215 
19. It has ever been found that the “corruption of the best 
things yields the most evil” results; so we find that Eve, the 
fruitful mother of all living, the one in whose perfect frame life 
was, as it were, embodied, becomes the channel through which death 
enters into the world, and all our woe ; and through some strange 
and ill-understood series of events, which has its counterpart (be it 
remembered) in all the stories of the early world in heathen lore, 
the earth became utterly corrupt and filled icith violence. 
20. Such is the narrative of Scripture ; and if we are to attach 
any credence to the examination of kitchen middens* in Denmark, 
or to the inferences derived from relics of poor humanity inhabiting 
caves in our islands, when these were overspread by herds of the 
Irish elk or of the reindeer, and when the death-dealing blows of 
the savage human being came in aid of the wolf or the cave-bear, 
to exterminate the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and all the 
monster progeny of earth ; we have ever the same unpleasant con- 
viction of the then state of the human race forced upon our minds. 
Partially, if not universally, cannibals , f delighting in nothing so 
much as in cracking the bones and feasting on the marrow of his 
fellows, men or women were of such an order that we are compelled 
to admit the justice of the sentence, which led to their being all 
swept away by the waters of the Deluge. 
21. As illustrative of the probable state of civilization of the 
then age of stone, I present here a transcript of a drawing 
originally published by M. de Baye, of a flint arrow, X deeply 
imbedded in and still adhering to a human vertebra. This was 
found in the caverns of La Marne, together with some 500 more of 
the formidable weapons in the use of which these savages delighted. 
One of these flint arrows was discovered in the Grotto of E} r zies 
(Pcrigord), lodged in a vertebra of a reindeer, which it had pierced 
through from one side to the other, after having traversed all the 
body of the animal § Professor Nilson has found one imbedded in 
the skeleton of an aurochs, and others in the skulls of stags. 
This savant has described a human skull, found in an ancient 
place of sepulture at Tygelsjo, which had been transpierced with a 
dart made of the antler of a stag. 
22. No doubt the rude life of the sportsmen of that day was 
not without its charms, and amongst these might be accounted the 
* I think the reader will prefer this word to the Danish Kjcekken- 
mceddingen. 
f Bull, de V Ac. Roy. des Sciences de Belgique , t. xx. p. 427, exception- 
ally \n France,Lenormant,p.32; Cave-hunting, by W. BoydDawkins, F.R.S., 
pp. 215, 253, 259, 260, 147, &c. ; and see the Plate of the scraped human 
thigh-bone, p. 260. 
j Etudes sur I’Antiquite historique, p. 385. Chabas. § Ibid., p. 384. 
