Section II, 188Y. [ ^ 1 ' Trans. Eoy. Soc. Canada 



II. — Aboriginal American Poetry. 

 Bi/JoKN Eeade. 



(Presented May 25, 1887.) 



The true history of the earth was till within the memory of livinj? men a sealed book. 

 It is Jiot strange, therefore, that some chapters of it which concern the infancy of our 

 race should still remain obscure. Recent research has, it is true, lifted a corner of the 

 veil that shrouds the prehistoric past. Archœology has carried the light of the present 

 into the dwelling-place of savage man, and revealed him as he struggled for existence 

 amid scenes that have long ceased to know him. The earth has been made to give up 

 its dead, and conferred a new lease of life on races that antedated the dawn of Chinese or 

 Egyptian culture. The diligent hand of science has saved from the dust of oblivion the 

 implements and utensils of those long undreamed-of forerunners of the earliest civilisa- 

 tions. We know how they fished and hunted, what animals they prized or dreaded, what 

 weapons they used in the chase or in war, of what materials they were made, and how 

 prepared. We know with what kind of needle they sewed their coats of skins, what 

 jewellery they most affected, what dainty morsels were sweetest to their palates. We 

 have learned something about their industries and their trade, their agriculture, their 

 mode of grinding corn, their pottery and their weaving. Some of them aspired to be not 

 artisans only, but artists, and carvings of bears, of reindeers, of mammoths, even — carvings 

 which, Dr. Boyd Dawkins thinks, would not disgrace the chisel of some modern sculptors 

 — have come down to us from the cave-men of ancient Europe. Nor were those remote 

 ancestors of the present generation without their code of ethics and their notions of 

 divinity, as we gather from inferential evidence. They had, it appears, some sense of duty, 

 a hope of the world to come, and some of their remains disclose a cranial development 

 that would not be out of harmony with a fairly advanced stage of intellectual cultivation. 



Such, in rapid outlines, was the man of the Stone Age — man before metals — as the 

 research of the last half century has restored him to the living world. It is a picture 

 with which we, on this continent, are not entirely unacquainted, and it is needless to say 

 that between the stage of advancement which it indicates and the earliest civilisation with 

 which history brings us in contact, there must have been a long and eventful interval. 

 Nor, if we accept the principle of continuity, can we have much difficulty in imagining 

 that when the foremost nation on which history dawns was at the stage above portrayed, 

 the tribes which had lagged hindmost in the race of progress were of an extremely low 

 type, some su.ch type, perhaps, as that which the Neanderthal skull would represent. 

 As yet, we are almost utterly in the dark as to the process by which the great gulf 

 of difference that divides the higher from the lower was passed. Of the savage of the 

 Stone Age we may understand the capability for improvement, haAàng some experience 



Sec. ii, 1887. 2. 



