CHAPTER V. 



THE ABORIGINES. 



HITHERTO our story has been the annals of nature, 

 but now begins the narrative of man. Savage man 

 made "history here for centuries, and probably for thou- 

 sands of years, before a white face ever peered into a New 

 England forest. 



It has pleased the Anglo-Saxon immigrants to call the 

 aboriginal dwellers savages ; but the Anglo-Saxon ances- 

 tors in Europe were just about as savage as the Indian 

 forbears of New England. 



The higher the reach of civilization above savagery, the 

 more impressive is the fundamental sameness of human 

 nature under all its garbs. 



The prehistoric human life of Cohasset is a part of the 

 great hidden drama of man, which was being enacted here 

 for several thousand years after civilization had begun 

 about the Mediterranean Sea. The records of that abo- 

 riginal life are as wordless as nature's, but they can be as 

 clearly read as nature's were. 



The romance of the rocks was read by the shapes of 

 crystals, and by the cracks and colors and chemicals of the 

 ledges. Likewise the tragedies of the ice age were in- 

 ferred from glacial scratches, from rounded hills of hard- 

 pan, and from the perching bowlders. So the story of the 

 aborigines is to be read from a few stones and a few bones 

 and a few shells which they left, taken with the written 

 descriptions of Indian life as the first white settlers saw it. 

 Occasionally a farmer nowadays, in plowing, turns up a 

 stone of an odd, unnatural shape, which attracts his eye. 

 No other stone among millions is so interesting to him, 

 because this one has on it the marks of human tampering. 



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