506 



KNOWLEDGE • 



[June 12, 1885. 



PRE-HISTORIC AMERICA.* 



THIS is a companion volume to its learned author's 

 "Les Premiers Horames et les Temps Pre-historiques," 

 which dealt with the Stone Age in Europe. There is no 

 lack of treatises in botli English and Continental languages 

 on this latter subject, and the expositor has the easy task 

 oi treading in well-worn footsteps. The uniform character 

 of the relics of Paheolithic man, unearthed in tliousands 

 from river-gravels and bone caverns, lias left little play for 

 archaeological vagaries or for speculative fancies concerning 

 their makers. But it is otherwise with the pre-historic 

 races and those often stupendous relics of the New World 

 which have long been looked at through the magnifying 

 and tinted glasses of the romancer and the sciolist, and 

 have been invested with the glamour and mystery in which 

 ignorance covers its nakedness. 



Among the crude and imperfectly-digested hypotheses which 

 have engaged the attention of untrained ethnologists, none have 

 been more popular than those which ascribed the origin of the 

 Americans to full-fledged races such as we know at present in other 

 regions of the world. Among those who have been claimed as the 

 original or genuine ancestors of the Americans are the Chinese, 

 the Japanese, the Malays, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the 

 Basques, the ten lost tribes of Israel, the early Irish, the Welsh, 

 the Norsemen, some unknown Asiatic I^reeniasons, and other 

 equally unknown Buddhists. Volumes have been filled with the 

 most enthusiastic rubbish by men upon whose ability and sanity 

 in other matters nothing has ever thrown a doubt. Fortunately 

 the era of such speculations is passing away. The scientific treat- 

 ment of anthropological subjects is no longer the exception. 



The "ten lost tribes" still linger with us, and doubtless will 

 continue to do so for some time, probably becomini? in their turn 

 the subject of investigation b\' psychologists interested in aberrant 

 mental phenomena. But every d.iy increases our knowledge of the 

 true constitution of savage society, and builds a more enduring 

 barrier against the floods of pure hypothesis. 



The foregoing extract is a guarantee that we have in the 

 present -work a sober contribution to a subject over which 

 so many writers have lost their heads, but which, under the 

 treatment it now receives, falls into its relative place in 

 the general science of human culture. M. De Kadaillac's 

 volume covers more ground than the title indicates, the 

 larger part of it, and that necessarily the most copiously 

 illustrated, having more interest for the antiquarian than 

 for the anthropologist; but in the earlier and later chapters, 

 as well as in the references to cosmogonic legends and 

 religious beliefs and practices scattered throughout the 

 work, the anthropologist will find enough and to spare of 

 interesting and suggestive matter. 



In all that the author and his American editor (from 

 whose revision the book has largely gained) have to say 

 concerning the co-existence of man with mammals now 

 «xtinct, concerning the character of his earliest known relics 

 and the deposits in which they occur, concerning his place 

 in the geological record, the reader will be struck with ihe 

 parallelisms between prehistoric peoples of the Old \\ orld 

 and the Xew, with the proofs of the strictly analogous 

 phases of culture through which man has everywhere passed 

 in his ascent from savagery, and with the absence of any 

 essential physical difference between races, their unity, as 

 the author remarks, " standing out as the great law domi- 

 nating the history of mankind." Of course, they did every- 

 thing on the biggest scale in America from the earliest times. 

 The kitchen middens or refuse and oflFal heaps which are 

 scattered along the shores of the Baltic, although of con- 

 siderable size, are very "small pumpkins" to the like shell- 



* " Pre-historic America." By the Marquis de Nadaillac. 

 Translated by N. D'Anvers. (London : John Murray. 18S5.) 



heaps and sambaquis along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, 

 some of which cover many acres and reach a height of forty 

 or fifty feet ; the more remarkable mounds, to be referred 

 to presently, are, compared to the tumuli of the Old World, 

 as the Himalayas to the Mendip Hills ; the pyramids 

 challenge comparison with the famous pyramid of Cheops ; 

 the palaces vie with the classic ruins of the Palatine ; and 

 the megalithic remains would enclose a mightier ruin than 

 the broken circle of our Stonehenge. In the summary of 

 evidence conceruiug man's antiquity in America, the 

 cautious spirit in which the author approaches the 

 problem is apparent. He has not listened to the 

 charming ot the French savans who find human relics in 

 the middle Tertiaries in Europe. Although agreeing that 

 man lived before the glacial epoch in North America, 

 he recogni-es i he difficulty of fi.xing the precise time of 

 his appenrance, and in the uncertainty which attaches 

 to the exact deposits in which certain relics of him — notably 

 the Calaveras skull — occur, wisely leaves the question 

 open. But the main interest of the volume gathers round 

 the exhaustive account which the author gives of the thou- 

 sands of artificial mounds in the great river- valleys south 

 of the Rocky Mountains, and along the Gulf of Mexico 

 through the length of the Southern continent. They 

 appear to have little or no relation to the burial mounds 

 scattered over Europe and Asia, and which are referred to 

 pre-Aryan tomtj-raising peoples, being unlike in their fan- 

 tastic shapes, and apparently intended for defensive and 

 sacrificial, as well as for sepulchral, purposes. Many of 

 them are of geometrical form, oval, square, round, more 

 rarely, polygonal or triangular, either rising from hill sum- 

 mits, or standing solitar)' on plains, or enclosed within earth- 

 walls. In so'iie parts of the far West the mounds represent 

 mammals, liirds, and rei>tiles ; indeed, some bold architects 

 have not hesitated to attempt to imitate the human body. 

 In Wisconsin " they represent men with the trunk, head, 

 arms, and legs still recognisaVile ; mammals sixty-five yards 

 long; birds with outspread wings measuring more than 

 thirty-two yards from the tip to tip, reptiles of colossal 

 dimensions, and, lastly, Pigeon mentions having seen in 

 Minnesota a huge spider, whose body and legs covered an 

 acre of gmiiud." The cyclopean character and varied 

 forms of these mounds led superficial inquirers to attribute 

 them to soQie mj'>terious race of " giants in those days " 

 which has completely disappeared, and with which the extant 

 Indians of the Americas have no affinity. That the works are 

 of vast and undetermined antiquity is unquestioned ; for, as 

 with the rough measurement of the deposition of remains 

 beneath the successive layers of trees in the Danish peat- 

 bogs, the Upsi- of a long period is evidenced by the genera- 

 tions fi VMrieties of trees which cov^er the mounds. And 

 if, as M. de Nadaillac points out, we look among existing 

 tribes for thn lineal descendants of the Mound Builders, we 

 may look in vam, since the richest, the most cultured, and 

 most sedentary of the Indians existing when the white race 

 poured into Aiuerica like a resistless flood, have been de- 

 stroyed ; of many tribes none remain, of others only a feeble 

 remnant which has readily adopted the methods and arts 

 ot the dominant race. Nevertheless, the conclusion at 

 which the author, in agreement with the leading authori- 

 ties, arrives, is that expressed by Dr. Brinton as follows : 

 — " All these earthworks — and I am inclined to assert the 

 same of the whole of those in the Atlantic States and the 

 majority of the Mississippi Valley — were the production, 

 not of some mythical tribe of high civilisation in remote 

 antiquity, hut "f the identical nations found by the whites 

 residirg in tho-e regions." To which may be added the 

 opinion of Si^hiiolcraft. "There is nothing indeed in the 

 magnitude and structure of our western mounds which a 



