Part 8

“22 These four were born to the giant in Gath, and fell by the hand of David, and by the hand of his servants.”

But these were mere pigmies if we can believe M. Henrion, who in 1718 calculated out the heights of divers notable persons--thus he found Adam was 121 ft. 9 in. high, Eve 118 ft. 9 in., Noah 27 ft., Abraham 20 ft., and Moses 13 ft.

Putting aside the mythical classical giants, Pliny says: “The tallest man that has been seen in our times, was one Gabbaras by name, who was brought from Arabia by the Emperor Claudius; his height was nine feet and as many inches. In the reign of Augustus, there were two persons, Posio and Secundilla, by name, who were half a foot taller than him; their bodies have been preserved as objects of curiosity in the Museum of the Sallustian family.”

But it is reserved to Sir John Mandeville to have found the tallest giants of, comparatively speaking, modern times. “And beyond that valey is a great yle, where people as great as giaunts of xxviii fote long, and they have no clothinge but beasts skyns that hang on them, and they eate no bread, but flesh raw, and drink milke, and they have no houses, & they ate gladlyer fleshe of men, than other, & men saye to us that beyonde that yle is an yle where are greater giaunts as xlv or l fote long, & some said l cubits long (75 feet) but I saw them not, and among those giaunts are great shepe, and they beare great wolle, these shepe have I sene many times.”

EARLY MEN.

On the antiquity of man it is impossible to speculate, because we have no data to go upon. We know that his earliest existence, of which we have any cognisance, must have been at a period when the climate and fauna of the Western continent was totally different to their present state. Then roamed over the land, the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, the Bos-primigenius, the reindeer, the cave bear, the brown and the Arctic bears, the cave hyæna, and many other animals now quite extinct. We know that man then existed, because we find his handiwork in the shape of manufactured flint implements, mixed with the bones of these animals--and, occasionally, with them human remains have been found, but, as yet, no perfect skull has been found. There were two types of man, the Dolicho Cephalous, or long-headed, and the Brachy Cephalous, or round-headed--and, of these, the long-headed were of far greater antiquity.

All we can do is to classify man’s habitation of this earth, as well as we can, under certain well-defined, and known conditions. Thus, that called the Stone Age, must be divided into two parts, that of the roughly chipped flint implements--which is designated the Palæolithic period--and that of the polished and carefully finished stone arms and implements, which necessarily show a later time, and a higher state of civilisation--which is called the Neolithic period. The next age is that of bronze, when man had learned to smelt metals, and make moulds, showing a great advance--and, finally, the Iron Age, in which man had subdued the sterner metal to his will--and this age immediately precedes History.

The cave men were of undoubted antiquity--and were hunters of the wild beasts that then overran Western Europe, and who split the bones of those animals which they slew in order to obtain the marrow. Although strictly belonging to the Palæolithic period, they manufactured out of that stubborn material, flint, spear-heads, knives, scrapers--and, when the bow had been invented, arrow-heads. Nor were they deficient in the rudiments of art, as some tracings and carvings on pieces of the horns of slaughtered animals, clearly show. Mr. Christie in digging in the Dordogne caves found, at La Madelaine, engraved and carved pictures of reindeer, an ibex, a mammoth, &c., all of them recognisable, and the mammoth, a very good likeness. This was incised on a piece of mammoth tusk.

The lake men, judging by the remains found near their dwellings, occupied their houses during the Stone and Bronze periods. Herodotus mentions these curious dwellings. “But those around Mount Pangæus and near the Doberes, the Agrianæ, Odomanti, and those who inhabit Lake Prasias itself, were not at all subdued by Megabazus. Yet he attempted to conquer those who live upon the lake, in dwellings contrived after this manner: planks, fitted on lofty piles, are placed in the middle of the lake, with a narrow entrance from the mainland by a single bridge. These piles that support the planks, all the citizens anciently placed there at the common charge; but, afterwards, they established a law to the following effect; whenever a man marries, for each wife he sinks three piles, bringing wood from a mountain called Orbelus; but every man has several wives. They live in the following manner; every man has a hut on the planks, in which he dwells, with a trap door closely fitted in the planks, and leading down to the lake. They tie the young children with a cord round the foot, fearing lest they should fall into the lake beneath. To their horses and beasts of burden they give fish for fodder; of which there is such an abundance, that, when a man has opened his trap-door, he lets down an empty basket by a cord into the lake, and, after waiting a short time, draws it up full of fish.”

Here, then, we have a valuable record of the lake dwellings, and similar ones have been found in the lake of Zurich. In 1854, owing to the dryness and cold of the preceding winter, the water fell a foot below any previous record: and, in a small bay between Ober Meilen and Dollikon, the inhabitants took advantage to reclaim the soil thus left, and add it to their gardens, by building a wall as far out as they could--and they raised the level of the land thus gained, by dredging the mud out of the lake. In the course of dredging they found deer horns, tiles and various implements, and, the attention of an antiquary having been directed to this find, he concluded that it was the site of an ancient lake village. The lakes of Geneva, Constance, and Neufchatel, have also yielded much that throws light on the habits and intelligence of these lake men. They wove, they made pottery, they grew and parched corn--nay they ground it, and made biscuits, they ate apples, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, hazel and beech nuts, and peas. They evidently fed on cereals, fruit, fish, and the flesh of wild animals, for bones of the following animals have been found. Brown bear, badger, marten, pine marten, polecat, wolf, fox, wild cat, beaver, elk, urus, bison, stag, roe-deer, wild boar, marsh boar--whilst their domestic animals were the boar, horse, ox, goat, sheep, and dog. These, it must be remembered, range over a wide period, including the stone and bronze ages. They wore ornaments, too, for pins, and bracelets have been found. Lake dwellings have been found in Scotland, England, Italy, Germany and France--so that this practice seems to have obtained very widely. In Ireland they made artificial islands in the lakes, called Crannoges, on which they erected their dwellings. Pile dwellings now exist, and are inhabited in many parts of the world.

We have other traces of prehistoric man in the shell mounds, kjökkenmöddings, or kitchen middens, which still exist in Denmark, and have been found in Scotland on the shores of the Moray Firth and Loch Spynie; in Cornwall, and Devon, at St. Valéry at the mouth of the Somme, in Australia, Tierra del Fuego, the Malay Peninsula, the Andaman Islands, and North and South America, showing a very wide range. The Danish kjökkenmöddings, when first thoroughly noticed, (of course, in this century), were taken to be raised beaches--but when they were examined, it was found that the shells were of four species of molluscs or shell-fish, that did not live together, and that they were either full-grown, or nearly so. A stricter examination was made, and the result was the finding of some flint implements, and bones marked by knives, conclusively showing that man had had a hand in this collection of shells--and the conclusion was come to that these were the sites of villages of a prehistoric man, a hypothesis which was fully borne out by the discovery, in some of them, of hearths bearing traces of having borne fire. Thus, then, these refuse heaps were clearly the work of a very ancient race, so poor, and backward, as to be obliged to live on shell-fish--and these mounds were made by the shells which they threw away.

We can find a very great analogy between them and the Tierra del Fuegans, when Darwin visited them, while with the surveying ships Adventure and Beagle, a voyage which took from 1832 to 1836; and, when we read the following extracts from Darwin’s account of the expedition, we can fancy we have before us a vivid picture of the makers of the kitchen middens. “The inhabitants, living chiefly upon shell-fish, are obliged constantly to change their place of residence; but they return at intervals to the same spots, as is evident from the pile of old shells, which must often amount to some tons in weight. These heaps can be distinguished at a long distance by the bright green colour of certain plants which invariably grow on them.... The Fuegian wigwam resembles, in size and dimensions, a haycock. It merely consists of a few broken branches stuck in the ground, and very imperfectly thatched on one side, with a few tufts of grass and rushes. The whole cannot be so much as the work of an hour, and it is only used for a few days.... At a subsequent period, the Beagle anchored for a couple of days under Wollaston Island, which is a short way to the northward. While going on shore, we pulled alongside a canoe with six Fuegians. These were the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld. On the east coast, the natives, as we have seen, have guanaco cloaks, and, on the west, they possess sealskins. Amongst the central tribes the men generally possess an otter skin, or some small scrap about as large as a pocket handkerchief, which is barely sufficient to cover their backs as low down as their loins. It is laced across the breast by strings, and, according as the wind blows, it is shifted from side to side. But these Fuegians in the canoe were quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water, together with the spray, trickled down her body.... These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gestures violent and without dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe they are fellow-creatures and inhabitants of the same world.... At night, five or six human beings, naked, and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground, coiled up like animals. Whenever it is low water, they must rise to pick shell-fish from the rocks; and the women, winter and summer, either dive and collect sea eggs, or sit patiently in their canoes, and, with a baited hair line, jerk out small fish. If a seal is killed, or the floating carcase of a putrid whale discovered, it is a feast: such miserable food is assisted by a few tasteless berries, and fungi. Nor are they exempt from famine, and, as a consequence, cannibalism accompanied by parricide.”

This I believe to be as faithful a picture as can be drawn of the makers of the shell mounds.

But in Denmark, although shells formed by far the major part of these middens, yet they ate other fish, the herring, dorse, dab, and eel. Birds also were not despised by them, bones of swallows, the sparrow, stork, capercailzie, ducks, geese, wild swans, and even of the great auk (now extinct) have been found. Then of beasts they ate the stag, roe-deer, wild boar, urus, dog, fox, wolf, marten, otter, lynx, wild cat, hedgehog, bear, and mouse; beside which they lived on the seal, porpoise, and water rat.

Owing to the almost total absence of polished implements--and yet the fact being that portions of one or two have been found--the makers of these kjökkenmöddings, are classed as belonging to the later Palæolithic period.

Of the Bronze and Iron Ages there is no necessity to write, men were emerging from their primæval barbarity--and all the gentle arts, though undeveloped, were nascent. Men who could smelt metals, and mould, and forge them, cannot be considered as utter barbarians, such as were the long-headed men, with their chipped flint implements and weapons.

WILD MEN.

Sometimes a specimen of humanity has got astray in infancy, and has been dragged up somehow in the woods, like Caspar Hauser, and Peter the Wild Boy, and fiction supplies other instances, such as Romulus and Remus, Orson, &c. Some of them were credited with being hairy as are the accompanying wild man and woman, as they are portrayed in John Sluper’s book, where they are thus described:--

“L’HOMME SAUVAGE.

“Combien que Dieu le createur seul sage, A fait user les hommes de raison: Icy voyez un vray homme sauvage, Son corps vela est en toute saison.”

“LA FEMME SAUVAGE.

“Femme sauvage a l’œil humain, non sainte, Ainsi qu’elle est sur le naturel lieu, Au naturel vous est icy depeinte, Comme voyez qu’il appert a votre vue.”

When Cæsar came to Britain for the second time, he found the Britons, although to a great extent civilised, having cavalry and charioteers (so many of the latter, that Cassivelaunus left about 4000 to watch the Romans), and knowing the art of fortification, yet in themselves, only just emerging from utter barbarism--the colouring and shaving of themselves showed that they had vanity, and were making, after their fashion, the most of their personal charms. Cæsar (Book v. 14) writes: “Of all these tribes, by far the most civilised are those who inhabit Kent, which district is altogether maritime; nor do they differ much from the Gallic customs. Most of those in the interior do not sow corn, but live on flesh and milk, and are clad in skins. All the Britons, in truth, dye themselves with woad, which produces a bluish colour, and on this account they are of a more frightful aspect in battle. They have flowing hair, and every part of the body shaved, except the head and the upper lip. Ten, and even twelve of them have wives in common between them, and chiefly brothers with brothers, and fathers with sons; but, if there is any offspring, they are considered to be the children of those by whom each virgin was first espoused.”

HAIRY MEN.

If, as we may conjecture from the above, the ancient Briton was “a rugged man, o’ergrown with hair,” his full-dress toilette must have occupied some time. But extreme hairiness in human beings is by no means singular, and very many cases are recorded in medical books. Many of us may remember the Spanish dancer, Julia Pastrana, whose whole body was hairy, and who had a fine beard. She had a child on whom the hair began to grow, like its mother; and, but a few years back, there was a hairy family exhibited in London--their faces being covered with hair, as is the case of the Puella pilosa, or Hairy Girl--given by Aldrovandus in his Monstrorum Historia.

She was aged twelve years, and came from the Canary Isles, together with her father (aged 40), her brother (20), and her sister (8), all as hairy one as the other. They were brought over by Marius Casalius, and first shown at Bologna, so that this is no doubt a faithful likeness, as Aldrovandus lived and died in that city. He gives other examples, but not so well authenticated as this.

There were two wonderful hairy people at Ava, in Burmah, who are described by two most trustworthy eye-witnesses, John Crawford, in his “Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava”--and in 1855, by Captain Henry Youle, in his “Narrative of the Mission sent by the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava.” They were father and daughter, respectively named Shu-Maon, and Maphoon. The father may strictly be said to have had neither eyelashes, eyebrows, nor beard, because the whole of his face, including the interior and exterior of his ears, were covered with long silky silvery grey hair. His whole body, except his hands and feet, was covered with hair of the same texture and colour as that now described, but generally less abundant; it was most plentiful over the spine and shoulders, where it was five inches long; over the breast, about four inches, and was most scanty on the arms, legs, thighs, and abdomen.

Of the daughter, Captain Youle writes: “The whole of Maphoon’s face was more or less covered with hair. On a part of the cheek, and between the nose and mouth, this was confined to a short down, but over all the rest of the face was a thick silky hair of a brown colour, paleing about the nose and chin, four or five inches long. At the alæ of the nose, under the eye, and on the cheek bone this was very fully developed; but it was in, and on, the ear, that it was most extraordinary. Except the upper tip, no part of the ear was visible. All the rest was filled and veiled with a large mass of silky hair, growing apparently out of every part of the external organ, and hanging a pendant lock to a length of eight or ten inches. The hair over her forehead was brushed so as to blend with the hair of the head, the latter being dressed (as usual with her countrywomen) à la Chinoise; it was not so thick as to conceal her forehead.