5o8 



NATURE 



[September i8, 1890 



to a high antiquity. It is said to have been found at a depth of 

 1 53 feet in the auriferous gravels of California, containing re- 

 mains of mastodon, and covered by five or six beds of lava or 

 volcanic ashes. But here again doubts enter into the case, as 

 well-fashioned mortars, stone hatchets, and even pottery, are 

 said to occur in the same deposits. In the same way the dis- 

 coveries of M. Ameghino at the mouth of the Plata, in the 

 Argentine Republic, require much further corroboration. 



The presumably worked bones which I have placed in the 

 second category, such as those with incisions in them from St. 

 Prest, near Chartres, the cut bones of Cetacea in Tuscany, the 

 fractured bones in our own crag-deposits, and numerous other 

 specimens of a similar character, have, by most geologists, been 

 regarded as bearing marks entirely due to natural agencies. It 

 seems more probable that in bones deposited at the bottom of 

 Pliocene seas, cuts and marks should have been produced by the 

 teeth of carnivorous fish, than by men who could only have lived 

 on the shores of the seas, and who have left behind them no 

 instruments by which such cuts as those on the bones could have 

 been produced. 



As to the third category, the instruments of flint reported to 

 have been found in Tertiary deposits, those best known are 

 from St. Prest and Thenay, in the north-west of France, and 

 Otta, in Portugal. 



These three localities I have visited ; and though at the two 

 former the beds in which the flints were said to have been found 

 are certainly Pliocene, there is considerable doubt in some cases 

 whether the flints have been fashioned at all, and in others, 

 where they appear to have been wrought, whether they belong 

 to the beds in which they are reported to have been found, and 

 have not come from the surface of the ground. Even the 

 suggestion that the flints of Thenay were fashioned by the 

 Dryopithecus, one of the precursors of man, has now been 

 retracted. At Otta the flakes that have been found present, 

 as a rule, only a single bulb of percussion, and, having been 

 found oa the surface, their evidence is of small value. The 

 exact geological age of the beds in which they have occurred is, 

 moreover, somewhat doubtful. On the whole, therefore, it 

 appears to me that the present verdict as to Tertiary man must 

 be in the form of " Not proven." 



When we consider the vast amount of time comprised in the 

 Tertiary period, with its three great principal subdivisions of 

 the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, and when we bear in mind 

 that of the vertebrate land animals of the Eocene no one has 

 survived to the present time, while of the Pliocene but one — the 

 hippopotamus — remains unmodified, the chances that man, as 

 at present constituted, should also be a survivor from that 

 period seem remote, and against the species Homo sapiens 

 ha ving existed in Miocene times almost incalculable. The 

 a p riori improbability of finding man unchanged, while all the 

 other vertebrate animals around him have, from natural causes, 

 undergone more or less extensive modification, will induce all 

 careful investigators to look closely at any evidence that would 

 carry him back beyond Quaternary times ; and though it would 

 be unsafe to deny the possibility of such an early origin for the 

 human race, it would be unwise to regard it as established 

 except on the clearest evidence. 



Another question of more general interest than that of the 

 existence of Tertiary man is that of the origin and home of the 

 Aryan family. The views upon this subject have undergone 

 important modification during the last twenty years. The 

 opinions based upon comparative philology alone have received 

 a rude shock, and the highlands of Central Asia are no lon-^er 

 accepted without question as the cradle of the Aryan family, but 

 it is suggested that their home is to be sought somewhere in 

 Northern Europe. While the Germans contend that the primi- 

 tive Aryans were the blue-eyed dolichocephalic race, of Which 

 the Scandinavians and North Germans are typical examples, 

 the French are in favour of the view that the dark-haired 

 brachycephalic race of Gauls, now well represented in the 

 Auvergne, is that of the primitive Aryans. I am not going to 

 enter deeply into this question, on which Canon Isaac Taylor 

 has recently published a comprehensive treatise, and Mr. Frank 

 Jevons a translation of Dr. Schrader's much more extensive 

 work, "The Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples." 

 Looking at the changes that all languages undergo, even when 

 they have the advantage of having been reduced into the written 

 form, and bearing in mind the rapidity with which these changes 

 are effected ; bearing in mind, also, our extreme ignorance of 

 the actual forms of language in use among prehistoric races un- 



acquainted with the art of writing, I, for one, cannot wonder a 

 something like a revolt having arisen against the dogmatic asser- 

 tions of those who have, in their efforts to reconstruct early 

 history, confined themselves simply to the comparative study of 

 languages and grammar. But, notwithstanding any feeling of 

 this kind, I think that all must admire the enormous industry 

 and the varied critical faculties of those who have pursued these 

 studies, and must acknowledge that the results to which they 

 have attained cannot lightly be set aside, and that, so far as 

 language alone is concerned, the different families, their pro- 

 vinces, and mutual relations have, in the main, become fairly 

 established. The study of "linguistic palaeontology," as it has 

 been termed, will help, no doubt, in determining still more 

 accurately the affinities of the different forms of language, 

 and in fixing the dates at which one separated from another, 

 as well as the position that each should occupy on the 

 family-tree — if such a tree exists. But even here there 

 is danger of relying too much on negative evidence ; and 

 the absence in the presumed original Aryan language of 

 special words for certain objects in general use ought not 

 to be regarded as affording absolute proof that such 

 objects were unknown at the time when the languages con- 

 taining such words separated from the parent stock. Not only 

 Prof, Huxley, but Broca and others have insisted that language 

 as a test of race is as often as not, or even more often than not, 

 entirely misleading. The manner in which one form of lan- 

 guage flourishes at the expense of another ; the various ways in 

 which a language spreads even otherwise than by conquest ; the 

 fact that different races, with totally different physical character- 

 istics, are frequently found speaking the same language, or but 

 slightly different dialects of it — all conduce to show how im- 

 perfect a guide comparative philology may be so far as anthropo- 

 logical results are concerned. Of late, prehistoric archaeology 

 has been invoked to the aid of linguistic researches ; but here 

 again there is great danger of those who are most conversant with 

 the one branch of knowledge being but imperfectly acquainted 

 with the other. The different conditions prevailing in different 

 countries, the degrees of intercourse with other more civi- 

 lized nations, and local circumstances which influence the 

 methods of life, all add difficulties to the laying down of any 

 comprehensive scheme of archaeological arrangement which 

 shall embrace the relics, whether sepulchral or domestic, of 

 even so limited an area as that of Europe. We are all natur- 

 ally inclined to assume that the record of the past is compara- 

 tively complete. But in archaeology no more thati geology does 

 this appear to be the case. The interval between the period of 

 the river-gravels and that of the caves, such as Kent's Cavern, in 

 England, and those of the Reindeer period of the south of France, 

 may have been but small ; but our knowledge of the transi- 

 tion is next to none. The gap between the Palaeolithic 

 period and the Neolithic has, to my mind, still to be bridged 

 over, and those who regard the occupation of the Belgian caves 

 as continuous from the days of the reindeer down to late Neo- 

 lithic times seem to me possessed of great powers of faith. 

 Even the relations in time between the kj'ckkenmoddings of 

 Denmark and the remains of the Neolithic age of that country 

 are not as yet absolutely clear ; and who can fix the exact limits 

 of that age? Nor has the origin and course of extension of the 

 more recent Bronze civilization been as yet satisfactorily deter- 

 mined ; and until more is known, both as to the geographical 

 and chronological development of this stage of culture, we can 

 hardly hope to establish any detailed succession in the history 

 of the Neolithic civilization that went before it. In the mean- 

 lime, it will be for the benefit of our science that speculations as 

 to the origin and home of the Aryan family should be rife ; but 

 it will still more effectually conduce to our eventual knowledge 

 of this most interesting question if it be consistently borne in 

 mind that they are but speculations. 



Turning from theoretical to practical subjects, I may call 

 attention to the vastly improved means of comparison and study 

 that the ethnologists of to-day p assess as compared with those 

 of twenty years ago. Not only have the books and periodicals 

 that treat of ethnology multiplied in all European languages, 

 but the number of museums that have been formed with the 

 express purpose of illustrating the manners and customs of the 

 lower races of mankind has also largely increased. On the 

 Continent, the Museums of Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, and 

 other capitals have either been founded or greatly improved ; 

 while in England our ethnological collections infinitely surpass, 

 both in the number of objects they contain and in the method 



NO. 



1090, VOL. 42] 



