ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 



291 



bronze, and pottery ; and by the ruder forms of the older 

 flint implements. The weakness of this argument has 

 been well shown by Mr. Albert Mott in his very original 

 but little known presidential address to the Literary and 

 Philosophical Society of Liverpool in 1873. He main- 

 tains that " our most distant glimpses of the past are 

 still of a world peopled as now with men both civilised 

 and savage," and " that we have often entirely misread 

 the past by supposing that the outward signs of civilisa- 

 tion must always be the same, and must be such as are 

 found among ourselves.'^ In support of this view he 

 adduces a variety of striking facts and ingenious argu- 

 ments, a few of which I will briefly summarize. 



Sculptures on Easter Island, — On one of the most 

 remote islands of the Pacific— Easter Island, 2,000 

 miles from South America, 2,000 from the Marquesas, 

 and more than 1,000 from the Gambler Islands, are 

 found hundreds of gigantic stone images, now mostly 

 in ruins. They are often forty feet high, while some seem 

 to have been much larger, the crowns on their heads, 

 cut out of a red stone, being sometimes ten feet in 

 diameter, while even the head and neck of one is said 

 to have been twenty feet high.^ These images once all 

 stood erect on extensive stone platforms. 



The island containing these remarkable works of art has 

 only an area of about thirty square miles, or considerably 

 less than Jersey. Now as one of the smallest images 

 (eight feet high) weighs four tons, the largest must weigh 

 over a hundred tons, if not much more ; and the exist- 

 ence of such vast works implies a large population, 

 abundance of food, and an established government. Yet 



1 Joum. of Roy. Geog. Soc. 1870, pp. 177, 178. 



U 2 



