820 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ing artist had, to assist him in his work, only some wretched flints or 

 roughly-sharpened bones. The inquiry whether these discoveries made 

 in the west of Europe are verified in other countries, and whether this 

 art-feeling was innate in man and has characterized him always and 

 everywhere, is one of much interest. The excavations in Asia and 

 Africa are still too few, and the discoveries that have been made there 

 are of too little importance, to warrant the drawing of serious conclu- 

 sions respecting those quarters. We must, then, turn to America, 

 where eminent archaeologists and enthusiastic collectors have eagerly 

 studied all that relates to the past of the human race. With the aid 

 of their publications and the photographs they have distributed with 

 rare liberality, we are able to follow the ancient populations in their 

 migrations from the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, to study 

 their habits and their progress, and to show that among them also art 

 was born at a very early epoch, and that it grew up with the generations. 

 It has now been ascertained that man lived in America during the 

 quaternary ages, contemporaneously with the mastodons and the huge 

 edentates and pachyderms, which had no other resemblances with the 

 mammals of the Eastern continents than those of size. Like their con- 

 temporaries in Europe, the primitive Americans wandered in the soli- 

 tary wilderness, and disputed with animals for the prey on which they 

 fed and the caves that sheltered them, having for weapons of offense 

 and defense only the flints that lay at their feet. Their barbarism ap- 

 pears to have been lower than that of the troglodytes of Europe, and 

 to have been destitute of all artistic feeling and taste for ornament. 

 Ages passed, the duration of which we can not compute ; the quater- 

 nary animals disappeared, and man became sedentary ; and he has left 

 as evidences of his long abode in the same place the heaps of refuse 

 exemplified in the shell-mounds and kitchen-middens of the Atlantic 

 coast, the Gulf of Mexico, the banks of the Mississippi and the Ama- 

 zon, the Pacific coast, and Tierra del Fuego. Excavations made at 

 several points have brought out hatchets, knives, harpoons, and tools 

 of every shape, of stone, bone, and horn, all bearing witness to a back- 

 ward social condition, fragments of carbonized wood, bones of ani- 

 mals, and fish-bones, all having evidently been accumulated by men 

 who knew nothing of agriculture and lived by hunting and fishing. 

 Occasionally a few shards of pottery have been found among the re- 

 mains, made of clay mixed with pounded shells, fashioned by hand, 

 and dried in the sun. Sometimes plaited vines or canna-stems have 

 been impressed on the wet parts, or lines have been scratched on the 

 vessel with the point of a shell or a flint. These are the first efforts at 

 ornamentation, and are singularly like those of the most ancient pot- 

 teries of Europe. Ornaments designed for the decoration of the per- 

 son are more rare than the potteries. We can only cite a few bears' 

 or cats' teeth and shells bored for the purpose of being hung from the 

 neck, except in the sambaquis or kitchen-middens of Brazil, where a 



