Part 50

VICTOR HUGO, les Orientales.

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* Alone with the waves, on a starry night, My thoughts far away in the infinite; On the sea not a sail, not a cloud in the sky, And the wind and the waves with sweet lullaby Seem to question in murmurs of mystery, The fires of heaven, the waves of the sea.

And the golden stars of the heavens rose higher, Harmoniously blending their crowns of fire, And the waves which no ruling hand may know, ‘Midst a thousand murmurs, now high, now low, Sing, while curving their foaming crests to the sea, “It is the Lord God! It is He.”

The “Mécanique Céleste” of Laplace, the “Principia” of Newton, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” the “Orientales” by Victor Hugo--are the fruits of the faculty of abstraction.

In the year 1800, a being, half savage, who lived in the woods, clambered up the trees, slept upon dried leaves, and fled on the approach of men, was brought to a physician named Pinel. Some sportsmen had found him; he had no voice, and was devoid of intelligence; he was known as the little savage of Aveyron. The Parisian savants for a long time disputed over this strange individual. Was it an ape?--was it a wild man?

The learned Dr. Itard has published an interesting history of the savage of Aveyron. “He would sometimes descend,” he writes, “into the garden of the deaf and dumb, and seat himself upon the edge of the fountain, preserving his balance by rocking himself to and fro; after a time his body became quite still, and his face assumed an expression of profound melancholy. He would remain thus for hours--regarding attentively the surface of the water--upon which he would, from time to time, throw blades of grass and dried leaves. At night, when the clear moonlight penetrated into the chamber he occupied, he rarely failed to rise and place himself at the window, where he would remain part of the night, erect, motionless, his neck stretched out, his eyes fixed upon the landscape lit up by the moon, lost in a sort of ecstasy of contemplation.” This being was, undoubtedly, a man. No ape ever exhibited such signs of intelligence, such dreamy manifestations, vague conceptions of the ideal--in other words, that faculty of abstraction which belongs to humanity alone. In order worthily to introduce the new inhabitant who comes to fill the earth with his presence--who brings with him intelligence to comprehend, to admire, to subdue, and to rule the creation (PL. XXXII.), we require nothing more than the grand and simple language of Moses, whom Bossuet calls “the most ancient of historians, the most sublime of philosophers, the wisest of legislators.” Let us listen to the words of the inspired writer: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”

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Volumes have been written upon the question of the unity of the human race; that is, whether there were many centres of the creation of man, or whether our race is derived solely from the Adam of Scripture. We think, with many naturalists, that the stock of humanity is unique, and that the different human races, the negroes, and the yellow race, are only the result of the influence of climate upon organisation. We consider the human race as having appeared for the first time (the mode of his creation being veiled in Divine mystery, eternally impenetrable to us) in the rich plains of Asia, on the smiling banks of the Euphrates, as the traditions of the most ancient races teach us. It is there, where Nature is so rich and vigorous, in the brilliant climate and under the radiant sky of Asia, in the shade of its luxuriant masses of verdure and its mild and perfumed atmosphere, that man loves to represent to himself the father of his race as issuing from the hand of his Creator.

We are, it will be seen, far from sharing the opinion of those naturalists who represent man, at the beginning of the existence of his species, as a sort of ape, of hideous face, degraded mien, and covered with hair, inhabiting caves like the bears and lions, and participating in the brutal instincts of those savage animals. There is no doubt that early man passed through a period in which he had to contend for his existence with ferocious beasts, and to live in a primitive state in the woods or savannahs, where Providence had placed him. But this period of probation came to an end, and man, an eminently social being, by combining in groups, animated by the same interests and the same desires, soon found means to intimidate the animals, to triumph over the elements, to protect himself from the innumerable perils which surrounded him, and to subdue to his rule the other inhabitants of the earth. “The first men,” says Buffon, “witnesses of the convulsive movements of the earth, still recent and frequent, having only the mountains for refuge from the inundations; and often driven from this asylum by volcanoes and earthquakes, which trembled under their feet; uneducated, naked, and exposed to the elements, victims to the fury of ferocious animals, whose prey they were certain to become; impressed also with a common sentiment of gloomy terror, and urged by necessity, would they not unite, first, to defend themselves by numbers, and then to assist each other by working in concert, to make habitations and arms? They began by shaping into the forms of hatchets these hard flints, the Jade, and other stones, which were supposed to have been formed by thunder and fallen from the clouds, but which are, nevertheless, only the first examples of man’s art in a pure state of Nature. He will soon draw fire from these same flints, by striking them against each other; he will seize the flames of the burning volcano, or profit by the fire of the red-hot lava to light his fire of brushwood in the forest; and by the help of this powerful element he cleanses, purifies, and renders wholesome the place he selects for his habitation. With his hatchet of stone he chops wood, fells trees, shapes timber, and puts it together, fashions instruments of warfare and the most necessary tools and implements; and after having furnished themselves with clubs and other weighty and defensive arms, did not these first men find means to make lighter weapons to reach the swift-footed stag from afar? A tendon of an animal, a fibre of the aloe-leaf, or the supple bark of some ligneous plant, would serve as a cord to bring together the two extremities of an elastic branch of yew, forming a bow; and small flints, shaped to a point, arm the arrow. They will soon have snares, rafts, and canoes; they will form themselves into communities composed of a few families, or rather of relations sprung from the same family, as is still the case with some savage tribes, who have their game, fish, and fruits in common. But in all those countries whose area is limited by water, or surrounded by high mountains, these small nations, becoming too numerous, have been in time forced to parcel out the land between them; and from that moment the earth has become the domain of man; he has taken possession of it by his labour, he has cultivated it, and attachment to the soil follows the very first act of possession; the private interest makes part of the national interest; order, civilisation, and laws succeed, and society acquires force and consistency.” We love to quote the sentiments of a great writer--but how much more eloquent would the words of the naturalist have been, if he had added to his own grand eloquence of language, the knowledge which science has placed within reach of the writers of the present time--- if he could have painted man in the early days of his creation, in presence of the immense animal population which then occupied the earth, and fighting with the wild beasts which filled the forests of the ancient world! Man, comparatively very weak in organisation, destitute of natural weapons of attack or defence, incapable of rising into the air like the birds, or living under water like the fishes and some reptiles, might seem doomed to speedy destruction. But he was marked on the forehead with the Divine seal. Thanks to the superior gift of an exceptional intelligence, this being, in appearance so helpless, has by degrees swept the most ferocious of its occupants from the earth, leaving those only who cater to his wants or desires, or by whose aid he changes the primitive aspects of whole continents.

It is told of a former distinguished and witty member of the Geological Society that, having obtained possession of the rooms on a certain day, when there was to be a general meeting, he decorated its walls with a series of cartoons, in which the parts of the members were strangely reversed. In one cartoon Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri were occupied with the skeleton of Homo sapiens; in another, a party of Crustaceans were occupied with a cranium suspiciously like the same species; while in a third, a party of Pterichthys were about to dine on a biped with a suspicious resemblance to a certain well-conditioned F.G.S. of the day.

“Époques de la Nature,” vol. xii., pp. 322-325. 18mo. Paris, 1778.

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The antiquity of man is a question which has largely engaged the attention of geologists, and many ingenious arguments have been hazarded, tending to prove that the human race and the great extinct Mammalia were contemporaneous. The circumstances bearing on the question are usually ranged under three series of facts: 1. The Cave-deposits; 2. Peat and shell mounds; 3. Lacustrine habitations, or Lake dwellings.

We have already briefly touched upon the Cave-deposits. In the Kirkdale Cave no remains or other traces of man’s presence seem to have been discovered. But in Kent’s Hole, an unequal deposit of loam and clay, along with broken bones much gnawed, and the teeth of both extinct and living Mammals, implements evidently fashioned by the human hand were found in the following order: in the upper part of the clay, artificially-shaped flints; on the clay rested a layer of stalagmite, in which streaks of burnt charcoal occurred, and charred bones of existing species of animals. Above the stalagmite a stone hatchet, or celt, made of syenite, of more finished appearance, was met with, with articles of bone, round pieces of blue slate and sandstone-grit, pieces of pottery, a number of shells of the mussel, limpet, and oyster, and other remains, Celtic, British, and Roman, of very early date; the lower deposits are those with which we are here more particularly concerned. The Rev. J. MacEnery, the gentleman who explored and described them, ascertained that the flint-instruments occupied a uniform situation intermediate between the stalagmite and the upper surface of the loam, forming a connecting link between both; and his opinion was that the epoch of the introduction of the knives must be dated antecedently to the formation of the stalagmite, from the era of the quiescent settlement of the mud. From this view it would follow that the cave was visited posteriorly to the introduction and subsidence of the loam, and before the formation of the new super-stratum of stalagmite, by men who entered the cave and disturbed the original deposit. Although flints have been found in the loam underlying the regular crust of stalagmite, mingled confusedly with the bones, and unconnected with the evidence of the visits of man--such as the excavation of ovens or pits--Dr. Buckland refused his belief to the statement that the flint-implements were found beneath the stalagmite, and always contended that they were the work of men of a more recent period, who had broken up the sparry floor. The doctor supposed that the ancient Britons had scooped out ovens in the stalagmite, and that through them the knives got admission to the underlying loam, and that in this confused state the several materials were cemented together.

In 1858 Dr. Falconer heard of the newly-discovered cave at Brixham, on the opposite side of the bay to Torquay, and he took steps to prevent any doubts being entertained with regard to its contents. This cave was composed of several passages, with four entrances, formerly blocked up with breccia and earthy matter; the main opening being ascertained by Mr. Bristow to be seventy-eight feet above the valley, and ninety-five feet above the sea, the cave itself being in some places eight feet wide. The contents of the cave were covered with a layer of stalagmite, from one to fifteen inches thick, on the top of which were found the horns of a Reindeer; under the stalagmite came reddish loam or cave-earth, with pebbles and some angular stones, from two to thirteen feet thick, containing the bones of Elephants, Rhinoceros, Bears, Hyænas, Felis, Reindeer, Horses, Oxen, and several Rodents; and, lastly, a layer of gravel, and rounded pebbles without fossils, underlaid the cave-earth and formed the lowest deposit.

In these beds no human bones were found, but in almost every part of the bone-bed were flint-knives, one of the most perfect being found thirteen feet down in the bone-bed, at its lowest part. The most remarkable fact in connection with this cave was the discovery of an entire left hind-leg of the Cave-bear lying in close proximity to this knife; “not washed in a fossil state out of an older alluvium, and swept afterwards into this cave, so as to be mingled with the flint implements, but having been introduced when clothed in its flesh.” The implement and the Bear’s leg were evidently deposited about the same time, and it only required some approximative estimate of the date of this deposit, to settle the question of the antiquity of man, at least in an affirmative sense.

Mr. H. W. Bristow, who was sent by the Committee of the Royal Society to make a plan and drawings of the Brixham Cave, found that its entrance was situated at a height of ninety-five feet above the present level of the sea. In his Report made to the Royal Society, in explanation of the plan and sections, Mr. Bristow stated that, in all probability, at the time the cave was formed, the land was at a lower level to the extent of the observed distance of ninety-five feet, and that its mouth was then situated at or near the level of the sea.

The cave consisted of wide galleries or passages running in a north and south direction, with minor lateral passages branching off nearly at right angles to the main openings--- the whole cave being formed in the joints, or natural divisional planes, of the rock.

The mouth or entrance to the cave originated, in the first instance, in an open joint or fissure in the Devonian limestone, which became widened by water flowing backwards and forwards, and was partly enlarged by the atmospheric water, which percolated through the cracks, fissures, and open joints in the overlying rock. The pebbles, forming the lowest deposit in the cave, were ordinary shingle or beach-gravel, washed in by the waves and tides. The cave-earth was the residual part of the limestone rock, after the calcareous portion had been dissolved and carried away in solution; and the stalactite and stalagmite were derived from the lime deposited from the percolating water.

With regard to bone-caves generally, it would seem that, like other such openings, they are most common in limestone rocks, where they have been formed by water, which has dissolved and carried away the calcareous ingredient of the rock. In the case of the Brixham cave, the mode of action of the water could be clearly traced in two ways: first, in widening out the principal passages by the rush of water backwards and forwards from the sea; and, secondly, by the infiltration and percolation of atmospheric water through the overlying rock. In both cases the active agents in producing the cave had taken advantage of a pre-existing fissure or crack, or an open joint, which they gradually enlarged and widened out, until the opening received its final proportions.

The cave presented no appearance of ever having been inhabited by man; or of having been the den of Hyænas or other animals, like Wookey Hole in the Mendips, and some other bone-caves. The most probable supposition is, that the hind quarter of the Bear and other bones which were found in the cave-earth, had been washed into the cave by the sea, in which they were floating about.

We draw some inferences of the greatest interest and significance from the Brixham cave and its contents.

We learn that this country was, at one time, inhabited by animals which are now extinct, and of whose existence we have not even a tradition; that man, then ignorant of the use of metal, and little better than the brutes, was the contemporary of the animals whose remains were found in the cave, together with a rude flint-implement--the only kind of weapon with which our savage ancestor defended himself against animals scarcely wilder than himself.

We also learn that after the cave had been formed and sealed up again, as it were, together with all its contents, by the deposition of a solid crust of stalagmite--an operation requiring a very great length of time to effect--the Reindeer (Cervus Tarandus) was indigenous to this country, as is proved by the occurrence of an antler of that animal which was found lying upon, and partly imbedded in, the stalagmite forming the roof or uppermost, that is, the latest formed, of the cave-deposits.

Lastly, we learn that, at the time the cave was formed, and while the land was inhabited by man, that part of the country was lower by ninety-five feet than it is now; and that this elevation has probably been produced so slowly and so gradually, as to have been imperceptible during the time it was taking place, which extended over a vast interval of time, perhaps over thousands of years.

Perhaps it may not be out of place here to describe the mode of formation of bone-caves generally, and the causes which have produced the appearances these now present.