The Puzzle of Life and How It Has Been Put Together

Part 1

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THE

PUZZLE OF LIFE.

LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET

Frontispiece

The Mammoth.]

THE PUZZLE OF LIFE;

AND

HOW IT HAS BEEN PUT TOGETHER.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FORMATION OF THE EARTH, WITH ITS VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL LIFE, FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES,

INCLUDING AN ACCOUNT OF

PRE-HISTORIC MAN, his WEAPONS, TOOLS and WORKS.

ARTHUR NICOLS, F.R.G.S.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS by FREDERICK WADDY.

SECOND EDITION.

LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1877.

All rights reserved.

MY YOUNG FRIENDS

BEATRIX, GUY, SYLVIA, MAY, AND GERALD.

THE CHILDREN OF

GEORGE DU MAURIER.

PREFACE

THE SECOND EDITION.

The favourable reception accorded to the first edition has induced me to give the present a more definite educational character. Foot-notes are appended, referring to the position in the British Museum of all the principal antiquities, fossils, and implements mentioned in the text; so that the specimens can easily be found by any young student who wishes, with the book in his hand, to make himself familiar with these records of past time. This will probably facilitate the search for and recognition of specimens by the reader.

The additions to the text consist chiefly of a more extended account of the deposition of chalk and other deep-sea formations, founded on the results of the “Challenger” and “Tuscarora” expeditions, and a sketch of the earthworks of the Ohio mound-builders and the stone monuments of Easter Island. Examples of pre-historic art and lake-dwellings have been added to the illustrations.

A. N.

HAMPSTEAD: March 1877.

PREFACE

Part 2

THE FIRST EDITION.

Having found that children could be interested in the history of life upon the Earth, and that it appealed forcibly to their understanding, I considered that a little book upon the subject might give them the taste for more extended study in after years. The difficulty of treating the, to them, novel conclusions of geology, often founded on abstract reasoning, in language simple in form yet stating clearly the great principles upon which this reasoning rests, will probably be apparent on every page. Breadth, rather than minuteness, has been aimed at, in the belief that a general view, not overcrowded with details, is likely to be the most impressive. Thus, in the geological part the leading features of the succession of strata have been preserved, but no details of systematic classification entered into. Similarly, Primeval Man is considered mainly with reference to gradual progress from a rude to a more civilized condition. To have been more explicit, where there is still much difference of opinion, would have obscured the main facts of the evidence for man’s great antiquity.

The illustrations are typical examples of the three arbitrary but convenient divisions of the history of life—the vegetable, the animal, and the human—such as will be most readily met with in museums. Slight as this sketch is, the liking for it shown by some intelligent children, who saw it in manuscript, encouraged me to believe that there are many others to whom it might prove interesting.

Some acquaintance with the leading facts in science is daily becoming more necessary to those who aspire to liberal culture, and instruction in them is a recognised feature in the curriculum of some public and leading private schools. Thus, it is hoped that the present volume may to some extent serve as a text-book without the severity of such a form. The best English and foreign authorities have been consulted, and other trustworthy sources—as papers read before scientific societies—drawn upon, bringing the information down to the latest time. Though these pages are designed for young persons, other readers, perhaps, who are not familiar with the subject, may find some interest in them if they are not deterred by the necessarily simple style.

My thanks are due to Mr. H. B. WOODWARD, of the Geological Survey of England and Wales, for some valuable suggestions made during the progress of the work.

A. N.

HAMPSTEAD: November 1876.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE 1

THE GEOLOGICAL PART 17

THE VEGETABLE PART 56

THE ANIMAL PART 77

THE HUMAN PART 120

CONCLUSION 168

INDEX 171

ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE MAMMOTH Frontispiece

I. UPHEAVAL: SUBSIDENCE: DENUDATION 51

II. DIFFERENT KINDS OF PLANTS OF THE COAL FORESTS 65

III. TRILOBITE 79

IV. FOOTPRINTS OF LABYRINTHODON: FOOTPRINTS OF BIRDS, (2) WITH MARKS OF RAIN-DROPS 83

V. FISH-REPTILES 87

VI. BIRD-REPTILES 93

VII. FOSSILS OF THE CHALK 97

VIII. GIGANTIC IRISH STAG (CERVUS MEGACEROS) 108

IX. THE MEGATHERIUM 112

X. 1. FLINT ARROW-HEAD; 2. STONE AXE IN HANDLE; 3. FLINT KNIFE; 4. BONE HARPOON; 5. BONE NEEDLES; 6. SCEPTRE MADE OF HORN; 7. MARROW SPOON 129

Part 3

XI. EXAMPLES OF PRE-HISTORIC DRAWINGS 135

XII. LAKE-DWELLINGS 148

XIII. THE GUADALOUPE HUMAN FOSSIL 159

THE

PUZZLE OF LIFE.

THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PUZZLE.

You must often have looked with wondering eyes at this World of ours, and asked yourselves questions about it. How did it come here? What is it made of? How old is it? All of them questions not to be answered without a great deal of thought and study, and even then not so perfectly as we should like. It is easy to say “It is here,” and “It is made of earth,” and “It surely must be old,” but that will not satisfy us. We want to know something more certain than this, if possible. We can see that a clock goes with wheels, but we are not very intelligent people if we do not want to find out what makes the clock go. One way of finding out is to pull things to pieces, but we cannot exactly do this with the World. We must think about it, and put together all the knowledge we can gain from the outside and inside, and from the other Worlds around us, which we can see, and when we have done this we may get something like answers to our questions.

How did it come here? But this is not quite the right way of asking the question, because the World is never for two moments together in the same place. It is travelling in a great circle round the Sun at the rate of more than sixty thousand miles an hour, and has been ever since it was formed. That is a wonderful arrangement by which all Worlds travel round some other World larger than themselves, in greater or less circles, and we do not know why it is, though we are certain that it is so. The Moon travels round us once in about every month, and we and the Moon together round the Sun once in every year.

Then again, other planets, with their moons, such as Jupiter, for instance, travel round the Sun in much larger circles than our World, and take many years to do the journey, while Venus, which is nearer the Sun than we are, travels in a much smaller circle, and takes less time. We do not perceive that we are moving so fast because everything we see is moving equally fast with us; but there is no doubt that we are spinning along at sixty thousand miles an hour.

If we ask an astronomer how our World came into existence, he will tell us that it is probably a mass separated from the Sun, that it was once red-hot, and that it slowly cooled down until animals and plants could live upon it. He will tell us besides, that he can see mountains and valleys in our Moon, and land and sea, snow and clouds, on the planet Mars, with his great telescopes. When he thinks about the planets and our own World, then he believes them to be pieces of some much larger World—perhaps the Sun—which now travel round the Sun and receive their light and heat from it. The World is made of what we call “earth,” and it is of this I mean to tell you now—how it was formed, what changes have taken place in it, what plants and animals have lived upon it, and what reasons there are for thinking that it is an exceedingly old place, with a long and interesting story to tell.

Little was known thirty or forty years ago by the most learned men about the age of our World, and it was thought that the human race had not lived here very long. It was indeed known that many large animals, whose huge bones have been found, must have lived before man came to inhabit the Earth, and that even far smaller creatures—such as fishes, and crabs, and insects, and shell-fish—most probably lived for many generations, and died and left their bones and shells in the soil long before the first man or the first tribes of men came to share the World with them. I hope to be able to tell you something of the strange and beautiful history of all these animals, and of man himself, and to show you what reasons there are now for thinking that the human race has inhabited this Earth for a very long time indeed, and how all this knowledge has been gained and put together piece by piece. It is something like the different parts of a puzzle-map, which might be scattered all over the house, and found at one time or another in different places, and at last made up altogether. Some parts of the puzzle have not been found yet certainly; but so many have been collected, and they fit into one another so well, that we can begin to see its real shape and size. It will perhaps be a very long time before some of the missing pieces are found; but in the meantime we can go on without them, and put the framework together, and no doubt in time we shall see what our puzzle, the history of life on the Earth, was like.

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