith, Sayce, Delitzsch, Jensen,

Schrader, and their compeers have found in the Ninevite records

the undoubted source of that form of the fall legend which was

adopted by the Hebrews and by them transmitted to

Christianity.[193]



[193] For Mr. Southall's views, see his Recent Origin of Man, p.

20 and elsewhere.  For Mr. Gosse'e views, see his Omphalos as

cited in the chapter on Geology in this work.  For a summary of

the work of Arcelin, Hamy, Lenormant, Richard, Lubbock, Mook, and

Haynes, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, passim.  As to Zittel's

discovery, see Oscar Fraas's Aus dem Orient, Stuttgart, 1878.  As

to the striking similarties of the stone implements found in

Egypt with those found in the drift and bone caves, see Mook's

monograph, Wurzburg, 1880, cited in the next chapter, especially

Plates IX, XI, XII.  For even more striking reproductions of

photographs showing this remarkable similarity between Egyptian

and European chipped stone remains, see H. W. Haynes,

Palaeolithic Implements in Upper Egypt, Boston, 1881.  See also

Evans, Ancient Stone Implements, chap. i, pp. 8, 9, 44, 102, 316,

329.  As to stone implements used by priests of Jehovah, priests

of Baal, priests of Moloch, priests of Odin, and Egyptian

priests, as religious survivals, see Cartailhac, as above, 6 and

7; also Lartet, in De Luynes, Expedition to the Dead Sea; also

Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, pp. 96, 97; also

Sayce, Herodotus, p. 171, note.  For the discoveries by Pitt-

Rivers, see the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great

Britain and Ireland for 1882, vol. xi, pp. 382 et seq.; and for

Campbell's decision regarding them, see ibid., pp. 396, 397.  For

facts summed up in the words, "It is most probable that Egypt at

a remote period passed like many other countries through its

stone period," see Hilton Price, F. S. A., F. G. S., paper in the

Journal of the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and

Ireland for 1884, p. 56.  Specimens of Palaeolithic implements

from Egypt--knives, arrowheads, spearheads, flakes, and the like,

both of peculiar and ordinary forms--may be seen in various

museums, but especially in that of Prof. Haynes, of Boston.  Some

interesting light is also thrown into the subject by the

specimens obtained by General Wilson and deposited in the

Smithsonian Institution at Washington.  For Abbe Hamard's attack,

see his L'Age de la Pierre et L'Homme Primitif, Paris, 1883--

especially his preface.  For the stone weapon found in the high

drift behind Esneh, see Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, chap.

i.  Of these discoveries by Pitt-Rivers and others, Maspero

appears to know nothing.