ORIGIN OF LITERARY FORMS. 673 



sharply than ever shall we look for a hit of pottery seven thousand 

 years old, an arrowhead or grooved stone axe, and without unjust 

 doubt ask the questions : Have we "been deceived ? Have the 

 classic stones slipped down into the gravel through Nature's chan- 

 nels ? Has a landslide tricked us with its mastodon's tooth and 

 human skull ? And then, where are the hammer stones, and the 

 chips, and the signs of use on the " turtlebacks," and the thinned- 

 down blades, which shall prove for what purpose glacial man 

 might have made these leaf-shaped forms — whether like the 

 modern Indian he treated them only as blocked-out types of more 

 specialized tools, or whether, still a child in the stone-chipper's 

 art, he halted at the second step in the process, and, unskilled to 

 go further, used the now famous " turtleback " as a finished im- 

 plement sufficient for his primitive needs ? 



It is well that we have this new light from the jasper quarries 

 on the great art of arts that most concerned man's life and happi- 

 ness in the untold ages of his childhood. One source of error and 

 confusion has been cleared away from the subject, and we fully 

 realize that what shall in future determine the age and nature of 

 these stones is not their " type " or their form, or their resem- 

 blance to European specimens, but their geological position. 



ORIGIN OF LITERARY FORMS. 



By M. CHAELES LETOURNEAU. 



WHAT in current language we call literature, the literary 

 aesthetics of civilized peoples, poetry intelligently composed 

 and revised according to complicated metrical laws — written 

 works, made to be read, not sung, and addressed to a cultivated 

 public — only represent the last term of literary evolution. Prim- 

 itive literature is very different, and is everywhere the same. Its 

 origin is extremely distant, and it is probable that it even pre- 

 ceded, in our most ancient ancestors, the invention of articulate 

 language — that great step which sealed the transformation of the 

 anthropopithecus into man. That precious acquisition, however, 

 was not miraculous nor instantaneous. The first speech was cer- 

 tainly very rudimentary ; and before conquering it, the anthro- 

 poids from which man slowly issued possessed, like all other ani- 

 mals, a vocal language constituted solely of modulated cries re- 

 sulting from simple reflex actions, automatic, and corresponding 

 to the necessities, the desires, and the feelings of beings of little in- 

 telligence. In the brain of the anthropopithecus the passage from 

 the cry to speech marked the beginning of a complete psychical 

 revolution. It must have been effected with great slowness, and 



VOL. XLIII. 49 



