Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 by Various

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It would be gratifying to all lovers of science to be informed that the
practical knowledge acquired by Mr. Sidney had been preserved, and that
at least the elementary principles of the arts in which he became so
nearly perfect had been definitely explained and recorded. I am not
aware, however, that such is the fact, but am persuaded that his uniform
policy of concealment has deprived the world of much that would have
been exceedingly entertaining and instructive. That this knowledge has
not been preserved is owing mainly to the fact that he considered it
of little importance, except as a means for the accomplishment of his
purposes, and that those purposes would be most effectually achieved by
his withholding from the common gaze the instrumentality by which they
were to be attained. That he intended at some future period to make some
communication to the public I am well assured, and some materials were
collected by him with this view; but the hot pursuit of the great idea
that he never for an hour lost sight of would not allow sufficient rest
from his labors, and he deferred the publication to those riper years
of experience and acquirement from which he could survey his whole past
career.

It may be comforting for all rogues to know that he left behind him no
note of that vast amount of statistical knowledge which he possessed,
whether appertaining to crimes or criminals in general or in particular,
or more especially to the band of robbers,--and that with him perished
all knowledge of this organization as such, and the names of all the
parties therewith connected. They also have the consolation, if there be
any, of knowing that he was sent prematurely to his grave by a subtle
poison, administered by unknown hands and in an unknown manner and
moment, and that he died in the firm faith of immortality.

THE CUMBERLAND.

At anchor in Hampton Roads we lay,
On board of the Cumberland sloop-of-war;
And at times from the fortress across the bay
The alarum of drums swept past,
Or a bugle-blast
From the camp on the shore.

Then far away to the South uprose
A little feather of snow-white smoke,
And we knew that the iron ship of our foes
Was steadily steering its course
To try the force
Of our ribs of oak.

Down upon us heavily runs,
Silent and sullen, the floating fort;
Then comes a puff of smoke from her guns,
And leaps the terrible death,
With fiery breath,
From each open port.

We are not idle, but send her straight
Defiance back in a full broadside!
As hail rebounds from a roof of slate,
Rebounds our heavier hail
From each iron scale
Of the monster's hide.

"Strike your flag!" the rebel cries,
In his arrogant old plantation strain.
"Never!" our gallant Morris replies;
"It is better to sink than to yield!"
And the whole air pealed
With the cheers of our men.

Then, like a kraken huge and black,
She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp!
Down went the Cumberland all a wrack,
With a sudden shudder of death,
And the cannon's breath
For her dying gasp.

Next morn, as the sun rose over the bay,
Still floated our flag at the mainmast-head.
Lord, how beautiful was thy day!
Every waft of the air
Was a whisper of prayer,
Or a dirge for the dead.

Ho! brave hearts that went down in the seas!
Ye are at peace in the troubled stream.
Ho! brave land! with hearts like these,
Thy flag, that is rent in twain,
Shall be one again,
And without a seam!

THE FOSSIL MAN.

The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been: to
be found in the register of God, not in the records of men. The number
of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The Night of Time far
surpasseth the Day, and who knoweth the Equinox?--Sir THOMAS BROWNE.

What a mysterious and subtile pleasure there is in groping back through
the early twilight of human history! The mind thirsts and longs so to
know the Beginning: who and what manner of men those were who laid
the first foundations of all that is now upon the earth: of what
intellectual power, of what degree of civilization, of what race and
country. We wonder how the fathers of mankind lived, what habitations
they dwelt in, what instruments or tools they employed, what crops they
tilled, what garments they wore. We catch eagerly at any traces that may
remain of their faiths and beliefs and superstitions; and we fancy, as
we gain a clearer insight into them, that we are approaching more nearly
to the mysterious Source of all life in the soul. The germ, to our
limited comprehension, seems nearer the Creator than the perfected
growth. Then the great problem of _Origin_ forever attracts us on,--the
multitudinous and intricate questions relating to "the ordained becoming
of beings": how the Creating Power has worked, whether through an almost
endless chain of gradual and advantageous changes, or by some sudden and
miraculous _ictus_, placing at once a completed body on the earth, as
an abode and instrument for a developed soul,--all these remote and
difficult questions lead us on. And yet the search for human origins, or
the earliest historic and scientific evidences of man on the earth, is
but a groping in the dark.

We turn to the Hebrew and the inspired records; but we soon discover,
that, though containing a picture, unequalled for simplicity and
dignity, of the earliest experiences of the present family of man, they
are by no means a monument or relic of the most remote period, but
belong to a comparatively modern date, and that the question of _Time_
is not at all directly treated in them.

We visit the region where poetry and myth and tradition have placed a
most ancient civilization,--the Black-Land, or Land of the Nile: we
search its royal sepulchres, its manifold history written in funereal
records, in kingly genealogies, in inscriptions, and in the thousand
relics preserved of domestic life, whether in picture, sculpture, or the
embalmed remains of the dead; and we find ourselves thrown back to a
date far beyond any received date of history, and still we have before
us a ripened civilization, an art which could not belong to the
childhood of a race, a language which (so far as we can judge) must have
needed centuries for its development, and the divisions of human races,
whose formation from the original pair our philosophy teaches us must
have required immense and unknown spaces of time,--all as distinct as
they are at the present day.

We traverse the regions to which both the comparison of languages and
the Biblical records assign the original birthplace of mankind,--the
country of the Euphrates and the plateau of Eastern Asia. Buried
kingdoms are revealed to us; the shadowy outlines of magnificent cities
appear which flourished and fell before recorded human history, and of
which even Herodotus never heard; Art and Science are unfolded, reaching
far back into the past; the signs of luxury and splendor are uncovered
from the ruin of ages: but, remote as is the date of these Turanian and
Semitic empires, almost equalling that of the Flood in the ordinary
system of chronology, they cannot be near the origin of things, and
a long process of development must have passed ere they reached the
maturity in which they are revealed to us.

The Chinese records give us an antiquity and an acknowledged date before
the time of Abraham, (if we follow the received chronology,) and
even then their language must have been, as it is now, distinct and
solidified, betraying to the scholar no certain affinity to any other
family of language. The Indian history, so long boasted of for its
immense antiquity, is without doubt the most modern of the ancient
records, and offers no certain date beyond 1800 B.C.

In Europe, the earliest evidences of man disclosed by our investigations
are even more vague and shadowy. Probably, without antedating in time
these historical records of Asia, they reach back to a more primitive
and barbarous era. The earliest history of Europe is not studied from
inscription or manuscript or even monument; it is not, like the Asiatic,
a conscious work of a people leaving a memorial of itself to a future
age. It is rather, like the geological history, an unconscious, gradual
deposit left by the remains of extinct and unknown races in the soil of
the fields or under the sediment of the waters. The earliest European
barbarian, as he burned his canoe from a log, or fabricated his necklace
from a bone, or worked out his knife from a flint, was in reality
writing a history of his race for distant days. We can follow him now
in his wanderings through the rivers and lakes and on the edges of the
forests; we open his simple mounds of burial, and study his barbarian
tools and ornaments; we discover that he knew nothing of metals, and
that bone and flint and amber and coal were his materials; we trace out
his remarkable defences and huts built on piles in the various lakes of
Europe, where the simple savage could escape the few gigantic "fossil"
animals which even then survived, and roved through the forests of
Prussia and France, or the still more terrible human enemies who were
continually pouring into Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland from the
Asiatic plains. We find that the early savage of Switzerland and Sweden
was not entirely ignorant of the care of animals, and that he had
fabricated some rude pottery. Of what race he was, or when he appeared
amid the forests of Northern Europe, no one can confidently say.
Collecting the various indications from the superstitions, language,
and habits of this barbarian people, and comparing them with like
peculiarities of the most ancient races now existing in Europe, we can
frame a very plausible hypothesis that these early savages belonged to
that great family of which the Finns and Laps, and possibly the Basques,
are scattered members. Their skulls, also, are analogous in form to
those of the Finnish race. This age the archaeologists have denominated
the "Stone Age" of European antiquity.

Following this is what has been called by them the "Bronze Age."
Another, more powerful, and more cultivated race or collection of
peoples inundates Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, and other
districts. They make war against and destroy the early barbarians; they
burn their water-huts, and force them to the mountains, or to the most
northern portions of the continent. This new race has a taste for
objects of beauty. They work copper and bronze; they make use of
beautiful vases of earthenware and ornaments of the precious metals;
but they have yet no knowledge of iron or steel. Their dead are burned
instead of being buried, as was done by the preceding races. They are
evidently more warlike and more advanced than the Finnish barbarians. Of
their race or family it is difficult to say anything trustworthy. Their
skulls belong to the "long-skulled" races, and would ally them to the
Kelts. Antiquaries have called their remains "Keltic remains."

Still another age in this ancient history is the "Iron Age," when the
tribes of Europe used iron weapons and implements, and had advanced from
the nomadic condition to that of cultivators of the ground, though still
gaining most of their livelihood from fishing and hunting. This period
no doubt approached the period of historical annals, and the iron men
may have been the earliest Teutons of the North,--our own forefathers;
but of their race or mixture of races we have no certain evidence,
and can only make approximate hypotheses,--the division of "ages" by
archaeologists, it should be remembered, being not in any way a fixed
division of races, but only indicating the probability of different
races at those different early periods. What was the date of these ages
cannot at all be determined; the earlier are long before any recorded
European annals, but there is no reason to believe that they approach in
antiquity the Asiatic records and remains.

Such, until recently, were the historic and scientific evidences with
regard to the antiquity of man. His most venerable records, his most
ancient dates of historic chronology were but of yesterday, when
compared with the age of existing species of plants and animals, or
with the opening of the present geologic era. Every new scientific
investigation seemed, from its negative evidence, to render more
improbable the existence of the "fossil man." It is true that in various
parts of the world, during the past few years, human bones have been
discovered in connection with the bones of the fossil mammalia; but they
were generally found in caves or in lime-deposits, where they might
have been dropped or swept in by currents of water, or inserted in
more modern periods, and yet covered with the same deposit as the more
ancient relics. Geologists have uniformly reasoned on the _a priori_
improbability of these being fossil bones, and have somewhat strained
the evidence--as some distinguished _savans_[A] now believe--against the
theory of a great human antiquity.

[Footnote A: Pictet.]

And yet the "negative evidence" against the existence of the fossil
man was open to many doubts. The records of geology are notoriously
imperfect. We probably read but a few leaves of a mighty library of
volumes. Moreover, the last ages preceding the present period were
witnesses of a series of changes and slowly acting agencies of
destruction, from which man may have in general escaped. We have reason
to believe that during long periods of time the land was gradually
elevated and subject to oscillations, so that the courses of rivers and
the beds of lakes were disturbed, and even the bottom of the ocean was
raised. The results were the inundation of some countries, and the
pouring of great currents of water over others, wearing down the hills
and depositing in the course of ages the regular layers of gravel, sand,
and marl, which now cover so large a part of Europe. This was still
further followed by a period in which the temperature of the earth was
lowered, and ice and glaciers had perhaps a part in forming the present
surface of the northern hemisphere. During the first period, which may
be called the "Quaternary Period,"[B] the mighty animals lived whose
bones are now found in caverns, or under the slowly deposited sediment
of the waters, or preserved in bog,--the mammoth, and rhinoceros, and
elk, and bear, and elephant, as well as many others of extinct species.

[Footnote B: We should bear in mind that the Quaternary or Diluvian
Period, however ancient in point of time, has no clearly distinguishing
line of separation from the present period. The great difference lies in
the extinction of certain species of animals, which lived then, whose
destruction may be due both to gradual changes of climate and to
man.--PICTET.]

We may suppose, that, if man did exist during these convulsions and
inundations, his superior intelligence would enable him to escape
the fate of the animals that were submerged,--or that, if his few
burial-places were invaded by the waters, his remains are now completely
covered by marine deposits under the ocean. If, however, in his
barbarian condition, he had fashioned implements of any hard material,
and especially if, as do the savages of the present family of man, he
had accidentally deposited them, or had buried them with the dead in
mighty mounds, the invading waters might well sweep them together from
their place and deposit them almost in mass, in situations where the
eddies should leave their gravel and sand.[C]

[Footnote C: Sir C. Lyell, in his remarks before the British Association
in 1859, said upon the discovery alluded to here: "I am reminded of a
large Indian mound which I saw in St. Simon's Island in Georgia,--a
mound ten acres in area, and having an average height of five feet,
chiefly composed of cast-away oyster-shells, throughout which
arrow-heads, stone axes, and Indian pottery were dispersed. If the
neighboring river, the Altamalia, or the sea which is at hand, should
invade, sweep away, and stratify the contents of this mound, it might
produce a very analogous accumulation of human implements, unmixed,
perhaps, with human bones."--_Athenaeum_, September 21, 1859.]

Such seems in reality to have been the case; though in regard to so
important a fact in the history of the world much caution must be
exercised in accepting the evidence. We will state briefly the proofs,
as they now appear, of the existence of a race of human beings on this
earth in an immense antiquity.

A French gentleman, M. Boucher de Perthes, has for thirty-four years
been devoting his time and his fortune, with rare perseverance, to the
investigation of certain antiquities in the later geological deposits
in the North of France. His first work, "Les Antiquites Celtiques and
Antediluviennes," published in 1847, was received with much incredulity
and opposition; a second, under the same title, in 1857, met with a
scarce better reception, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he
could induce even the _savans_ of his own country to look at the mass of
evidence he had collected on this subject.

He made the extraordinary claim to have discovered a great quantity of
rough implements of flint, fashioned by art, in the undisturbed beds of
clay, gravel, and sand, known as _drift_, near Abbeville and Amiens.
These beds vary in thickness from ten to twenty feet, and cover the
chalk hills in the vicinity; in portions of them, upon the hills, often
in company with the flints, are discovered numerous bones of the extinct
mammalia, such as the mammoth, the fossil rhinoceros, tiger, bear,
hyena, stag, ox, horse, and others.

The flint implements are found in the lowest beds of gravel, just above
the chalk, while above them are sands with delicate fresh-water shells
and beds of brick-earth,--all this, be it remembered, on table-lands two
hundred feet above the level of the sea, in a country whose level and
face have remained unaltered during any historical period with which we
are acquainted. "It must have required," says Sir Charles Lyell, "a
long period for the wearing down of the chalk which supplied the broken
flints (stones) for the formation of so much gravel at various heights,
sometimes one hundred feet above the level of the Somme, for the
deposition of fine sediment, including entire shells, both terrestrial
and aquatic, and also for the denudation which the entire mass of
stratified drift has undergone, portions having been swept away, so
that what remains of it often terminates abruptly in old river-cliffs,
besides being covered by a newer unstratified drift. To explain these
changes, I should infer considerable oscillations in the level of the
land in that part of France, slow movements of upheaval and subsidence,
deranging, but not wholly displacing the course of ancient rivers."

The President of the British Association, in his opening speech at
the meeting of 1860, affirms the immense antiquity of these flint
implements, and remarks:--"At Menchecourt, in the suburbs of Abbeville,
a nearly entire skeleton of the Siberian rhinoceros is said to have been
taken out about forty years ago,--a fact affording an answer to the
question often raised, as to whether the bones of the extinct mammalia
could have been washed out of an older alluvium into a newer one, and
so redeposited and mingled with the relics of human workmanship.
Far-fetched as was this hypothesis, I am informed that it would not, if
granted, have seriously shaken the proof of the high antiquity of human
productions; for that proof is independent of organic evidence or fossil
remains, and is based on physical data. As was stated to us last year
by Sir Charles Lyell, we should still have to allow time for great
denudation of the chalk, and the removal from place to place, and the
spreading out over the length and breadth of a large valley, of heaps of
chalk-flints in beds from ten to fifteen feet in thickness, covered
by loam and sands of equal thickness, these last often tranquilly
deposited,--all of which operations would require the supposition of a
great lapse of time."

An independent proof of the age of these gravel-beds and the associated
loam, containing fossil remains, is derived by the same authority from
the large deposits of peat in the valley of the Somme, which contain not
only monuments of the Roman, but also those of an older, stone period,
the Finnic period; yet, says Lord Wrottesley, "distinguished geologists
are of opinion that the growth of all the vegetable matter, and even
the original scooping out of the hollows containing it, are events long
posterior in date to the gravel with flint-implements,--nay, posterior
even to the formation of the uppermost of the layers of loam with
fresh-water shells overlaying the gravel."

The number of the flint implements is computed at above fourteen hundred
in an area of fourteen miles in length and half a mile in breadth. They
are of the rudest nature, as if formed by a people in the most degraded
state of barbarism. Some are mere flakes of flint, apparently used for
knives or arrow-heads; some are pointed and with hollowed bases, as if
for spear-heads, varying from four to nine inches in length; some are
almond-shaped, with a cutting edge, from two to nine inches in length.
Others again are fashioned into coarse representations of animals, such
as the whale, saurian, boar, eagle, fish, and even the human profile;
others have representations of foliage upon them; others are either
drilled with holes or are cut with reference to natural holes, so as to
serve as stones for slings, or for amulets, or for ornaments. The edges
in many cases seem formed by a great number of small artificial tips
or blows, and do not at all resemble edges made by a great natural
fracture. Very few are found with polished surfaces like the modern
remains in flint; and the whole workmanship differs from that of flint
arrow-heads in other parts of Europe, as well as from the later Finnish
(or so-called Keltic) remains, discovered in such quantities in France.
The only relics that have been found resembling them are, according to
Mr. Worsaae, some flint arrow-heads and spear-points discovered at great
depths in the bogs of Denmark. A few bone knives and necklaces of bone
have been met with in these deposits, but thus far no human bones. The
people who fabricated these instruments seemed to be a hunting and
fishing people, living in some such condition as the present savages of
Australia.

These discoveries of M. de Perthes have at length aroused the attention
of English men of science, and during 1859 a number of eminent
gentlemen--among them Sir Charles Lyell, Mr. Prestwich, Dr. Falconer,
and others--visited M. Perthes's collection, and saw the flints _in
situ_. Several of them have avowed their conviction of the genuineness
and antiquity of these relics. Sir Charles Lyell has given a guarded
sanction to the belief that they present one strong proof of a remote
human antiquity.

The objections that would naturally be made to this evidence are, that
the flints are purely natural formations, and not works of man,--that
the deposit is alluvial and modern, rather than of the ancient
drift,--or that these implements had been dropped into crevices, or sunk
from above, in later periods.

The testimony of disinterested observers seems to be sufficient as to
the human contrivance manifest in these flints; and the concurrence of
various scientific men hardly leaves room for doubt that these deposits
are of great antiquity, preceding the time in which the surface of
France took its present form, and dating back to what is called the
Post-Pliocene Period. Their horizontal position, and the great depth
at which the hatchets are found, together with their number, and the
peculiar incrustation and discoloration of each one, as well as their
being in company with the bones of the extinct mammalia, make it
improbable that they could have been dropped into fissures or sunk there
in modern times.[D] In regard to the absence of human bones, it should
be remembered that no bones are easily preserved, unless they are
buried in sediment or in bog; and furthermore, that the extent of the
researches in these formations is very small indeed. Besides, the
country where above all we should expect the most of human remains
in the drift-deposits, as being probably the most ancient abode of
man,--Asia,--has been the least explored for such purposes. Still this
is without doubt the weak point in the evidence, as proving human
antiquity.

[Footnote D: An article in Blackwood, (October, 1860,) which is
understood to be from the pen of Professor H.D. Rogers, admits entirely
that the flints are of human workmanship, and that it is impossible for
them to have dropped through fissures, as, according to the writer's
observation of the deposits, it would be impossible even for a mole to
penetrate them, so close are they. Professor Rogers takes the ground
that human antiquity is not proven from these relics, for two
reasons:--First, because the indications in the deposits inclosing the
flints point clearly to a "turbulent diluvial action," and therefore it
is possible for a violent incursion of the ocean to have taken place in
the historic period, and to have mixed up the more recent works of man
with the previously buried bones or relics of a pre-historic period; and
secondly, because the different geological deposits do not necessarily
prove time, but only succession,--two schools of geology interpreting
all similar phenomena differently, as relating to the time required.

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