The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18) A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times to the Present
The Book of History
A History of all Nations
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT
WITH OVER 8000 ILLUSTRATIONS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VISCOUNT BRYCE, P.C., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.
CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS
W. M. Flinders Petrie, LL.D., F.R.S UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
Hans F. Helmolt, Ph.D. EDITOR, GERMAN “HISTORY OF THE WORLD”
Stanley Lane-Poole, M.A., Litt.D. TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN
Robert Nisbet Bain ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN, BRITISH MUSEUM
Hugo Winckler, Ph.D. UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN
Archibald H. Sayce, D.Litt., LL.D. OXFORD UNIVERSITY
Alfred Russel Wallace, LL.D., F.R.S. AUTHOR, “MAN’S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE”
Sir William Lee-Warner, K.C.S.I. MEMBER OF COUNCIL OF INDIA
Holland Thompson, Ph.D. THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
W. Stewart Wallace, M.A. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
Maurice Maeterlinck ESSAYIST, POET, PHILOSOPHER
Dr. Emile J. Dillon UNIVERSITY OF ST. PETERSBURG
Arthur Mee EDITOR, “THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE”
Sir Harry H. Johnston, K.C.B., D.Sc. LATE COMMISSIONER FOR UGANDA
Johannes Ranke UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH
K. G. Brandis, Ph.D. UNIVERSITY OF JENA
And many other Specialists
Volume I
MAN AND THE UNIVERSE
The World before History The Great Steps in Man’s Development Birth of Civilisation and the Growth of Races Making of Nations and the Influence of Nature
JAPAN
The Country and the People
NEW YORK THE GROLIER SOCIETY LONDON THE EDUCATIONAL BOOK CO.
EDITORIAL AND CONTRIBUTING STAFF
OF
THE BOOK OF HISTORY
Rt. Hon. Viscount Bryce, F.R.S.
Formerly British Ambassador to the United States, Author of “The American Commonwealth”
Professor E. Ray Lankester, F.R.S.
President British Association, 1906-7; Past Director of South Kensington Museum of Natural History
Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, F.R.S.
Co-discoverer with Darwin of the Theory of Natural Selection; Author of “Man’s Place in the Universe”
Dr. William Johnson Sollas, F.R.S.
Professor of Geology at Oxford University
Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, F.R.S.
Professor of Egyptology, University College, London; Founder of British School of Archæology in Egypt
Professor Wm. Boyd Dawkins, F.R.S.
Professor of Geology at Victoria University, Manchester; Author of “Early Man in Britain”
Frederic Harrison, M.A.
Hon. Fellow and formerly Tutor of Wadham College, Oxford; Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society
Dr. Archibald H. Sayce
Professor of Assyriology at Oxford University
Sir Harry H. Johnston, K.C.B.
Doctor of Science of Cambridge University; late Commissioner and Consul-General for Uganda
Dr. J. Holland Rose
Cambridge University Lecturer on Modern History; Author of “Development of the European Nations”
Dr. Stanley Lane-Poole
Professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin
Sir John Knox Laughton
Professor of Modern History at King’s College, London University; Editor of Lord Nelson’s Despatches
Oscar Browning, M.A.
Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge; University Lecturer in History
Professor Ronald M. Burrows
Professor of Greek at University College of South Wales; Author of “Discoveries in Crete”
David George Hogarth, M.A.
Director of Cretan Exploration Fund and Past Director of the British School at Athens
Herbert Paul, M.P.
Author of “A History of Modern England”
Sir Robert K. Douglas
Professor of Chinese at King’s College, University of London; late Keeper of Oriental Books, British Museum
Dr. Hugo Winckler
Professor of History and Oriental Languages at the University of Berlin
Sir William Lee-Warner, K.C.S.I.
Member of the Council of India; Formerly Scholar of St. John’s College, Cambridge
Dr. E. J. Dillon
Author and Journalist; Master of Oriental Languages at the University of St. Petersburg
William Romaine Paterson, M.A.
Author of “The Nemesis of Nations”
W. Warde Fowler, M.A.
Scholar and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford; Author of “The City-State of the Greeks and Romans”
Dr. H. F. Helmolt
Author of “German History” and Editor of the German “History of the World”
Professor Konrad Haebler
Of the Imperial Library of Berlin
Professor Richard Mayr
Of the Vienna Academy of Commerce
Arthur Mee
Editor of The Book of Knowledge.
Professor Rudolf Scala
Of the Imperial University of Vienna
Professor Karl Weule
Director of the Leipzig Museum of Anthropology
Professor Wilhelm Walther
Of the University of Rostock
Arthur Christopher Benson, M.A.
Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge; Editor of The Correspondence of Queen Victoria
Major Martin Hume
Lecturer in Spanish History and Literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge
Robert Nisbet Bain
Traveller and Historian; Assistant Librarian at the British Museum
Richard Whiteing
Author of “The Life of Paris”
His Excellency Max von Brandt
Ex-German Ambassador to China and Minister in Japan
Francis H. Skrine
Traveller and Explorer; late of the Indian Civil Service
Holland Thompson, Ph. D.
The College of the City of New York.
Dr. Archdall Reid, F.R.S.E.
Author of “The Principles of Heredity”
Arthur Diósy
Founder of the Japan Society; Author of “The New Far East”
Dr. K. G. Brandis
Director of the University Libraries at Jena
Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L.
Author of “A Political History of England”
Professor Joseph Kohler
Professor of Jurisprudence at Berlin University
Angus Hamilton
Traveller and Correspondent in the Far East; Author of “Afghanistan”
J. G. D. Campbell, M.A.
Late Educational Adviser to the Government of Siam
W. R. Carles, C.M.G.
Geographer; late British Consul at Tientsin, China
Professor Johannes Ranke
Professor of Anthropology, Physiology, and Natural History at Munich
W. S. Wallace, M. A.
University of Toronto.
Hon. Bernhard R. Wise
Scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford; Ex-Attorney-General of New South Wales
K. W. C. Davis, M.A.
Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford
CONTENTS OF VOLUME I
THE SAURIAN AGE FRONTISPIECE
FIRST GRAND DIVISION
MAN AND THE UNIVERSE
PAGE
Editorial Introduction 1
Plan of the HISTORY 3
Plan of First Grand Division 6
A View across the Ages 7
Summary of World History 60
Chronology of 10,000 Years 61
Time-table of the Nations 74
Contemporary Figures in History 78
The Beginning of the Earth 79
Four Periods of the Earth’s Development 89
Geological Clock of the World’s Life 90
How Life became possible on Earth 91
Scene from the Prehistoric World Plate facing 96
Beginning of Life on the Earth 99
How Man obtained Mastery of the Earth 108
THE WORLD BEFORE HISTORY
Prehistoric Man attacking Cave Bears Plate facing 114
The Wonderful Story of Drift Man 115
The Appearance of Man on the Earth 127
Life of Man in the Stone Age 132
Primitive Man in the Past and Present 145
The Home Life of Primitive Folk 164
When History was dawning 175
THE GREAT STEPS IN MAN’S DEVELOPMENT
The Material Progress of Mankind 185
Beginnings of Commerce Plate facing 192
The Higher Progress of Mankind 203
BIRTH OF CIVILISATION AND GROWTH OF RACES
Seven Wonders of Ancient Civilisation 225
Rise of Civilisation in Egypt 233
Rise of Civilisation in Mesopotamia 259
Rise of Civilisation in Europe 281
The Triumph of Race 299
Alphabet of the World’s Races 311
Little Gallery of Races 313
Types of the Chief Races of Mankind 349
Ethnological Chart of the Human Race 352
MAKING OF NATIONS AND THE INFLUENCE OF NATURE
Birth and Growth of Nations 353
Land and Water and Greatness of Peoples 377
Environment and the Life of Nations 387
The Size and Power of Nations 399
The Future History of Man 404
SECOND GRAND DIVISION
THE FAR EAST
Map of the Far East 406
Plan of the Second Grand Division 408
Interest and Importance of the Far East 409
JAPAN
COUNTRY AND PEOPLE
Great Dates in Japan 416
The Empire of the Eastern Seas 417
Map of Japan 432
Qualities of the Japanese People 433
LIST OF SPECIAL PLATES IN THE BOOK OF HISTORY
PAGE
The Saurian Age Frontispiece, Vol. 1
Scene from the Prehistoric World: Early Ice Age Facing 96
Prehistoric Men Attacking the Great Cave Bears “ 114
The Beginnings of Commerce “ 192
Carrying Off an Emperor Frontispiece, Vol. 2
Buddha, “The Light of Asia” Facing 562
Four Famous Figures in Chinese History “ 754
The Colour of India Frontispiece, Vol. 3
Gems of Indian Architecture Facing 1154
Indian Temples “ 1196
Nineveh in the Days of Assyria’s Ascendancy Frontispiece, Vol. 4
Two Indian Scenes Facing 1364
Spring Carnival at a Tibetan Monastery “ 1436
The Pyramids of Abusir Frontispiece, Vol. 5
Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans Facing 1860
Palace of an Assyrian King “ 1956
The Sphinx “ 1996
Alexander, the World Conqueror Frontispiece, Vol. 6
The Acropolis of Athens Facing 2504
An Arab Storyteller Frontispiece, Vol. 7
Theodora, the Byzantine Empress Facing 2906
Glimpse of the Life in a Turkish Harem “ 2994
Primitive Justice Frontispiece, Vol. 8
Thaddeus Reyten at the Diet of Warsaw Facing 3282
Roland “ 3484
Prince Arthur and Hubert Frontispiece, Vol. 9
Venerable Bede Dictating His Translation of the Gospel of St. John Facing 3716
“The Vigil”: A Knight of the Middle Ages “ 3788
Alfred, the Hero King of England “ 3834
King John Granting Magna Charta “ 3865
Crusaders Sighting Jerusalem Frontispiece, Vol. 10
Wolsey’s Last Interview with Henry VIII Facing 4168
Charles I on His Way to Execution “ 4340
Charles II Visiting Wren Frontispiece, Vol. 11
Napoleon the Great Facing 4636
“Peace with Honour” Frontispiece, Vol. 12
The French Soldiers’ Unrealised Dream of Victory Facing 5104
Recessional Frontispiece, Vol. 13
The Conqueror’s Gift to London Facing 5464
King Edward VII “ 5614
Clio, “The Muse of History” Frontispiece, Vol. 14
Flags that Fly in the Four Winds of Heaven Facing 5874
Statue of Liberty Frontispiece, Vol. 15
Hope Facing Index
LIST OF MAPS APPEARING IN THE BOOK OF HISTORY
PAGE
The World as Known to its First Historian 8
Shifting of the Centre of the World’s Commerce 28
How the Mediterranean has Given Place to the Atlantic 29
The First Maps 51
Modern Representation of the World 52
The Europeanisation of the World 55
The Shaping of the Face of the Earth 85
How Mountain Ranges were formed 87
Europe Before the British Isles were Formed 118
The Submerged Lands of Europe 119
Europe in the Ice Age 155
Egypt in Three Periods 243
Babylonia 260
Sea Routes of Ancient Civilisation 283
Land Routes of Ancient Civilisation 284
How Civilisation Spread through Europe 359
The Expansion of White Races 361
The Island that Rules the Sea 378
Oceans of the World 383
Effect of Climate on the Course of History 391
Political Expansion 396
Relation of Rivers and Sea to the Civilisation of Countries 397
South America Africa Europe
The Far East, and Australia, Oceania and Malaysia 406
The Island Empire of Japan 432
Japan in the Fifth Century 457
Siberia 634
Movement of the Peoples of Siberia 656
Russia’s Advance in Western Asia 676
Growth of Russia in the Far East 677
The Trans-Siberian Line 692
The Chinese Empire 708
Korea and its Surroundings 858
The Malay Archipelago 886
Islands of Oceania 947
New Zealand 986
Australia and Tasmania 1010
Britain Contrasted with Australia 1012
South-east Australia, Indicating Products 1013
Bed of the Pacific Ocean 1102
The Middle East 1120
Modern India 1161
India in 1801 1266
Bed of the Indian Ocean and China Sea 1419
Suez Canal 1434
Mountain Systems In and Around Tibet 1457
The Approach of Lhasa 1505
Early Empires of the Ancient Near East 1562
Later Empires of the Ancient Near East 1563
Ancient Empires of Western Asia 1582
Modern Africa 2001
Races and Religions of Africa 2005
Natural Products of Africa 2009
Basin of the River Nile 2022
Delta of the River Nile 2024
Utica as it Was 2188
The Remains of Utica 2189
Ancient States of Mediterranean North Africa 2191
Niger River and Guinea Coast 2229
Great Britain in South Africa 2322
Basin of the Zambesi 2332
Basin of the Congo 2347
General Map of Europe 2356
Geographical Connection of the Mediterranean Coasts 2373
Ancient Greece 2482
World Empire of Alexander the Great 2561
Italy in the First Century B.C. 2621
The Roman Empire 2738
Origin of the Barbaric Nations 2797
Principal Countries of Eastern Europe 2894
World’s Great Empires Between 777 and 814 A.D. 2934
Turkey and Surrounding Countries in the 14th and 17th Centuries 3082
Historical Maps of Poland and Western Russia 3220
Western Europe in the Middle Ages 4138
Europe During the Revolutionary Era 4636
Modern Europe 4788
Britain’s Maritime Enterprise 5440
The British Empire in 1702 5462
The British Empire in 1909 5463
The Atlantic Ocean 5656
South America in the Sixteenth Century 5915
South America as it is To-day 5983
North Pole, with routes of Explorers 6014
South Pole 6045
North America 6431
This is the story of the earth from the first thing we know of it to the time in which we live. It is the story of man from the first thing we know of him to the last thought that the vision of modern science can suggest.
There is no need here to discuss the question how far it is possible to write a universal history, or on what lines such a history should proceed. These points may well be left where Lord Bryce leaves them in his introduction to this book. Nor need we consider what history is; the plain man may be left to make up his own mind as to that while the philosophers are making up theirs. A word may be said, however, of the plan and purpose of this work, especially of that distinction of it which is at once the ground of its appeal and its justification.
A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE
It is a commonplace to say of a great work that it is unique, and there would at first sight seem to be peculiar presumption in making such a claim for a History of the World. It may be claimed, however, without any fear of contradiction, that this work has no rival in the English language.
There have been histories of the world before; there are available in large numbers histories of all countries well worthy of attention; but there is not, and it may be doubted if there has ever been attempted before, a scientific World-History. This work is, as far as it can possibly be in the present state of knowledge, a universal history of the universe.
SCIENCE AND HISTORY
That is a far reaching claim to make, but a mere glance through the names of those whose services have been enlisted for the work will make its basis clear. The contributors include some of the foremost students of science. Many men of eminence whose names do not usually come into historical works will be found here. Their function may be described as holding the Lamp of Science up to History. It is for these authorities to read the story of the earth and to tell the plain man what they read there, as Turner read the sunset and painted what he saw. The simile is not so unfortunate as it may appear, because, although our canvas has not the same room for the artist’s imagination as Turner’s had, it will probably be admitted that the imagination of the scientist is often nearer to the truth of things than the conventional belief.
THE LIFE-STORY OF ALL NATIONS
And the scientist will come into our History whenever and wherever science has any light to throw upon its problems. To the creators of this work the world is not merely an aggregation of countries under more or less settled governments, nor is a country merely the seat of a political system. They conceive the earth as a part of the universe, as one world among many; and this is the story of a huge ball flying in space, on which men and women live and move, on which mighty nations rise and rule and pass away, on which great empires crumble into dust. It is the entrancing book of man and the universe, the life-story of all nations. It begins with the beginning; it regards the universe, as modern science has taught us to regard it, as a vast unit, in which the life of man is the ultimate consummation.
A history of the world cannot be written in a day. It is like an institution--it must be allowed to grow. It would be a purposeless sacrifice in an undertaking of such magnitude to reject any work of building-up that is available, and this History has a rare privilege in being able to utilise the result of the matchless research, the tireless industry, the unequalled knowledge of Dr. Hans Helmolt and the distinguished staff of scholars and investigators who have been engaged with him for many years in preparing a history of the world on precisely the lines laid down in this work.
THE MATERIAL FOR A WORLD HISTORY
It would be impossible to exaggerate the value of the elaborate research made for Dr. Helmolt by such of his eminent collaborators as Professor Johannes Ranke, Professor Ratzel, Professor Joseph Kohler, and others whose names stand for foremost authority wherever the value of learning is understood, and it is one of the chief claims of this work to recognition that it has behind it all the material collected by Dr. Helmolt’s staff, with all the judgment and skill of Dr. Helmolt himself in co-ordinating the labour of his assistants.
A work so universal in time and place must engage many minds. Behind it there must be the labour and thought of many lives. The materials for a world-history cannot be amassed by one man, cannot be gathered together in the time that it is possible for one man to devote to them. A moment’s reflection reveals the vastness and complexity of the arrangements for such a work, the reaching-out into far corners of the earth, the ransacking of historical libraries and official archives; the placing of the result of all this research into the hands of a hundred trained historians, the analysing, sifting, and editing of each part as if it were in itself a perfect whole.
A BOOK OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
All this labour can hardly be measured. And if we add to our reckoning the work of illustrating the world’s history in pictures, the task of finding illustrations where they are rare as precious stones, or of choosing them where their number is bewildering, the labour that a world-history involves is, indeed, incalculable. It can only be accomplished by the co-operation of many minds, working over a long period, drawing upon actual experience in every part of the world.
Especially is this so in the present work. There are histories that can be made up from books, but this is not one of them. The BOOK OF HISTORY is not only a great book of human experience, as every history is; it is the product of experience. It could never have been written if the men who write it had not helped to make the history that they write.
THE MAKERS OF THE BOOK
It is a book of history by writers and makers of history; it is a book of action by men of action; it is a book, that is, by men who know intimately the real life of the world. When Professor Ratzel writes of the making of nations, he writes with perhaps an unequalled knowledge of the conditions that have made for human progress; when Dr. Flinders Petrie writes of Egypt, when Dr. Sayce writes of Assyria, they write with the same authority that Sir Harry Johnston has in writing of those parts of the British Empire that he has helped to govern.
The real rulers of the world are not the princes, and among the makers of this book are men who, though the fierce light that beats upon a throne has not beat upon them, have borne the burden of empire and of ruling men. It is the ideal collaboration, that of the brilliant investigator, the scientific interpreter, and the man of affairs, and it makes possible the achievement of a History which we have claimed to be unique.
THE WORLD YESTERDAY, TO-DAY & TO-MORROW
We have the facts from the pens of the men who have dug them up fresh from the earth itself or who know them from experience; we have them treated by the men who can turn upon them the full light of modern science; we have the world as it moves in our own time described by the men who know it from the centre, and know it therefore best.
This is the story of the world, then, yesterday and to-day. And, as history goes on, as to-day becomes yesterday and to-morrow becomes to-day, we shall find in this book a vision of the things that lie before. Out of the deeps of Time came man. Through the mists of Time he grew. Down the ages of Time he goes. Whence he came we guess; how he lives we know; where he goes the wisdom of History does not tell. But the history of the world is young, and young men shall see visions.
THE EDITORS
THE BOOK OF HISTORY
The Life-Story of the Earth and of All Nations
TOLD IN SEVEN GRAND DIVISIONS
This plan provides a general scheme for the HISTORY, but is not intended for reference. It does not follow that the exact order of countries here given is maintained throughout the volumes. A full index appears at the end of the work
I--MAN AND THE UNIVERSE
THE WORLD AND ITS STORY
A View Across the Ages: Introduction
Summary of the History of the World
Chronology of 10,000 Years and Chart of Nations
MAKING OF THE EARTH AND THE COMING OF MAN
The Beginning of the Earth
How Life is Possible on the Earth
The Beginning of Life on the Earth
How Man Obtained the Mastery of the Earth
THE RISE OF MAN AND THE EVE OF HISTORY
The World Before History
The Great Steps in Man’s Development
BIRTH OF CIVILISATION & THE GROWTH OF RACES
The Beginnings of Civilisation
How Civilisation Came to Europe
The Triumph of Race
An Alphabet of the World’s Races
MAKING OF NATIONS & THE INFLUENCE OF NATURE
The Birth and Growth of Nations
Influence of Land and Water on National History
How Nations are Affected by Their Environment
The Size and Power of Nations
The Future History of Man
II--THE FAR EAST
The Interest and Importance of the Far East
Japan. Siberia. China. Korea
Malaysia
Philippines. Malay States. Straits Settlements. Borneo. Sarawak. Sumatra. Java. New Guinea, and other Islands of Malay Archipelago
Australia
New South Wales. Victoria. Queensland. South Australia. West Australia. Tasmania
Oceania
New Zealand. Fiji. Pitcairn. Hawaii. Samoa. Tonga and other Islands
The Influence of the Pacific Ocean in History
III--THE MIDDLE EAST
The Importance of the Middle East
India.
Including Ceylon and the Native States
Further India.
Siam. Annam. Burma. Tonking. Cochin China. Cambodia. Champa
The Influence of the Indian Ocean in History
Central Asia.
Afghanistan. Baluchistan. Turkestan. Thibet
IV--THE NEAR EAST
The Ancient Empires of Western Asia
Babylonia. Assyria. Elam
Early Nations of Western Asia
Scythia. Sarmatia. Armenia. Syria. Phœnicia. Israel
Western Asia from the Rise of Persia to Mohammed
Persia. Asia Minor. Syria. Palestine. Arabia. Mediterranean Islands
Western Asia from the Time of Mohammed
The Saracen Dominion. The Turkish Empire in Asia. Persia. Arabia
V--AFRICA
Legacy of Ancient Empires to the Modern World
Egypt and the Egyptian Sudan
North Africa
Tripoli. Tunis. Morocco. Algeria and the French Territories. Sierra Leone. Liberia. Gold Coast. Nigeria. German West Africa. Abyssinia. Somaliland. Erythrea. British East Africa. Zanzibar
South Africa
Native Races. The Portuguese and Dutch in South Africa. British South Africa: Cape Colony. Natal. Transvaal. Orange River Colony. Rhodesia. Congo Free State. Portuguese East Africa. Angola. German East Africa. German South-West Africa. Madagascar
VI--EUROPE
1. EUROPE TO THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Mediterranean Influence in the Making of Europe
The Ancient Spirit of Greece and Rome
Early Peoples of Europe. Ascendancy of the Greeks
The Rise of Rome and the World Empire
Social Fabric of the Ancient World: Slave States
2. EASTERN EUROPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION
The Byzantine Empire and the Turk in Europe
The Middle Peoples
Russia, Poland, and the Baltic Provinces
The Social Fabric of the Mediæval World: The Twilight of Nations
3. WESTERN EUROPE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
A Survey of Western Mediæval Europe
The Peoples of Western Europe
The Importance of the Baltic Sea
The Emerging of the Nations
Frankish Dominion and the Empire of Charlemagne. England. Spanish Peninsula. Italy. The Papacy. Scandinavia
The Development of the Nations
The German or Holy Roman Empire. France. England. Spain and Portugal. Italy. The Papacy. Scandinavia
The Crusades. Industry and Commerce
4. WESTERN EUROPE FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE REVOLUTION
A Survey of Western Europe
The Reformation and Wars of Religion
The Age of Louis XIV.
From the Peace of Westphalia to the Treaty of Utrecht
The Ending of the Old Order
From the Treaty of Utrecht to the Revolution
The Importance of the Atlantic to the World Powers
Religion After the Reformation. Industry and Commerce
5. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era
The Revolution. The Republic at War and the Rise of Napoleon. The Zenith of Napoleon and his Fall
Great Britain in the Napoleonic Era
6. THE RE-MAKING OF EUROPE
Europe After Waterloo
The Triumph of Despotism. The Revolt Against Despotism
Europe in Revolution
The Second French Republic and the Coup d’Etat. The Uprising of the Little Nations. National Movements in Germany
The Consolidation of the Powers
Europe and the Second Empire. The Unification of Italy. The Unification of Germany. The Franco-German War
Great Britain to 1871. Russia and Turkey to 1871. Europe since 1871
Great Britain. Germany. France. Austria-Hungary. Spain and Portugal. Italy. Russia. Turkey. Switzerland. Greece. Belgium. Holland. Denmark. Norway. Sweden. Bulgaria. Servia. Roumania. Montenegro. Luxemburg. Monaco. San Marino
7. THE EUROPEAN POWERS TO-DAY
Europe in Our Own Time
Great Britain. Germany. Austria-Hungary. France.
Italy. Russia. Turkey. Spain and Portugal
Minor States of Europe:
Switzerland. Greece. Belgium. Holland. Denmark. Norway. Sweden. Bulgaria. Servia. Roumania. Montenegro. Luxemburg. Monaco. San Marino
VII--AMERICA
America Before Columbus
The Primitive Races of America. The Ancient Civilisation of Central America. The Ancient Civilisation of South America
The European Colonisation
The Discovery. The Spanish Conquest. The Spanish and Portuguese Empire in America. The Independence of South and Central America. The Pilgrim Fathers and the English Settlement. The Development and Expansion of the British Colonies
The American Nation
The Revolt of the Thirteen Colonies. The Struggle for Independence and the War. The Creation of the United States. The Development of the American Nation. The United States in Our Own Time
British America
Canada. Newfoundland. British West Indies. British Honduras. Bermudas.
Central America in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Cuba. Haiti. Dominica. Porto Rico. Mexico. Guatemala. Honduras. San Salvador. Nicaragua. Costa Rica. Panama
South America in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Colombia. Venezuela. British, French and Dutch Guiana. Brazil. Ecuador. Peru. Chili. Bolivia. Paraguay. Argentina. Uruguay
The World Around the Poles
Greenland. Iceland. Arctic and Antarctic Oceans
FIRST GRAND DIVISION
MAN AND THE UNIVERSE]
FIRST GRAND DIVISION
MAN AND THE UNIVERSE
There can, of course, be neither absolute finality nor entire unanimity in the subjects of these chapters, which are designed to enable the reader to follow the course of history with greater interest and understanding than would be possible without some scientific knowledge of life. They are presented as a symposium of modern thought on the problems concerning the origin and development of the earth and mankind
PLAN
THE WORLD AND ITS STORY
A VIEW ACROSS THE AGES
Rt. Hon. James Bryce
A SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Arthur D. Innes, M.A.
CHRONOLOGY OF 10,000 YEARS AND CHART OF NATIONS
MAKING OF THE EARTH & THE COMING OF MAN
THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH
Dr. Wm. Johnson Sollas, F.R.S.
HOW LIFE BECAME POSSIBLE ON THE EARTH
Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, F.R.S.
HOW MAN OBTAINED THE MASTERY OF THE EARTH
Dr. Archdall Reid, F.R.S.E.
THE RISE OF MAN AND THE EVE OF HISTORY
THE WORLD BEFORE HISTORY
Professor Johannes Ranke
THE GREAT STEPS IN MAN’S DEVELOPMENT
Professor Joseph Kohler
BIRTH OF CIVILISATION & THE GROWTH OF RACES
THE BIRTH OF CIVILISATION
Dr. Flinders Petrie, F.R.S.
HOW CIVILISATION CAME TO EUROPE
David George Hogarth, M.A.
THE TRIUMPH OF RACE
Dr. Archdall Reid, F.R.S.E.
ALPHABET OF THE WORLD’S RACES
W. E. Garrett Fisher, M.A.
MAKING OF NATIONS & THE INFLUENCE OF NATURE
Professor Friedrich Ratzel
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF NATIONS
INFLUENCE OF LAND & WATER ON NATIONAL HISTORY
EFFECT OF ENVIRONMENT ON NATIONS
THE SIZE AND POWER OF NATIONS
THE FUTURE HISTORY OF MAN
* * * * *
For full contents and page numbers see Index
Mr. Kipling’s “Recessional” is quoted in a Frontispiece from “The Five Nations,” by permission of the Author and the Publishers, Messrs. Methuen
A VIEW ACROSS THE AGES
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF HISTORY
BY THE RIGHT HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
When History, properly so called, has emerged from those tales of the feats of kings and heroes and those brief entries in the roll of a temple or a monastery in which we find the earliest records of the past, the idea of composing a narrative which shall not be confined to the fortunes of one nation soon presents itself.
[Sidenote: The First True Historian]
Herodotus--the first true historian, and a historian in his own line never yet surpassed--took for his subject the strife between Greeks and Barbarians which culminated in the Great Persian War of B.C. 480, and worked into his book all he could ascertain regarding most of the great peoples of the world--Babylonians and Egyptians, Persians and Scythians, as well as Greeks. Since his time many have essayed to write a Universal History; and as knowledge grew, so the compass of these treatises increased, till the outlying nations of the East were added to those of the Mediterranean and West European world which had formerly filled the whole canvas.
[Sidenote: Scientific History only now Possible]
None of these books, however, covered the field or presented an adequate view of the annals of mankind as a whole. It was indeed impossible to do this, because the data were insufficient. Till some time way down in the nineteenth century that part of ancient history which was preserved in written documents could be based upon the literature of Israel, upon such notices regarding Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Iran as had been preserved by Greek or Roman writers, and upon those writers themselves. It was only for some of the Greek cities, for the kingdoms of Alexander and his successors, and for the city and Empire of Rome that fairly abundant materials were then available. Of the world outside Europe and Western Asia, whether ancient or modern, scarcely anything was known, scarcely anything even of the earlier annals of comparatively civilised peoples, such as those of India, China, and Japan, and still less of the rudimentary civilisations of Mexico and Peru. Nor, indeed, had most of the students who occupied themselves with the subject perceived how important a part in the general progress of mankind the more backward races have played, or how essential to a true History of the World is an account of the semi-civilised and even of the barbarous peoples. Thus it was not possible, until quite recent times, that the great enterprise of preparing such a history should be attempted on a plan or with materials suitable to its magnitude.
The last seventy or eighty years have seen a vast increase in our materials, with a corresponding widening of the conception of what a History of the World should be. Accordingly, the time for trying to produce one upon a new plan and enlarged scale seems to have arrived; not, indeed, that the years to come will not continue to add to the historian’s resources, but that those resources have recently become so much ampler than they have ever been before that the moment may be deemed auspicious for a new departure.
The nineteenth century was marked by three changes of the utmost consequence for the writing of history.
[Sidenote: New Material and New Methods]
That century, in the first place, has enormously widened our knowledge of the times hitherto called prehistoric. The discovery of methods for deciphering the inscriptions found in Egypt and Western Asia, the excavations in Assyria and Egypt, in Continental Greece and in Crete, and to a lesser extent in North Africa also, in the course of which many inscriptions have been collected and fragments of ancient art examined, have given us a mass of knowledge regarding the nations who dwelt in these countries larger and more exact than was possessed by the writers of classical antiquity who lived comparatively near to those remote times. We possess materials for the study not only of the political history but of the ethnology, the languages, and the culture of the nations which were first civilised incomparably better than were those at the disposal of the contemporaries of Vico or Gibbon or Herder. Similar results have followed as regards the Far East, from the opening up of Sanskrit literature and of the records of China and Japan. To a lesser degree, the same thing has happened as regards the semi-civilised peoples of tropical America both north and south of the Isthmus of Panama. And while long periods of time have thus been brought within the range of history, we have also learnt much more about the times that may still be called prehistoric. The investigations carried on in mounds and caves and tombs and lake-dwellings, the collection of early stone and bronze implements, and of human skulls and bones found along with those of other animals, have thrown a great deal of new light upon primitive man, his way of life, and his migrations from one region to another. As history proper has been carried back many centuries beyond its former limit, so has our knowledge of prehistoric times been extended centuries above the furthest point to which history can now reach back. And this applies not only to the countries previously little explored, but to such well-known districts as Western Europe and the Atlantic coast of America.
Secondly, there has been during the nineteenth century a notable improvement in the critical method of handling historical materials. Much more pains have been taken to examine all available documents and records, to obtain a perfect text of each by a comparison of manuscripts or of early printed copies, and to study each by the aid of other contemporary matter. It is true that, with the exception of Egyptian papyri and some manuscripts unearthed in Oriental monasteries (besides those Indian, Chinese, and other early Eastern sacred books to which I have already referred), not very much that is absolutely new has been brought to light. It is also true that a few of the most capable students in earlier days, in the ancient world as well as since the Renaissance, have fully seen the value of original authorities and have applied to them thoroughly critical methods. This is not a discovery of our own times. Still, it may be claimed that there was never before so great a zeal for collecting and investigating all possible kinds of original texts, nor so widely diffused a knowledge of the methods to be applied in turning them to account for the purposes of history. Both in Europe and in America an unprecedentedly large number of competent men have been employed upon researches of this kind, and the result of their labours on special topics has been to provide the writer who seeks to present a general view of history with materials not only larger but far fitter for his use than his predecessors ever enjoyed. Then with the improvement in critical apparatus, there has come a more cautious and exact habit of mind in the interpretation of facts.
Thirdly, the progress of the sciences of Nature has powerfully influenced history, both by providing new data and by affecting the mental attitude of all reflective men. This has happened in several ways. Geographical exploration has made known nearly every part of the surface of the habitable globe. The great natural features of every country, its mountain ranges and rivers, its forest or deserts, have been ascertained. Its flora and fauna have been described, and thereby its capacity for supporting human life approximately calculated. The other physical conditions which govern the development of man, such as temperature, rainfall, and the direction of prevalent winds have been examined. Thus we have acquired a treasury of facts relating to the causes and conditions which help the growth of civilisation and mould it into diverse forms, conditions whose importance I shall presently discuss in considering the relation of man to his natural environment. Although a few penetrating minds had long ago seen how much the career of each nation must have been affected by physical phenomena, it is only in the last two generations that men have begun to study these phenomena in their relation to history, and to appreciate their influence in the formation of national types and in determining the movement of races over the earth’s surface.
Not less remarkable has been the increase in our knowledge of the more remote and backward peoples. Nearly every one of these has now been visited by scientific travellers or missionaries, its language written down, its customs and religious rites, sometimes its folk lore also, recorded. Thus materials of the highest value have been secured, not only for completing our knowledge of mankind as a whole, but for comprehending in the early history of the now highly civilised peoples various facts which had previously remained obscure, but which became intelligible when compared with similar facts that can be studied in their actuality among tribes whom we find in the same stage to-day as were the ancestors of the civilised nations many centuries ago.
[Sidenote: Progress of the Sciences]
The progress thus achieved in the science of man regarded as a part of Nature has powerfully contributed to influence the study of human communities as they appear in history. The comparative method has become the basis for a truly scientific inquiry into the development of institutions, and the connection of religious beliefs and ceremonies with the first beginnings of institutions both social and political has been made clear by an accumulation of instances. Whether or no there be such a thing as a Science of History--a question which, since it is mainly verbal, one need not stop to discuss--there is such a thing as a scientific method applied to history; and the more familiar men have become with the methods of inquiry and canons of evidence used in physical investigations, so much the more have they tended to become exact and critical in historical investigations, and to examine the causes and the stages by and through which historical development is effected.
[Sidenote: Historical Knowledge in Our Time]
In noting this I do not suggest that what is popularly called the “Doctrine of Evolution” should be deemed a thing borrowed by history from the sciences of nature. Most of what is true or helpful in that doctrine was known long ago, and applied long ago by historical and political thinkers. You can find it in Aristotle, perhaps before Aristotle. Even as regards the biological sciences, the notion of what we call evolution is ancient; and the merit of Darwin and other great modern naturalists has lain, not in enouncing the idea as a general theory, but in elucidating, illustrating, and demonstrating the processes by which evolution takes place. The influence of the natural sciences on history is rather to be traced in the efforts we now see to accumulate a vast mass of facts relating to the social, economic, and political life of man, for the sake of discovering general laws running through them, and imparting to them order and unity.
Although the most philosophic and diligent historians have always aimed at and striven for this, still the general diffusion of the method in our own time, and the greatly increased scale on which it is applied, together with the higher standard of accuracy which is exacted by the opinion of competent judges, may be, in some measure, ascribed to the examples which those who work in the spheres of physics and biology and natural history have so effectively set.
Finally, the progress of natural science has in our time, by stimulating the production and exchange of commodities, drawn the different parts of the earth much nearer to one another, and thus brought nearly all its tribes and nations into relations with one another far closer and far more frequent than existed before.
[Sidenote: Oneness of the Human Race]
This has been done by the inventions that have given us steam and electricity as motive forces, making transport quicker and cheaper, and by the application of electricity to the transmission of words. No changes that have occurred in the past (except perhaps changes in the sphere of religion) are comparable in their importance as factors in history to those which have shortened the voyage from Western Europe to America to five and a half days, and made communication with Australia instantaneous. For the first time the human race, always essentially one, has begun to feel itself one, and civilised man has in every part of it become a contemporaneous observer of what passes in every other part.
The general result of these various changes has been that while the materials for writing a history of the world have been increased, the conception of what such a history should be has been at the same time both enlarged and defined. Its scope is wider; its lines are more clearly drawn. But what do we mean by a Universal History? Briefly, a History which shall, first, include all the races and tribes of man within its scope; and, secondly, shall bring all these races and tribes into a connection with one another such as to display their annals as an organic whole.
[Sidenote: Importance of the Small Races]
Universal history has to deal not only with the great nations, but also with the small nations; not only with the civilised, but also with the barbarous or savage peoples; not only with the times of movement and progress, but also with the times of silence and apparent stagnation. Every fraction of humanity has contributed something to the common stock, and has lived and laboured not for itself only, but for others also, through the influence which it has perforce exercised on its neighbours. The only exceptions we can imagine are the inhabitants of some remote isle, “far placed amid the melancholy main.” Yet they, too, must have once formed part of a race dwelling in the region whence they came, even if that race had died out in its old home before civilised man set foot on such an oceanic isle in a later age. The world would have been different, in however small a measure, had they never existed. As in the realm of physical science, so in that of history no fact is devoid of significance, though the true significance may remain long unnoticed. The history of the backward races presents exceptional difficulties, because they have no written records, and often scarcely any oral traditions. Sometimes it reduces itself to a description of their usages and state of life, their arts and their superstitions, at the time when civilised observers first visited them. Yet that history is instructive, not only because the phenomena observable among such races enlarge our knowledge, but also because through the study of those which survive we are able to interpret the scanty records we possess of the early condition of peoples now civilised, and to go some way towards writing the history of what we have hitherto called prehistoric man.
Thus such tribes as the aborigines of Australia, the Fuegians of Magellan’s Straits, the Bushmen of South Africa, the Sakalavas of Madagascar, the Lapps of Northern Europe, the Ainos of Japan, the numerous “hill-tribes” of India, will all come within the historian’s ken. From each of them something may be learnt; and each of them has through contact with its more advanced neighbours affected those neighbours themselves, sometimes in blood, sometimes through superstitious beliefs or rites, frequently borrowed by the higher races from the lower (as the Norsemen learnt magic from the Lapps, and the Semites of Assyria from the Accadians), sometimes through the strife which has arisen between the savage and the more civilised man, whereby the institutions of the latter have been modified.
Obviously the historian cannot record everything. These lower races are comparatively unimportant. Their contributions to progress, their effect on the general march of events, have been but small. But they must not be wholly omitted from the picture, for without them it would have been different. One must never forget, in following the history of the great nations of antiquity, that they fought and thought and built up the fabric of their industry and art in the midst of a barbarous or savage population surrounding them on all sides, whence they drew the bulk of their slaves and some of their mercenary soldiers, and which sometimes avenged itself by sudden inroads, the fear of which kept the Greek cities, and at certain epochs even the power of Rome, watchful and anxious. So in modern times the savages among whom European colonies have been planted, or who have been transported as slaves to other colonies--sometimes, as in the case of Portugal in the fifteenth century, to
Europe itself--or those with whom Europeans have carried on trade, must not be omitted from a view of the causes which have determined the course of events in the civilised peoples.
[Sidenote: Great Works of Little Peoples]
To dwell on the part played by the small nations is less necessary here, for even a superficial student must be struck by the fact that some of them have counted for more than the larger nations to whose annals a larger space is commonly allotted. The instance of Israel is enough, so far as the ancient world is concerned, to show how little the numbers of a people have to do with the influence it may exert. For the modern world, I will take the case of Iceland.
[Sidenote: The Culture of the Icelanders]
The Icelanders are a people much smaller than even was Israel. They have never numbered more than about seventy thousand. They live in an isle so far remote, and so sundered from the rest of the world by an inhospitable ocean, that their relations both with Europe, to which ethnologically they belong, and with America, to which geographically they belong, have been comparatively scanty. But their history, from the first settlement of the island by Norwegian exiles in A.D. 874 to the extinction of the National Republic in A.D. 1264, is full of interest and instruction, in some respects a perfectly unique history. And the literature which this handful of people produced is certainly the most striking primitive literature which any modern people has produced, superior in literary quality to that of the Continental Teutons, or to that of the Romance nations, or to that of the Finns or Slavs, or even to that of the Celts. Yet most histories of Europe pass by Iceland altogether, and few persons in Continental Europe (outside Scandinavia) know anything about the inhabitants of this isle, who, amid glaciers and volcanoes, have maintained themselves at a high level of intelligence and culture for more than a thousand years.
The small peoples have no doubt been more potent in the spheres of intellect and emotion than in those of war, politics, or commerce. But the influences which belong to the sphere of creative intelligence--that is to say, of literature, philosophy, religion and art--are just those which it is peculiarly the function of a History of the World to disengage and follow out in their far-reaching consequence. They pass beyond the limits of the country where they arose. They survive, it may be, the race that gave birth to them. They pass into new forms, and through these they work in new ways upon subsequent ages.
[Sidenote: The Wide Scope of History]
It is also the task of universal history so to trace the march of humanity as to display the relation which each part of it bears to the others; to fit each race and tribe and nation into the main narrative. To do this, three things are needed--a comprehensive knowledge, a power of selecting the salient and significant points, and a talent for arrangement. Of these three qualifications, the first is the least rare. Ours is an age of specialists; but the more a man buries himself in special studies, the more risk does he incur of losing his sense of the place which the object of his own study fills in the general scheme of things. The highly trained historian is generally able to draw from those who have worked in particular departments the data he needs; while the master of one single department may be unable to carry his vision over the whole horizon, and see each part of the landscape in its relations to the rest.
In other words, a History of the World ought to be an account of the human family as an organic whole, showing how each race and state has affected other races or states, what each has brought into the common stock, and how the interaction among them has stimulated some, depressed or extinguished others, turned the main current this way or that. Even when the annals of one particular country are concerned, it needs no small measure of skill in expression as well as of constructive art to trace their connection with those of other countries. To take a familiar example, he who writes the history of England must have his eye always alive to what is passing in France on one side, and in Scotland on the other, not to speak of countries less closely connected with England, such as Germany and Spain. He must let the reader feel in what way the events that were happening in France and Scotland affected men’s minds, and through men’s minds affected the progress of events in England. Yet he cannot allow himself constantly to interrupt his English narrative in order to tell what was passing beyond the Channel or across the Tweed.
[Sidenote: Unity of Universal History]
Obviously, this difficulty is much increased when the canvas is widened to include all Europe, and when the aim is to give the reader a just impression of the general tendencies of a whole age, such an age as, for instance, the sixteenth century, over that vast area. If for a History of the World the old plan be adopted--that of telling the story of each nation separately, yet on lines generally similar, cross references and a copious use of chronological tables become helpful, for they enable the contemporaneity of events to be seen at a glance, and as the history of each nation is being written with a view to that of other nations, the tendencies at work in each can be explained and illustrated in a way which shows their parallelism, and gives to the whole that unity of meaning and tendency which a universal history must constantly endeavour to display. The connection between the progress or decline of different peoples is best understood by setting forth the various forms which similar tendencies take in each. To do this is a hard task when the historian is dealing with the ancient world, or with the world outside Europe even in mediæval and post-mediæval times. For the modern European nations it is easier, because, ever since the spread of Christianity made these nations parts of one great ecclesiastical community, similar forces have been at work upon each of them, and every intellectual movement which has told upon one has more or less told upon the others also.
[Sidenote: Central Line of Human Development]
[Sidenote: The Study of Human Society]
[Sidenote: Each Race a Distinct Entity]
Such a History of the World may be written on more than one plan, and in the light of more than one general theory of human progress. It might find the central line of human development in the increase of man’s knowledge, and in particular of his knowledge of Nature and his power of dealing with her. Or that which we call culture, the comprehensive unfolding and polishing of human faculty and of the power of intellectual creation and appreciation, might be taken as marking the most real and solid kind of progress, so that its growth would best represent the advance of man from a savage to a highly civilised condition. Or if the moral and political sphere were selected as that in which the onward march of man as a social being, made to live in a community, could best be studied, the idea of liberty might be made a pivot of the scheme; for in showing how the individual emerges from the family or the tribe, how first domestic and then also prædial slavery slowly disappears, how institutions are framed under which the will of one ruler or of a small group begins to be controlled, or replaced as a governing force, by the collective will of the members of the community, how the primordial rights of each human creature win their way to recognition--in tracing out all these things the history of human society is practically written, and the significance of all political changes is made clear. Another way, again, would be to take some concrete department of human activity, follow it down from its earliest to its latest stages, and group other departments round it. Thus one author might take religion, and in making the history of religion the main thread of his narrative might deal incidentally with the other phenomena which have influenced it or which it has influenced. Or, similarly, another author might take political institutions, or perhaps economic conditions--i.e., wealth, labour, capital, commerce, or, again, the fundamental social institutions, such as the family, and the relations of the ranks and classes in a community, and build up round one or other of these manifestations and embodiments of the creative energy of mankind the general story of man’s movement from barbarism to civilisation. Even art, even mechanical inventions, might be similarly handled, for both of these stand in a significant relation to all the rest of the life of each nation and of the world at large. Nevertheless, no one of these suggested lines on which a universal history might be constructed would quite meet the expectations which the name Universal History raises, because we have become accustomed to think of history as being primarily and pre-eminently a narrative of the growth and development of communities, nations, and states as organised political bodies, seeing that it is in their character as bodies so organised that they come into relation with other nations and states. It is therefore better to follow the familiar plan of dealing with the annals of each race and nation as a distinct entity, while endeavouring to show throughout the whole narrative the part which each fills in the general drama of human effort, conflict, and progress.
A universal history may, however, while conforming to this established method, follow it out along a special line, which shall give prominence to some one leading idea or principle. Such a line or point of view has been found for the present work in the relation of man to his physical environment--that is to say, to the geographical conditions which have always surrounded him, and always must surround him, conditions whose power and influence he has felt ever since he appeared upon the globe. This point of view is more comprehensive than any one of those above enumerated. Physical environment has told upon each and every one of the lines of human activity already enumerated that could be taken to form a central line for the writing of a history of mankind. It has influenced not only political institutions and economic phenomena, but also religion, and social institutions, and art, and inventions. No department of man’s life has been independent of it, for it works upon man not only materially but also intellectually and morally.
As this is the idea which has governed the preparation of the present book, as it is constructed upon a geographical rather than a purely chronological plan (though, of course, each particular country and nation needs to be treated chronologically), some few pages may properly be devoted here to a consideration of the way in which geography determines history, or, in other words, to an examination of the relations of Nature, inorganic and organic, to the life of man.
MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE’S KINGDOM
Though we are accustomed to contrast man with Nature, and to look upon the world outside ourselves as an object to be studied by man, the conscious and intelligent subject, it is evident, and has been always recognised even by those thinkers who have most exalted the place man holds in the Cosmos, that man is also to be studied as a part of the physical universe. He belongs to the realm of Nature in respect of his bodily constitution, which links him with other animals, and in certain respects with all the phenomena that lie within the sphere of biology.
All creatures on our earth, since they have bodies formed from material constituents, are subject to the physical laws which govern matter; and the life of all is determined, so far as their bodies are concerned, by the physical conditions which foster, or depress, or destroy life. Plants need soil, moisture, sunshine, and certain constituents of the atmosphere. Their distribution over the earth’s surface depends not only upon the greater or less extent to which these things, essential to their existence, are present, but also upon the configuration of the earth’s surface (continents and oceans), upon the greater or less elevation above sea level of parts of it, upon such forces as winds and ocean currents (occasionally also upon volcanoes), upon the interposition of arid deserts between moister regions, or upon the flow of great rivers. The flora of each country is the resultant (until man appears upon the scene) of these natural conditions.
[Sidenote: Natural Conditions of Life]
We know that some plants are also affected by the presence of certain animals, particularly insects and birds. Similarly, animals depend upon these same conditions which regulate their distribution, partly directly, partly indirectly, or mediately through the dependence of the animal for food upon the plants whose presence or absence these conditions have determined. It would seem that animals, being capable of moving from place to place, and thus of finding conditions suitable for their life, and to some extent of modifying their life to suit the nature around them, are somewhat more independent than plants are, though plants, too, possess powers of adapting themselves to climatic surroundings; and there are some--such, for instance, as our common brake-fern and the grass of Parnassus--which seem able to thrive unmodified in very different parts of the globe.
[Sidenote: Man the Servant of Nature]
The primary needs of man which he shares with the other animals are an atmosphere which he can breathe, a temperature which he can support, water which he can drink, and food. In respect of these he is as much the product of geographical conditions as are the other living creatures. Presently he superadds another need, that of clothing. It is a sign that he is becoming less dependent on external conditions, for by means of clothing he can make his own temperature and succeed in enduring a degree of cold, or changes from heat to cold, which might otherwise shorten his life. The discovery of fire carries him a long step further, for it not only puts him less at the mercy of low temperatures, but extends the range of his food supplies, and enables him, by procuring better tools and weapons, to obtain his food more easily. We need not pursue his upward course, at every stage of which he finds himself better and still better able to escape from the thraldom of Nature, and to turn to account the forces which she puts at his disposal. But although he becomes more and more independent, more and more master not only of himself, but of her, he is none the less always for many purposes the creature of the conditions with which she surrounds him. He always needs what she gives him. He must always have regard to the laws which he finds operating through her realm. He always finds it the easiest course to obey, and to use rather than to attempt to resist her.
Here let me pause to notice a remarkable contrast between the earlier and the later stages of man’s relations to Nature. In the earlier stages he lies helpless before her, and must take what she chooses to bestow--food, shelter, materials for clothing, means of defence against the wild beasts, who are in strength far more than a match for him. He depends upon her from necessity, and is better or worse off according as she is more or less generous.
[Sidenote: Man’s Advance in Knowledge]
But in the later stages of his progress he has, by accumulating a store of knowledge, and by the development of his intelligence, energy, and self-confidence, raised himself out of his old difficulties. He no longer dreads the wild beasts. They, or such of them as remain, begin to dread him, for he is crafty, and can kill them at a distance. He erects dwellings which can withstand rain and tempest. He irrigates hitherto barren lands and raises abundant crops from them. When he has invented machinery, he produces in an hour clothing better than his hands could formerly have produced in a week. If at any given time he has not plenty of food, this happens only because he has allowed his species to multiply too fast. He is able to cross the sea against adverse winds and place himself in a more fertile soil or under more genial skies than those of his former home. As respects all the primary needs of his life, he has so subjected Nature to himself, that he can make his life what he will.
[Sidenote: Man the Master of Nature]
All this renders him independent. But he now also finds himself drawn into a new kind of dependence, for he has now come to take a new view of Nature. He perceives in her an enormous storehouse of wealth, by using which he can multiply his resources and gratify his always increasing desires to an extent practically unlimited. She provides forces, such as steam and electricity, which his knowledge enables him to employ for production and transport, so as to spare his own physical strength, needed now not so much for effort as for the direction of the efforts of Nature. She has in the forest, and still more beneath her own surface in the form of minerals, the materials by which these forces can be set in motion; and by using these forces man can, with comparatively little trouble, procure abundance of those materials.
Thus his relation to Nature is changed. It was that of a servant, or, indeed, rather of a beggar, needing the bounty of a sovereign. It is now that of a master needing the labour of a servant, a servant infinitely stronger than the master, but absolutely obedient to the master so long as the master uses the proper spell. Thus the connection of man with Nature, changed though his attitude be, is really as close as ever, and far more complex. If his needs had remained what they were in his primitive days--let us say, in those palæolithic days which we can faintly adumbrate to ourselves by an observation of the Australian or Fuegian aborigines now--he would have sat comparatively lightly to Nature, getting easily what he wanted, and not caring to trouble her for more. But his needs--that is to say, his desires, both his physical appetites and his intellectual tastes, his ambitions and his fondness for comfort, things that were once luxuries having become necessaries--have so immeasurably expanded that, since he asks much more from Nature, he is obliged to study her more closely than ever.
[Sidenote: Man’s New Relations to Nature]
Thus he enters into a new sort of dependence upon her, because it is only by understanding her capacities and the means of using them that he can get from her what he wants. Primitive man was satisfied if he could find spots where the trees gave edible fruit, where the sun was not too hot, nor the winds too cold, where the beasts easy of capture were abundant, and no tigers or pythons made the forest terrible. Civilised man has more complex problems to deal with, and wider fields to search. The study of Nature is not only still essential to him, but really more essential than ever. His life and action are conditioned by her. His industry and his commerce are directed by her to certain spots. That which she has to give is still, directly or indirectly, the source of strife, and a frequent cause of war. As men fought long ago with flint-headed arrows for a spring of water or a coconut grove, so they fight to-day for mineral treasures imbedded in the soil. It is mainly by Nature that the movements of emigration and the rise of populous centres of industry are determined.
Though Nature still rules for many purposes and in many ways the course of human affairs, the respective value of her various gifts changes from age to age, as man’s knowledge and power of turning them to account have changed. The things most prized by primitive man are not those which semi-civilised man chiefly prized, still less are they those most sought for now.
[Sidenote: Using Natural Wealth]
In primitive times the spots most attractive, because most favourable to human life, were those in which food could be most easily and safely obtained from fruit-bearing trees or by the chase, and where the climate was genial enough to make clothing and shelter needless, at least during the greater part of the year. Later, when the keeping of cattle and tillage had come into use, good pastures and a fertile soil in the valley of a river were the chief sources of material well-being. Wild beasts were less terrible, because man was better armed; but as human enemies were formidable, regions where hills and rocks facilitated defence by furnishing natural strongholds had their advantages.
Still later, forests came to be recognised as useful for fuel, and for carpentry and shipbuilding. Mineral deposits, usually found in hilly or mountainous districts, became pre-eminently important sources of wealth; and rivers were valued as highways of commerce and as sources of motive power by the force of their currents. To the Red Indians of the Ohio valley the places which were the most attractive camping-grounds were those whither the buffaloes came in vast herds to lick the rock salt exposed in the sides of the hills. It is now not the salt-licks, but the existence of immense deposits of coal and iron, that have determined the growth of huge communities in those regions whence the red man and the buffalo have both vanished. England was once, as New Zealand is now, a great wool-growing and wool-exporting country, whereas she is to-day a country which spins and weaves far more wool than she produces.
[Sidenote: Ancient Harbours and Modern]
So, too, the influence of the sea on man has changed. There was a time when towns were built upon heights some way off from the coast, because the sea was the broad high road of pirates who swooped down upon and pillaged the dwellings of those who lived near it. Now that the sea is safe, trading cities spring up upon its margin, and sandy tracts worthless for agriculture have gained an unexpected value as health resorts, or as places for playing games, places to which the inhabitants of inland districts flock in summer, as they do in England and Germany, or in winter, as they do on the Mediterranean coasts of France. The Greeks, when they began to compete with the Phœnicians in maritime commerce, sought for small and sheltered inlets in which their tiny vessels could lie safely--such inlets as Homer describes in the Odyssey, or as the Old Port of Marseilles, a city originally a colony from the Ionian Phocæa. Nowadays these pretty little rock harbours are useless for the large ships which carry our trade. The Old Port of Marseilles is abandoned to small coasters and fishing-boats, and the ocean steamers lie in a new harbour which is protected, partly by outlying islands, partly by artificial works.
[Sidenote: The World-Importance of Medicine]
So, too, river valleys, though still important as highways of traffic, are important not so much in respect of water carriage as because they furnish the easiest lines along which railways can be constructed. The two banks of the Rhine, each traversed by a railroad, carry far more traffic than the great stream itself carried a century ago; and the same remark applies to the Hudson. All these changes are due to the progress of invention, which may give us fresh changes in the future not less far-reaching than those the past has seen. Mountainous regions with a heavy rainfall, such as Western Norway or the coast of the Pacific in Washington and British Columbia, may, by the abundance of water power which they supply, which can be transmuted into electrical energy, become sources of previously unlooked-for wealth, especially if some cheap means can be devised of conveying electricity with less wastage in transmission than is at present incurred. Within the last few years considerable progress in this direction has been made. Should effective and easily applicable preventives against malarial fever be discovered, many districts now shunned, because dangerous to the life of white men, may become the homes of flourishing communities. The discovery of cinchona bark in the seventeenth century affected the course of events, because it provided a remedy against a disease that had previously baffled medical skill. If quinine had been at the disposal of the men of the Middle Ages, not only might the lives of many great men, as for instance of Dante, have been prolonged, but the Teutonic emperors would have been partially relieved of one of the chief obstacles which prevented them from establishing permanent control over their Italian dominions. Rome and the Papal power defended themselves against the hosts of the Franconian and Hohenstaufen sovereigns by the fevers of the Campagna more effectively than did the Roman people by their arms, and almost as effectively as did the Popes by their spiritual agencies.
Bearing in mind this principle, that the gifts of Nature to man not only increase, but also vary in their form, in proportion and correspondence to man’s capacity to use them, and remembering also that man is almost as much influenced by Nature when he has become her adroit master as when she was his stern mistress, we may now go on to examine more in detail the modes in which her influence has told and still tells upon him.
[Sidenote: The Problem of Racial Distinctions]
It has long been recognised that Nature must have been the principal factor in producing, that is to say, in differentiating, the various races of mankind as we find them differentiated when our records begin. How this happened is one of the darkest problems that history presents. By what steps and through what causes did the races of man acquire these diversities of physical and intellectual character which are now so marked and seem so persistent? It has been suggested that some of these diversities may date back to a time when man, as what is called a distinct species, had scarcely begun to exist. Assuming the Darwinian hypothesis of the development of man out of some pithecoid form to be correct--and those who are not themselves scientific naturalists can of course do no more than provisionally accept the conclusions at which the vast majority of scientific naturalists have arrived--it is conceivable that there may have been unconnected developments of creatures from intermediate forms into definitely human forms in different regions, and that some of the most marked types of humanity may therefore have had their first rudimentary and germinal beginning before any specifically human type had made its appearance. This, however, is not the view of the great majority of naturalists. They appear to hold that the passage either from some anthropoid apes, or from some long since extinct common ancestor of man and the existing anthropoid apes--this latter alternative representing what is now the dominant view--did not take place through several channels (so to speak), but through one only, and that there was a single specifically human type which subsequently diverged into the varieties we now see.
If this be so, it is plain that climate, and the conditions of life which depend upon climate, soil, and the presence of vegetables and of other animals besides man, must have been the forces which moulded and developed those varieties. From a remote antiquity, everybody has connected the dark colour of all, or nearly all, the races inhabiting the torrid zone with the power of the sun; and the fairer skin of the races of the temperate and arctic zones with the comparative feebleness of his rays in those regions. This may be explained on Darwinian principles by supposing that the darker varieties were found more capable of supporting the fierce heat of the tropics. What explanation is to be given of the other characteristics of the negro and negroid races, of the usually frizzled hair, of the peculiar nose and jaw, and so forth, is a question for the naturalist rather than for the historian. Although climate and food may be the chief factors in differentiation, the nature of the process is, as indeed is the case with the species of animals generally, sometimes very obscure. Take an instance from three African races which, so far as we can tell, were formed under similar climatic conditions--the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and the Bantu, the race including those whom we call Kaffirs. Their physical aspect and colour are different. Their size and the structure of their bodies are different. Their mental aptitudes are different; and one of the oddest points of difference is this, that whereas the Bushmen are the least advanced, intellectually, morally, and politically, of the three races, as well as the physically weakest, they show a talent for drawing which is not possessed by the other two.
[Sidenote: Is the Race Mystery Insoluble?]
In this case there is, of course, a vast unknown fore-time during which we may imagine the Bantu race, probably originally formed in a region other than that which it now occupies (and under more favourable conditions for progress), to have become widely differentiated from those which are now the lower African races. We still know comparatively little about African ethnography. Let us, therefore, take another instance in which affinities of language give ground for believing that three races, whose differences are now marked, have diverged from a common stock. So far as language goes, the Celts, the Teutons, and the Slavs, all speaking Indo-European tongues, may be deemed to be all nearly connected in origin. They are marked by certain slight physical dissimilarities, and by perhaps rather more palpable dissimilarities in their respective intellectual and emotional characters. But so far as our knowledge goes, all three have lived for an immensely long period in the colder parts of the temperate zone, under similar external conditions, and following very much the same kind of pastoral and agricultural life. There is nothing in their environment which explains the divergences we perceive; so the origin of these divergences must apparently be sought either in admixture with other races or in some other historical causes which are, and will for ever remain, in the darkness of a recordless past.
[Sidenote: Mixing of the World’s Peoples]
How race admixture works, and how it forms a new definite character out of diverse elements, is a subject which anyone may find abundant materials for studying in the history of the last two thousand years. Nearly every modern European people has been so formed. The French, the Spaniards, and the English are all the products of a mixture, in different proportions, of at least three elements--Iberian (to use a current name), Celts, and Teutons, though the Celtic element is probably comparatively small in Spain, and the Teutonic comparatively small both in Spain and in Central and Southern France. No small part of those who to-day speak German and deem themselves Germans must be of Slavonic stock. Those who to-day speak Russian are very largely of Finnish, to some small extent of Tartar, blood. The Italians probably spring from an even larger number of race-sources, without mentioning the vast number of slaves brought from the East and the North into Italy between B.C. 100 and A.D. 300. In the cases of Switzerland and Scotland the process of fusion is not yet complete. The Celto-Burgundian Swiss of Neuchatel is still different from the Allemanian Swiss of Appenzell; as the Anglo-Celt of Fife is different from the Ibero-Celt of the Outer Hebrides. But in both these cases there is already a strong sense of national unity, and in another three hundred years there may have arisen a single type of character.
[Sidenote: The Unique Case of Iceland]
An interesting and almost unique case is furnished by Iceland, where isolation under peculiar conditions of climate, food, and social life has created a somewhat different type both of body and of mental character from that of the Norwegians, although so far as blood goes the two peoples are identical, Iceland having been colonised from Western Norway a thousand years ago, and both Icelanders and Norwegians having remained practically unmixed with any other race--save that some slight Celtic infusion came to Iceland with those who migrated thither from the Norse settlements in Ireland, Northern Scotland, and the Hebrides--since the separation took place. But by far the most remarkable instance of race admixture is that furnished in our own time by the United States of North America, where a people of predominantly English stock (although there were in the end of the eighteenth century a few descendants of Dutchmen, with Germans, Swedes, and Ulster Irishmen, in the country) has within the last sixty years received additions of many millions of Celts, of Germans and Scandinavians, and of various Slavonic races. At least a century must elapse before it can be seen how far this infusion of new blood will change the type of American character as it stood in 1840.
There are, however, two noteworthy differences between modern race fusions and those which belong to primitive times. One is that under modern conditions the influence of what may be called the social and political environment is probably very much greater than it was in early times. The American-born son of Irish parents is at forty years of age a very different creature from his cousin on the coast of Mayo. The other is that in modern times differences of colour retard or forbid the fusion of two races. So far as the Teutonic peoples are concerned, no one will intermarry with a negro; a very few with a Hindu, a Chinese, or a Malay. In the ancient world there was but little contact between white men and black or yellow ones, but the feeling of race aversion was apparently less strong than it is now, just as it was much less strong among the Spaniards and Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it is among Americans or Englishmen to-day. It is less strong even now among the so-called “Latin races;” and as regards the Anglo-Americans, it is much less strong towards the Red Indians than towards negroes.
As Nature must have been the main agent in the formation of the various races of mankind from a common stock, so also Nature has been the chief cause of their movements from one part of the earth to another, these movements having been in their turn a potent influence in the admixture of the races. Some geographers have alleged climate--that is to say, the desire of those who inhabit an inclement region to enjoy a softer and warmer air--as a principal motive which has induced tribes of nations to transfer themselves from one region to another.
It is no doubt true that the direction of migrations has almost always been either from the north towards the south, or else along parallels of latitude, men rarely seeking for themselves conditions more severe than those under which they were born. But it is usually not so much the wish to escape cold that has been an effective motive as the wish to find more and better food, since this means an altogether easier life. Scarcity of the means of subsistence, which is, of course, most felt when population is increasing, has operated more frequently and powerfully than any other cause in bringing on displacements of the races of man over the globe. The movement of the primitive Aryans into India from the plateaux of West Central Asia, probably also the movement of the races which speak Dravidian languages from South Central Asia into Southern India, and probably also the mighty descent, in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., of the Teutonic races from the lands between the Baltic and the Alps into the Roman Empire, had this origin.
[Sidenote: The Colonising Impulse]
In more advanced states of society a like cause leads the surplus population of a civilised state to overflow into new lands, where there is more space, or the soil is more fertile. Thus the inhabitants of Southwestern Scotland, partly, no doubt, at the suggestion of their rulers, crossed over into Ulster, where they occupied the best lands, driving the aboriginal Celts into the rougher and higher districts, where their descendants remain in the glens of Antrim, and in the hilly parts of Down, Derry, and Tyrone. Thus the men of New England moved out to the West and settled in the Mississippi Valley, while the men of Virginia crossed the Alleghanies into Kentucky. Thus the English have colonised Canada and Australia and New Zealand and Natal. Thus the Russians have spread out from their ancient homes on the upper courses of the Dnieper and the Volga all over the vast steppes that stretch to the Black Sea and the Caucasus, as well as into the rich lands of Southwestern Siberia. Thus the surplus peasantry of Germany has gone not only to North America, but also to Southern Brazil and the shores of the Rio de la Plata.
[Sidenote: The Need of Native Labour]
In another form it is the excess of population over means of subsistence at home that has produced the remarkable outflow of the Chinese through the Eastern Archipelago and across the Pacific into North America, and that has carried the Japanese to the Hawaiian Islands. And here we touch another cause of migration which is indirectly traceable to Nature--namely, the demand in some countries for more labour or cheaper labour than the inhabitants of the country are able or willing to supply. Sometimes this demand is attributable to climatic causes. The Spaniards and Portuguese and English in the New World were unfitted by their physical constitutions for out-of-door labour under a tropical sun. Hence they imported negroes during the sixteenth and two following centuries in such numbers that there are now about eight millions of coloured people in the United States alone, and possibly (though no accurate figures exist) as many more in the West Indies and South America. To a much smaller extent the same need for foreign labour has recently brought Indian coolies to the shores of the Caribbean Sea, and to the hottest parts of Natal, as it brings Polynesians to the sugar plantations of Northern Queensland.
[Sidenote: What Determines Race Movements]
Two other causes which have been potent in bringing about displacements and mixtures of population are the desire for conquest and plunder and the sentiment of religion. But these belong less to the sphere of Nature than to that of human passion and emotion, so that they scarcely fall within this part of our inquiry, the aim of which has been to show how Nature has determined history by inducing a shifting of races from place to place. From this shifting there has come the contact of diverse elements, with changes in each race due to the influence of the other, or perhaps the absorption of one in the other, or the development of something new out of both. In considering these race movements we have been led from the remote periods in which they began, and of which we know scarcely anything except from archæological and linguistic data, to periods within the range of authentic history. So we may go on to see how Nature has determined the spots in which the industry of the more advanced races should build up the earliest civilisations, and the lines along which commerce, a principal agent in the extension of civilisation, should proceed to link one race with another.
[Sidenote: Isolation of Eastern Peoples]
It was long since observed that the first homes of a dense population and a highly developed civilisation lay in fertile river valleys, such as those of the Lower Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Ganges, the Yang-tse-kiang. All these are situate in the hotter parts of the temperate zone; all are regions of exceptional fertility. The soil, especially when tillage has become general, is the first source of wealth; and it is in the midst of a prosperous agricultural population that cities spring up where handicrafts and the arts arise and flourish. The basins of the Lower Nile and of the Lower Euphrates and Tigris are (as respects the West Asiatic and Mediterranean world) the fountain-heads of material, military, and artistic civilisation. From them it spreads over the adjacent countries and along the coasts of Europe and Africa. On the east, Egypt and Mesopotamia are cut off by the deserts of Arabia and Eastern Persia from the perhaps equally ancient civilisation of India, which again is cut off by lofty and savage mountains from the very ancient civilisation of China. Nature forbade intercourse between these far eastern regions and the West Asian peoples, while on the other hand Nature permitted Egypt, Phœnicia, and Babylon to influence and become teachers of the peoples of Asia Minor and of the Greeks on both sides of the Ægean Sea. The isolation and consequent independent development of India and of China is one of the most salient and significant facts of history. It was not till the end of the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese reached the Malabar coast, that the Indian peoples began to come into the general movement of the world; for the expedition of Alexander the Great left hardly any permanent result, except upon Buddhist art, and the conquests of Mahmud of Ghazni opened no road to the East from the Mediterranean West. Nor did China, though visited by Italian travellers in the thirteenth century, by Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth, come into effective contact with Europe till near our own time.
As the wastes of barren land formed an almost impassable eastern boundary to the West Asian civilisations, so on the west the expanse of sea brought Egypt and to a less extent Assyria (through Phœnicia) into touch with all the peoples who dwelt on the shores of the Mediterranean. The first agents in the diffusion of trade and the arts were the Phœnicians, established at Tyre, Sidon, and Carthage. The next were the Greeks. For more than two thousand years, from B.C. 700 onwards, the Mediterranean is practically the centre of the history of the world, because it is the highway both of commerce and of war. For seven hundred years after the end of the second century B.C., that is to say, while the Roman Empire remained strong, it was also the highway of civil administration. The Saracen conquests of the seventh century cut off North Africa and Syria from Europe, checked transmarine commerce, and created afresh the old opposition of East and West in which a thousand years earlier Herodotus had found the main thread of world history. But it was not till after the discovery of America that the Mediterranean began to yield to the Atlantic its primacy as the area of sea power and sea-borne trade.
[Sidenote: Influence of the Seas in History]
Bordered by far less fertile and climate-favoured countries, and closed to navigation during some months of winter, the Baltic has always held a place in history far below that of the Mediterranean. Yet it has determined the relations of the North European states and peoples. So, too, the North Sea has at one time exposed Britain to attack from the Danish and Norwegian lords of the sea, and at other times protected her from powerful continental enemies. It may indeed be said that in surrounding Europe by the sea on three sides, Nature has drawn the main lines which the course of events on this smallest but most important of the continents has had to follow.
[Sidenote: Magellan and American Politics]
Of the part which the great bodies of water have played, of the significance in the oceans of mighty currents like the Gulf Stream, the Polar Current, the Japan Current, the Mozambique Current, it would be impossible to speak within reasonable compass. But two remarks may be made before leaving this part of the subject. One is that man’s action in cutting through an isthmus may completely alter the conditions as given by Nature. The Suez Canal has of late years immensely enhanced the importance of the Mediterranean, already in some degree restored by the decay of Turkish power, by the industrial revival of Italy, and by the French conquests in North Africa. The cutting of a canal at Panama will change the relations of the seafaring and fleet-owning nations that are interested in the Atlantic and the Pacific. And the other remark is that the significance of a maritime discovery, however great at first, may become still greater with the lapse of time. Magellan, in his ever memorable voyage, not only penetrated to and crossed the Pacific, but discovered the Philippine Islands, and claimed them for the monarch who had sent him forth. His appropriation of them for the Crown of Spain, to which during these three centuries and a half they have brought no benefit, has been the cause which has led the republic of the United States to depart from its traditional policy of holding to its own continent by taking them as a prize--a distant and unexpected prize--of conquest.
A few words may suffice as to what Nature has done towards the formation of nations and States by the configuration of the surface of the dry land--that is to say, by mountain chains and by river valleys. The only natural boundaries, besides seas, are mountains and deserts. Rivers, though convenient frontier lines for the politician or the geographer, are not natural boundaries, but rather unite than dissever those who dwell on their opposite banks. Thus the great natural boundaries in Asia have been the deserts of Eastern Persia, of Turkestan, and of Northern Arabia, with the long Himalayan chain and the savage ranges apparently parallel to the Irawadi River, which separate the easternmost corner of India and Burmah from South-Western China. To a less extent the Altai and Thian Shan, and, to a still smaller extent, the Taurus in Eastern Asia Minor, have tended to divide peoples and States. The Caucasus, which fills the space between two great seas, has been at all times an extremely important factor in history, severing the nomad races of Scythia from the more civilised and settled inhabitants of the valleys of the Phasis and the Kura. Even to-day, when the Tsar holds sway on both sides of this chain, it constitutes a weakness in the position of Russia, and it helps to keep the Georgian races to the south from losing their identity in the mass of Russian subjects.
[Sidenote: The Place of Mountains in History]
Without the Alps and the Pyrenees, the annals of Europe must have been entirely different. The Alps, even more than the Italian climate, proved too much for the Romano-Germanic Emperors of the Middle Ages, who tried to rule both to the north and to the south of this wide mountain region. The Pyrenees have not only kept in existence the Basque people, but have repeatedly frustrated the attempts of monarchs to dominate both France and Spain. The mass of high moorland country which covers most of the space between the Solway Firth and the lower course of the Tweed has had something to do with the formation of a Scottish nation out of singularly diverse elements. The rugged mountains of Northern and Western Scotland, and the similar though less extensive hill country of Wales, have enabled Celtic races to retain their language and character in both these regions.
[Sidenote: What Steam-power has Done]
On the other hand, the vast open plains of Russia have allowed the Slavs of the districts which lie round Novgorod, Moscow, and Kiev to spread out among and Russify the Lithuanian and Finnish, to some extent also the Tartar, races, who originally held by far the larger part of that area. So, too, the Ural range, which, though long, is neither high nor difficult to pass, has opposed no serious obstacle to the overflow of population from Russia into Siberia. That in North America the Alleghanies have had a comparatively slight effect upon political history, although they did for a time arrest the march of colonisation, is due partly to the fact that they are a mass of comparatively low parallel ranges, with fertile valleys between, partly to the already advanced civilisation of the Anglo-Americans of the Atlantic seaboard, who found no great difficulty in making their way across, against the uncertain resistance of small and non-cohesive Indian tribes. A far more formidable natural barrier is formed between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific slope by the Rocky Mountains, with the deserts of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. But the discovery of steam power has so much reduced the importance of this barrier that it does not seriously threaten the maintenance of a united American republic.
In one respect the New World presents a remarkable contrast to the Old. The earliest civilisations of the latter seem to have sprung up in fertile river valleys. Those of the former are found not on the banks of streams like the Nile or Euphrates, but on elevated plateaux, where the heat of a tropical sun is mitigated by height above sea level. It was in the lofty lake basin of Tezcuco and Mexico, and on the comparatively level ground which lies between the parallel ranges of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, that American races had reached their finest intellectual development, not in the far richer, but also hotter and less healthy river valleys of Brazil, or (unless we are to except Yucatan) on the scorching shores of the Caribbean Sea. Nature was in those regions too strong for man, and held him down in savagery.
[Sidenote: How Nature fixes Sites of Cities]
In determining the courses of great rivers, Nature has determined the first highways of trade and fixed the sites of many cities. Nearly all the considerable towns founded more than three centuries ago owe their origin either to their possessing good havens on the sea-coast, or to the natural strength of their position on a defensible hill, or to their standing close to a navigable river. Marseilles, Alexandria, New York, Rio de Janeiro, are instances of the first; Athens, Edinburgh, Prague, Moscow, of the second; Bordeaux, Cologne, New Orleans, Calcutta, of the third. Rome and London, Budapest, and Lyons combine the advantages of the second with those of the third. This function of rivers in directing the lines of commerce and the growth of centres of population has become much less important since the construction of railroads, yet population tends to stay where it has been first gathered, so that the fluviatile cities are likely to retain their preponderance. Thus the river is as important to the historian as is the mountain range or the sea.
[Sidenote: Climate and Commerce]
From the physical features of a country it is an easy transition to the capacities of the soil. The character of the products of a region determines the numbers of its inhabitants and the kind of life they lead. A land of forests breeds hunters or lumbermen; a land of pasture, which is too rough or too arid or too sterile for tillage, supports shepherds or herdsmen probably more or less nomadic. Either kind of land supports inhabitants few in proportion to its area. Fertile and well-watered regions rear a denser, a more settled, and presumably a more civilised population. Norway and Tyrol, Tibet and Wyoming, and the Orange River Colony, can never become so densely peopled as Bengal or Illinois or Lombardy, yet the fisheries of its coast and the seafaring energy of its people have sensibly increased the population of Norway. Thus he who knows the climate and the productive capacity of the soil of any given country can calculate its prospects of prosperity. Political causes may, of course, intervene. Asia Minor and the Valley of the Euphrates, regions once populous and flourishing, are now thinly inhabited and poverty-stricken because they are ruled by the Turks.
But these cases are exceptional. Bengal and Lombardy and Egypt have supported large populations under all kinds of government. The products of each country tend, moreover, to establish definite relations between it and other countries, and do this all the more as population, commerce, and the arts advance. When England was a great wool-growing and wool-exporting country, her wool export brought her into close political connection with the wool-manufacturing Flemish towns. She is now a cotton-manufacturing country, needing cotton which she cannot grow at all, and consuming wheat which she does not grow in sufficient quantities. Hence she is in close commercial relations with the United States on one side, which give her most of her cotton and much of her wheat, and with India, from which she gets both these articles, and to which she exports a large part of her manufactured cotton goods.
[Sidenote: Common Needs make for Peace]
So Rome, because she needed the corn of Egypt, kept Egypt under a specially careful administration. The rest of her corn came from Sicily and North Africa, and the Vandal conquest of North Africa dealt a frightful blow to the declining Empire. In these cases the common interest of sellers and buyers makes for peace, but in other cases the competition of countries desiring to keep commerce to themselves occasions war. The Spanish and Dutch fought over the trade to India in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, when the Portuguese Indies belonged to Spain, as the English and French fought in the eighteenth. And a nation, especially an insular nation, whose arable soil is not large enough or fertile enough to provide all the food it needs, has a powerful inducement either to seek peace or else to be prepared for maritime war. If such a country does not grow enough corn or meat at home, she must have a navy strong enough to make sure that she will always be able to get these necessaries from abroad. Attica did not produce all the grain needed to feed the Athenians, so they depended on the corn ships which came down from the Euxine, and were practically at the mercy of an enemy who could stop those ships.
Of another natural source of wealth, the fisheries on the coast of a country, no more need be said than that they have been a frequent source of quarrels and even of war. The recognition of the right of each state to the exclusive control and enjoyment of the sea for three miles off its shores has reduced, but not entirely removed, the causes of friction between the fishermen of different countries.
[Sidenote: Minerals and Civilisation]
Until recently, the surface of the soil was a far more important source of wealth than was that which lies beneath the surface. There were iron mines among the Chalybes on the Asiatic coast of the Euxine in ancient times; there were silver mines here and there, the most famous being those at Laurium, from which the Athenians drew large revenues, gold mines in Spain and Dacia, copper mines in Elba, tin mines in the south-west corner of Britain. But the number of persons employed in mining and the industries connected therewith was relatively small both in the ancient world and, indeed, down till the close of the eighteenth century. The immense development of coal-mining and of iron-working in connection therewith has now doubled, trebled, or quadrupled the population of large areas in Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, and the United States, adding vastly to the wealth of these countries and stimulating in them the growth of many mechanical arts. This new population is quite different in character from the agricultural peasantry who in earlier days formed the principal substratum of society. Its appearance has changed the internal politics of these countries, disturbing the old balance of forces and accelerating the progress of democratic principles.
Nor have minerals failed to affect the international relations of peoples and States. It was chiefly for the precious metals that the Spaniards explored the American Continent and conquered Mexico and Peru. It was for the sake of capturing the ships bringing those metals back to Europe that the English sea-rovers made their way to the American coasts and involved England in wars with Spain. It was the discovery in 1885 of extensive auriferous strata unexampled in the certainty of their yield that drew a swarm of foreign immigrants into the Transvaal, whence arose those difficulties between them and the Dutch inhabitants previously established there which, coupled with the action of the wealthy owners of the mines, led at last to the war of 1899 between Britain and the two South African Republics.
[Sidenote: Man’s Fight with Nature]
The productive capacity of a country is, however, in one respect very different from those great physical features--such as temperature, rainfall, coast configuration, surface character, geological structure, and river system--which have been previously noted. Those features are permanent qualities which man can affect only to a limited extent, as when he reduces the rainfall a little by cutting down forests, or increases it by planting them, or as when he unites an isle, like that of Cadiz, to the mainland, cuts through an isthmus, like that of Corinth, or clears away the bar at a river mouth, as that of the Mississippi has been cleared.
[Sidenote: Exhausting the Mineral Wealth]
But the natural products of a country may be exhausted and even the productive capacity of its soil diminished. Constant tillage, especially if the same crop be raised and no manure added, will wear out the richest soils. This has already happened in parts of Western America. Still the earth is there; and with rest and artificial help it will recover its strength. But timber destroyed cannot always be induced to grow again, or at least not so as to equal the vigour of primeval forests. Wild animals, once extirpated, are gone for ever. The buffalo and beaver of North America, the beautiful lynxes of South Africa and some of its large ruminants, are irrecoverably lost for the purposes of human use, just as much as the dinornis, though a few individuals may be kept alive as specimens. So, too, the mineral resources of a country are not only consumable, but obviously irreplaceable. Already some of the smaller coalfields of Europe have been worked out, while in others it has become necessary to sink much deeper shafts, at an increasing cost. There is not much tin left in Cornwall, not much gold in the gravel deposits of Northern California. The richest known goldfield of the world, that of the Transvaal Witwatersrand, can hardly last more than thirty or forty years. Thus in a few centuries the productive capacity of many regions may have become quite different from what it is now, with grave consequences to their inhabitants.
These are some of the ways in which Nature affects those economic, social, and political conditions of the life of man the changes in which make up history. As we have seen, that which Nature gives to man is always the same, in so far as Nature herself is always the same--an expression which is more popular than accurate, for Nature herself--that is to say, not the laws of Nature, but the physical environment of man on this planet--is in reality always changing. It is true that this environment changes so slowly that a thousand years may be too short a period in which man can note and record some forms of change--such, for instance, as that by which the temperature of Europe became colder during the approach of the glacial period and warmer during its recession--while ten thousand years may be too short to note any diminution in the heat which the sun pours upon the earth, or in the store of oxygen which the earth’s atmosphere holds.
[Sidenote: Progress of Modern Invention]
[Sidenote: Man Cannot Disregard Nature]
But as we have also seen, the relation to man of Nature’s gifts differs from age to age as man himself becomes different, and as his power of using these gifts increases, or his need of them becomes either less or greater. Every invention alters those relations. Water power became less relatively valuable when steam was applied to the generation of motive force. It has become more valuable with the new applications of electricity. With the discovery of mineral dyes, indigo and cochineal are now less wanted than they were. With the invention of the pneumatic tyre for bicycles and carriages, caoutchouc is more wanted. Mountains have become, since the making of railways, less of an obstacle to trade than they were, and they have also become more available as health resorts. Political circumstances may interfere with the ordinary and normal action of natural phenomena. A race may be attracted to or driven into a region for which it is not physically suited, as Europeans have gone to the West Indies, and negroes were once carried into New York and Pennsylvania. The course of trade which Nature prescribes between different countries may be hampered or stopped by protective tariffs; but in these cases Nature usually takes her eventual revenges. They are instances which show, not that man can disregard her, but that when he does so, he does so to his own loss.
It would be easy to add further illustrations, but those already given are sufficient to indicate how multiform and pervading is the action upon man of the physical environment, or in other words, how in all countries, and at all times, geography is the necessary foundation of history, so that neither the course of a nation’s growth, nor its relations with other nations, can be grasped by one who has not come to understand the climate, surface, and products of the country wherein that nation dwells.
[Sidenote: There is no Unmixed Race left]
This conception of the relation of geography to history is, as has been said, the leading idea of the present work, and has furnished the main lines which it follows. It deals with history in the light of physical environment. Its ground plan, so to speak, is primarily geographical, and secondarily chronological. But there is one difficulty in the way of such a scheme, and of the use of such a ground plan, which cannot be passed over. That difficulty is suggested by the fact already noted--that hardly any considerable race, and possibly no great nation, now inhabits the particular part of the earth’s surface on which it was dwelling when a history begins. Nearly every people has either migrated bodily from one region to another, or has received such large infusions of immigrants from other regions as to have become practically a new people. Hence it is rare to find any nation now living under the physical conditions which originally moulded its character, or the character of some at least of its component elements. And hence it follows that when we study the qualities, aptitudes, and institutions of a nation in connection with the land it inhabits, we must always have regard not merely to the features of that land, but also to those of the land which was its earlier dwelling-place. Obviously, this brings a disturbing element into the study of the relations between land and people, and makes the whole problem a far more complicated one than it appeared at first sight.
[Sidenote: Nature’s Race Factory]
Where a people has migrated from a country whose physical conditions were similar to those under which its later life is spent, or where it had reached only a comparatively low stage of economic and political development before the migration, the difficulties arising from this source are not serious. The fact that the English came into Britain from the lands round the mouth of the Elbe is not very material to an inquiry into their relations to their new home, because climate and soil were similar, and the emigrants were a rude, warlike race. But when we come to the second migration of the English, from Britain to North America, the case is altogether different. Groups of men from a people which had already become highly civilised, had formed a well-marked national character, and had created a body of peculiar institutions, planted themselves in a country whose climate and physical features are widely diverse from those of Britain.
If, for the sake of argument, we assume the Algonquin aborigines of Atlantic North America as they were in A.D. 1600 to have been the legitimate product of their physical environment--I say “for the sake of argument,” because it may be alleged that other forces than those of physical environment contributed to form them--what greater contrast can be imagined than the contrast between the inhabitants of New England in this present year and the inhabitants of the same district three centuries earlier, as Nature, and Nature alone, had turned them out of her factory? Plainly, therefore, the history of the United States cannot, so far as Nature and geography are concerned, be written with regard solely, or even chiefly, to the conditions of North American nature. The physical environment in which the English immigrants found themselves on that continent has no doubt affected their material progress and the course of their politics during the three centuries that have elapsed since settlements were founded in Virginia and on Massachusetts Bay.
[Sidenote: Beginnings of Race History]
But it is not to that environment, but to earlier days, and especially to the twelve centuries during which their ancestors lived in England, that their character and institutions are to be traced. Thus the history of the American people begins in the forests of Germany, where the foundations of their polity were laid, and is continued in England, where they set up kingdoms, embraced Christianity, became one nation, received an influx of Celtic, Danish, and Norman-French blood, formed for themselves that body of customs, laws, and institutions which they transplanted to the new soil of America, and most of which, though changed and always changing, they still retain. The same thing is true of the Spaniards (as also of the Portuguese) in Central and South America. The difference between the development of the Hispano-Americans and that of their English neighbours to the north is not wholly, or even mainly, due to the different physical conditions under which the two sets of colonists have lived.
It is due to the different antecedent history of the two races. So a history of America must be a history not only of America, but of the Spaniards, Portuguese, French, and English--one ought in strictness to add of the negroes also--before they crossed the Atlantic. The only true Americans, the only Americans for whom American nature can be deemed answerable, are the aboriginal red men whom we, perpetuating the mistake of Columbus, still call Indians.
[Sidenote: Geography as a Basis of History]
This objection to the geographical scheme of history writing is no doubt serious when a historical treatise is confined to one particular country or continent, as in the instance I have taken of the Continent of North America. It is, however, less formidable in a universal history, such as the present work, because, by referring to another volume of the series, the reader will find what he needs to know regarding the history of the Spaniards, English, and French in those respective European homes where they have grown to be that which they were when, with religion, slaughter, and slavery in their train, they descended upon the shores of America.
Accordingly the difficulty I have pointed out does not disparage the idea and plan of writing universal history on a geographical basis. It merely indicates a caution needed in applying that plan, and a condition indispensable to its utility--viz., the regard that must be had to the stage of progress at which a people has arrived when it is subjected to an environment different from that which had in the first instance helped to form its type.
THE GROWTH OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
We have now considered some of the ways in which a universal history, written with special reference to the physical phenomena of the earth as geographical science presents them, may bring into strong relief one large and permanent set of influences which determine the progress or retrogression of each several branch of mankind. Upon the other principles which preside over and direct the composition of such a work, not much need be said. They are, of course, in the main, those which all competent historians will follow in writing the history of any particular people.
But a universal history which endeavours to present in a short compass a record of the course of events in all regions and among all peoples, since none can safely be omitted, is specially exposed to two dangers. One is that of becoming sketchy and viewy. When a large object has to be dealt with on a small scale, it is natural to sum up in a few broad generalisations masses of facts which cannot be described or examined in detail. Broad generalisations are valuable when they proceed from a thoroughly trained mind--valuable, even if not completely verifiable, because they excite reflection. But it is seldom possible to make them exact. They necessarily omit most of the exceptions, and thus suggest a greater uniformity than exists.
[Sidenote: Need of Care in History]
The other danger is that of sacrificing brightness and charm of presentation. When an effort is made to avoid generalisations, and to squeeze into the narrative as many facts as the space will admit, the narrative is apt to become dry, because compression involves the curtailment of the personal and dramatic element. These are the rocks between which every historian has to steer. If he has ample space, he does well to prefer the course of giving all the salient facts and leaving the reader to generalise for himself. If, however, his space is limited, as must needs be the lot of those who write a universal history, the impossibility of going into minute detail makes generalisations inevitable, for it is through them that the result and significance of a multitude of minor facts must be conveyed in a condensed form.
[Sidenote: New Minds and New Facts]
All the greater, therefore, becomes the need for care and sobriety in the forming and setting forth every summarising statement and general conclusion or judgment. Probably the soundest guiding principle and best safeguard against error is to be found in shunning all preconceived hypotheses which seek to explain history by one set of causes, or to read it in the light of one idea. The habit of magnifying a single factor, such as the social factor, or the economic, or the religious, has been a fertile source of weakness in historical writing, because it has made the presentation of events one-sided, destroying that balance and proportion which it is the highest merit of any historian to have attained. Theory and generalisation are the life-blood of history. They make it intelligible. They give it unity. They convey to us the instruction which it always contains, together with so much of practical guidance in the management of communities as history is capable of rendering. But they need to be applied with reserve, and not only with an impartial mind, but after a painstaking examination of all the facts--whether or no they seem to make for the particular theory stated--and of all the theories which any competent predecessor has propounded.
For the historian, though he must keep himself from falling under the dominion of any one doctrine by which it is sought to connect and explain phenomena, must welcome all the light which any such doctrine can throw upon facts. Even if such a doctrine be imperfect, even if it be tainted by error, it may serve to indicate relations between facts, or to indicate the true importance of facts, which previous writers had failed to observe, or had passed too lightly over. It is thus that history always needs to be re-written. History is a progressive science, not merely because new facts are constantly being discovered, not merely because the changes in the world give to old facts a new significance, but also because every truly penetrating and original mind sees in the old facts something which had not been seen before.
A universal history is fitted to correct such defects as may be incident to that extreme specialism in historical writing which is now in fashion. The broad and concise treatment which a history of all times and peoples must adopt naturally leads to efforts to characterise the dominant features and tendency of an epoch or a movement, whether social, economic, or political.
[Sidenote: The Side Streams of History]
Yet even here there is a danger to be guarded against. No epoch, no movement, is so simple as it looks at first sight, or as one would gather from even the most honest contemporary writer. There is always an eddy at the side of the stream; and the stream itself is the resultant of a number of rivulets with different sources, whose waters, if the metaphor may be extended, are of different tints. Let any man study minutely a given epoch, such as that of the Reformation in Germany, or that of the Revolutionary War in America, and he will be surprised to find how much more complex were the forces at work than he had at first supposed, and on how much smaller a number of persons than he had fancied the principal forces did in fact directly operate. Or let any one--for this is perhaps the best, if the most difficult, method of getting at the roots of this complexity--study thoroughly and dispassionately the phenomena of his own time. Let him observe how many movements go on simultaneously, sometimes accelerating, sometimes retarding, one another, and mark how, the more fully he understands this complex interlacing, so much the less confident do his predictions of the future become. He will then realise how hard it is to find simple explanations and to deliver exact statements regarding critical epochs in the past.
[Sidenote: The Main Stream of History]
Nevertheless, the task of summarising and explaining is one to which the writer of a History of the World must address himself. If he has the disadvantage of limited space, he has the advantage of being able to assume the reader’s knowledge of what has gone before, and to invite the reader’s attention to what will come after. Thus he stands in a better position than does the writer who deals with one country or one epoch only for making each part of history illustrate other parts, for showing how similar social tendencies, similar proclivities of human nature, work similarly under varying conditions and are followed by similar, though never identical, results. He is able to bring out the essential unity of history, expunging from the reader’s mind the conventional and often misleading distinctions that are commonly drawn between the ancient, the mediæval, and the modern time. He can bring the contemporaneous course of events in different countries into a fruitful relation. And in the case of the present work, which dwells more especially on the geographical side of history, he can illustrate from each country in succession the influence of physical environment on the formation of races and the progress of nations, the principles which determine the action of such environment being everywhere similar, though the forms which that action takes are infinitely various.
Is there, it may be asked, any central thread in following which the unity of history most plainly appears? Is there any process in tracing which we can feel that we are floating down the main stream of the world’s onward movement? If there be such a process, its study ought to help us to realise the unity of history by connecting the development of the numerous branches of the human family.
One such process has already been adverted to and illustrated. It is the gradual and constant increase in man’s power over Nature, whereby he is emancipated more and more from the conditions she imposes on his life, yet is brought into an always closer touch with her by the discovery of new methods of using her gifts. Two other such processes may be briefly examined. One goes on in the sphere of time, and consists in the accumulation from age to age of the strength, the knowledge, and the culture of mankind as a whole. The other goes on in space as well as in time, and may be described as the contraction of the world, relatively to man.
[Sidenote: The Great Increase of Population]
The accumulation of physical strength is most apparent in the increase of the human race. We have no trustworthy data for determining the population, even of any one civilised country, more than a century and a half ago; much less can we conjecture that of any country in primitive or prehistoric times. It is clear, however, that in prehistoric times--say, six or seven thousand years ago, there were very few men on the earth’s surface. The scarcity of food alone would be sufficient to prove that; and, indeed, all our data go to show it. Fifty years ago the world’s population used to be roughly conjectured at from seven to nine hundred millions, two-thirds of them in China and India. It is now estimated at over fifteen hundred millions. That of Europe alone must have tripled within a century, and can hardly be less than four hundred millions. That of North America may have scarcely exceeded four or five millions in the time of Christopher Columbus, or at the date of the first English settlements, though we have only the scantiest data for a guess. It may now be 130,000,000, for there are over a hundred millions in the United States alone, about fifteen in Mexico, and eight in Canada, besides the inhabitants of Central America.
[Sidenote: The Prolific Power of White People]
[Sidenote: Physical & Intellectual Power]
The increase has been most swift in the civilised countries, such as Britain, Germany, Russia, and the United States; but it has gone on in India also since India came under British rule (famines notwithstanding), and in the regions recently colonised by Europeans, such as Australia, Siberia, and Argentina, the disappearance of aborigines being far more than compensated for by the prolific power of the white immigrants. Some regions, such as Asia Minor and parts of North Africa, are more thinly peopled now than they were under the Roman Empire, and both China and Peru may have no larger population than they had five, or ten, or fifteen centuries ago. But taking the world at large, the increase is enormous, and will apparently continue. Even after the vacant cultivable spaces which remain in the two Americas, Northern Asia, and Australasia have been filled, the discovery of new modes of enlarging the annually available stock of food may maintain the increase. It is most conspicuous among the European races, and is, of course, due to the greater production in some regions of food, and in others of commodities wherewith food can be purchased. It means an immense addition to the physical force of mankind in the aggregate, and to the possibilities of intellectual force also--a point to be considered later. And, of course, it also means an immense and growing preponderance of the civilised white nations, which are now probably one half of mankind, and may, in another century, when they have risen from about five hundred to, possibly, one thousand or fifteen hundred millions, be nearly two-thirds.
[Sidenote: Modern Man Stronger than his Ancestors]
As respects the strength of the average individual man, the inquiry is less simple. Palæolithic man and neolithic man were apparently (though here and there may have been exceptions) comparatively feeble creatures, as are the relics of the most backward tribes known to us, such as the Veddas of Ceylon, the Bushmen, the Fuegians. Some savages, as, for instance, the Patagonians, are men of great stature, and some of the North American Indians possess amazing powers of endurance. The Greeks of the fifth century B.C., and the Teutons of the time of Julius Cæsar, had reached a high physical development. Pheidippides is said to have traversed one hundred and fifty miles on foot in forty-eight hours. But if we think of single feats of strength, feats have been performed in our own day--such as Captain Webb’s swimming across the Straits of Dover--equal to anything recorded from ancient or mediæval times. To swim across the much narrower Hellespont was then deemed a surprising exploit. Nor do we know of any race more to be commended for physical power and vigour of constitution than the American backwoodsmen of Kentucky or Oregon to-day. The swords used by the knights of the fifteenth century have usually handles too small for many a modern English or German hand to grasp.
[Sidenote: America’s Mingled Races]
Isolated feats do not prove very much, but there is good reason to believe that the average European is as strong as ever he was, and probably more healthy, at least if longevity is a test of health. One may fairly conclude that with better and more abundant food, the average of stature and strength has improved over the world at large, so that in this respect also the force of mankind as a whole has advanced. Whether this advance will continue is more doubtful. In modern industrial communities the law of the survival of the fittest may turn out to be reversed, for it is the poorer and lower sections of the population that marry at an early age, and have the largest families, while prudential considerations keep down the birth-rate among the upper middle-class. In Transylvania, for instance, the Saxons are dying out, because very few children are born to each pair, while the less educated and cultured Rumans increase fast. In North America, the Old New England stock of comparatively pure British blood has begun to be swamped by the offspring of the recent immigrants, mostly Irish or French Canadians; and although the sons of New England, who have gone West, continue to be prolific, it is probable that the phenomena of New England will recur in the Mississippi Valley, and that the newcomers from Europe who form the less cultivated strata of the population--Irish, Germans, Italians, Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Rumans--will contribute an increasing proportion of the inhabitants. Some of these, and especially the Irish and the Germans and the Scandinavians, are among the best elements in the American population, and have produced men of the highest distinction. But the average level among them of versatile aptitude and of intellectual culture is slightly below that of the native Americans.
Now, the poorer sections are in most countries, though of course not always to the same extent, somewhat inferior in physical as well as in mental quality, and more prone to suffer from that greatest hindrance to physical improvement, the abuse of alcoholic drinks.
We come next to another form of the increase of human resources, the accumulation of knowledge, and of what may be called intellectual culture and capacity, for it is convenient to distinguish these two latter from knowledge.
[Sidenote: Inventions Mean Progress]
In knowledge there has been an advance, not merely a tolerably steady and constant advance, but one which has gone on with a sort of geometrical progression, moving the faster the nearer we come to our own time. Whatever may have befallen in the prehistoric darkness, history knows of only one notable arrest or setback in the onward march--that which marks the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries of the Christian era. Even this set-back was practically confined to Southern and Western Europe, and affected only certain departments of knowledge. It did not, save, perhaps, as regards a few artistic processes, extinguish that extremely important part of the previously accumulated resources of mankind which consisted in the knowledge of inventions. It is in respect of inventions, especially mechanical and physical or chemical inventions, that the accumulation of knowledge has been most noteworthy and most easy to appreciate.
A history of inventions is a history of the progress of mankind, of a progress to which every race may have contributed in primitive times, though all the later contributions have come from a few of the most civilised. Every great invention marks one onward step, as one may see by enumerating a few, such as the use of fire, cooking, metal working, the domestication of wild animals, the tillage of the ground, the use of plough and mattock and harrow and fan, the discovery of plants or trees useful for food or for medicine, the cart, the wheel, the water-mill (overshot, undershot, and turbine), the windmill, the distaff (followed long, long after by the spinning-wheel), the loom, dyestuffs, the needle, the potter’s wheel, the hydraulic press, the axe-handle, the spear, the bow, the shield, the war-chariot, the sling, the cross-bow, the boat, the paddle, the oar, the helm, the sail, the mariner’s compass, the clock, picture-writing, the alphabet, parchment, paper, printing, photography, the sliding keel, the sounding-lead, the log, the brick, mortar, the column, the arch, the dome, till we come down to explosives, the microscope, the cantilever, and the Röntgen rays.
The history of the successive discovery, commixture, and applications of the metals, from copper and bronze down to manganese, platinum, and aluminium, or of the successive discovery and utilisation of sources of power--the natural sources, such as water and wind, the artificially procured, such as steam, gas, and electricity--or of the production and manufacture of materials available for clothing, wool, hair, linen, silk, cotton, would show how every step becomes the basis for another step, and how inventions in one department suggest or facilitate inventions in another. Recent discoveries in surgery and medicine, such as the use of antiseptics, tend to improve health and to prolong life; and in doing so, they increase the chances of further discoveries being made.
[Sidenote: The Prolonging of Life]
Who can tell what the world may have lost by the early death of many a man of genius? One peculiar line of discovery which at first seemed to have nothing to do with practice has proved to be of signal service; the working out of mathematical methods of calculation by means of which the mechanical and physical sciences have in recent times made a progress in their practical application undreamt of by those who laid the foundations of geometry and algebra many centuries ago. It may, indeed, be said that all the sciences need one another, and that none has been without its utilities for practice, since even that which deals with the heavenly bodies has been used for the computation of time, was used by the agriculturist before he had any calendars to guide him, and has been of supreme value to the navigator. It has also been suggested that an observation of sun spots may enable the advent of specially hot seasons, involving droughts, to be predicted.
Another kind of knowledge also grows by the joint efforts of many peoples, that which records the condition of men in the past and the present, including history, economics, statistics, and the other so-called social sciences. This kind also is useful for practice, and has led to improvements by which nearly all nations have profited, such as an undebased currency, banking and insurance, better systems of taxation, corporations, and joint stock companies. With this we may couple the invention of improved political institutions.
The accumulation of knowledge, especially of scientific knowledge applied to the exploitation of the resources of Nature, means the accumulation of wealth--that is to say, of all the things which men need or use. The total wealth of the world must have at least quadrupled or quintupled within the last hundred years. Nearly all of it is in the hands or under the control of the civilised nations of European stock, among whom the United States stands foremost, both in rate of economic growth and in the absolute quantity of values possessed.
[Sidenote: Knowledge Means Wealth]
Two further observations belong to this part of the subject. One is that this stock of useful knowledge, the accumulation of which is the central fact of the material progress as well as of the intellectual history of mankind, now belongs to (practically) all races and states alike. Some, as we shall note presently, are more able to use it than others, but all have access to it. This is a new fact. It is true that most races have contributed something to the common stock; and that even among the civilised peoples, no one or two or three (except possibly the Greeks as respects ancient times) can claim to have contributed much more than the others. But in earlier ages there were peoples or groups of peoples who were for a time the sole possessors of inventions which gave them great advantages, especially for war. Superior weapons as well as superior drill enabled Alexander the Great, and afterward the Romans, to conquer most of the civilised world. Horses and firearms, with courage and discipline, enabled two Spanish adventurers to seize two ancient American empires with very scanty forces, as they enabled a handful of Dutch Boers to overcome the hosts of Mosilikatze and Dingaan. So there were formerly industrial arts known to or practised by a few peoples only. But now all inventions, even those relating to war, are available even to the more backward races, if they can learn how to use them or can hire white men to do so for them. The facilities of communication are so great, the means of publicity so abundant, that everything becomes speedily known everywhere.
[Sidenote: Inventions are now Universal]
The other observation is that there is now no risk that any valuable piece of knowledge will be lost. Every public event that happens, as well as every fact of scientific consequence, is put on record, and that not on a single stone or in a few manuscripts, but in books, of which so many copies exist that even the perishable nature of the material will not involve the loss of the contents, since, if these contents are valuable, they will be transferred to and issued in other books, and so ad infinitum. Thus every process of manufacture is known to so many persons that while it continues to be serviceable it is sure to be familiar and transmitted from generation to generation by practice as well as by description. We must imagine a world totally different from the world we know in order to imagine the possibility of any diminution, indeed of any discontinuance of the increase, of this stock of knowledge which the world has been acquiring, and which is not only knowledge but potential wealth.
When one passes from knowledge considered as a body of facts ascertained and available for use to the thing we call intellectual aptitude or culture--namely, the power of turning knowledge to account and of producing results in spheres other than material--and when we inquire whether mankind has made a parallel advance in this direction, it becomes necessary to distinguish three different kinds of intellectual capacity.
The first may be called the power of using scientific methods for investigating phenomena, whether physical or social.
[Sidenote: No Decrease of Knowledge is now Likely]
The second is the power of speculation, applied to matters which have not hitherto been found capable of examination by the methods of science, whether observational, experimental, or mathematical. The third is the power of intellectual creation, whether literary or artistic.
The methods of scientific inquiry may almost be classed with the ascertained facts of science or with inventions, as being parts of the stock of accumulated knowledge built up by the labour of many generations. They are known to everybody who cares to study them, and can be learnt and applied by everybody who will give due diligence. Just as every man can be taught to fire a gun, or steer a ship, or write a letter, though guns, helms, and letters are the result of discoveries made by exceptionally gifted men, so every graduate in science of a university can use the methods of induction, can observe and experiment with a correctness which a few centuries ago even the most vigorous minds could scarcely have reached.
[Sidenote: Original Thinkers are still Rare]
Because the methods have been so fully explained and illustrated as to have grown familiar, a vast host of investigators, very few of whom possess scientific genius, are at work to-day extending our scientific knowledge. So the methods of historical criticism--so the methods of using statistics--are to-day profitably applied by many men with no such original gift as would have made them competent critics or statisticians had not the paths been cut by a few great men and trodden since by hundreds of feet. All that is needed is imitation--intelligent and careful imitation. Nevertheless, there remains this sharp contrast between knowledge of the facts of applied science and knowledge of the methods, that whereas there is no radical difference between the ability of one man and that of another to use a mechanical invention, such as a steam plough or an electric motor-car, there is all the difference in the world between the power of one intellect and another to use a method for the purposes of fresh discovery. Knowledge fossilised in a concrete invention or even in a mathematical formula is a sort of tool ready to every hand. But a method, though serviceable to everybody, becomes eminently fruitful only when wielded by the same kind of original genius as that which made discoveries by the less perfect methods of older days. This is apparent even in inquiries which seem to reside chiefly in collection and computation. Everybody tries nowadays to use statistics. Many people do use them profitably. But the people who by means of statistics can throw really fresh and brilliant light on a problem are as few as ever they were.
[Sidenote: Advantage of Modern over Old Thinkers]
When we turn to the exercise of speculative thought on subjects not amenable to strictly scientific--that is to say, to exact--methods, the gain which has come to mankind by the labour of past ages is of a different order. Metaphysics, ethics, and theology, to take the most obvious examples, are all of them the richer for the thoughts of philosophers in the past. A number of distinctions have been drawn, and a number of classifications made, a number of confusions, often verbal, have been cleared up, a number of fallacies detected, a number of technical terms invented, whereby the modern speculator enjoys a great advantage over his predecessor. His mind has been clarified, and many new aspects of the old problems have been presented, so that he is better able to see all round the old problems.
[Sidenote: The Living Thought of Past Ages]
None of the great thinkers, from Pythagoras down to Hegel, has left metaphysics where he found it. Yet none can be said to have built on the foundations of his predecessors in the same way as the mathematicians and physicists and chemists have added to the edifice they found. What the philosophers have done is to accumulate materials for the study of man’s faculties and modes of thinking, and of his ideas regarding his relations to the universe, while also indicating various methods by which the study may be pursued. Each great product of speculative thought is itself a part of these materials, and for that reason never becomes obsolete, as the treatises of the old physicists and chemists have mostly become. Aristotle, for instance, has left us books on natural history, on metaphysics and ethics, and on politics. Those on natural history are mere curiosities, and no modern biologist or zoologist needs them. Those on metaphysics and ethics still deserve the attention of the student of philosophy, though he may in a certain sense be said to have got beyond them. The treatise on politics still keeps its place beside Montesquieu, Burke, and Tocqueville. Or, to take a thinker who like Aristotle seems very far removed from us, though fifteen hundred years later in date, St. Thomas of Aquinum discusses questions from many of which the modern world has moved away, and discusses them by methods which many do not now use, starting from premises which many do not accept. But he marks a remarkable stage in the history of human thought, and as a part of that history, and as an example of extraordinary dialectical ingenuity and subtlety, he remains an object of interest to those least in agreement with his conclusions.
[Sidenote: Every Great Thinker Affects Others]
Every great thinker affects other thinkers, and propagates the impulse he has received, though perhaps in a quite different direction. The teaching of Socrates was the starting point for nearly all the subsequent schools of Greek philosophy. Hume became the point of departure for Kant, who desired to lay a deeper foundation for philosophy than that which Hume seemed to have overturned. All these great ones have not only enriched us, but are still capable of stimulating us. But they have not improved our capacity for original thinking. The accumulation of scientific knowledge has, as already observed, put all mankind in a better position for solving further physical problems and establishing a more complete dominion over Nature. The accumulation of philosophic thought has had no similar effect. In the former case each man stands, so to speak, on the shoulders of his predecessors. In the latter he stands on his own feet. The value of future contributions to philosophy will depend on the original power of the minds that make them, and only to a small extent (except by way of stimulus) on what such minds may have drawn from those into whose labours they have entered.
[Sidenote: Ebb-Tides of Intellectual Culture]
When we come to the products of literary and artistic capacity, we find an even vaster accumulation of intellectual treasure available for enjoyment, but a still more marked absence of connection between the amount of treasures possessed and the power of adding fresh treasures to them. Since writing came into use, and, indeed, even in the days when memory alone preserved lays and tales, every age and many races have contributed to the stock. There have been ebbs and flows both in quantity and quality. The centuries between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1100 have left us very little of high merit in literature, though something in architecture; and the best of that little in literature did not come from the seats of Roman civilisation in Italy, France, Spain, and the East Roman Empire.
Some periods have seen an eclipse of poetry, others an eclipse of art or a sterility in music. Literature and the arts have not always flourished together, and musical genius in particular seems to have little to do with the contemporaneous development of other forms of intellectual power. The quantity of production bears no relation to the quality, not even an inverse relation; for the pessimistic notion that the larger the output the smaller is the part which possesses brilliant excellence, has not been proved. Still less does the amount of good work produced in any given area depend upon the number of persons living in that area. Florence, between A.D. 1250 and A.D. 1500 gave birth to more men of first-rate poetical and artistic genius than London has produced since 1250; yet Florence had in those two and a half centuries a population of probably only from forty to sixty thousand. And Florence herself has since A.D. 1500 given birth to scarcely any distinguished poets or artists, though her population has been larger than it was in the fifteenth century.
The increase in the world’s stock of intellectual wealth is one of the most remarkable facts in history, for it represents a constant increase in the means of enjoyment. Such losses as there have been nearly all occurred during the Dark Ages; but there is now little risk that anything of high literary or musical value will perish, though, of course, works of art, and especially buildings and carvings, suffer or vanish.
The increase does not, however, tend to any strengthening of the creative faculty. There is a greater abundance of models of excellence, models of which form the taste, afford a stimulus to sensitive minds, and establish a sort of technique with well-known rules. The principles of criticism are more fully investigated. The power of analysis grows, and the appreciation both of literature and of art is more widely diffused. Their influence on the whole community becomes greater, but the creative imagination which is needed for the production of original work becomes no more abundant and no more powerful. It may, indeed, be urged, though our data are probably insufficient for a final judgment, that the finer qualities of poetry and of pictorial and plastic art tend rather to decline under the more analytic habit of mind which belongs to the modern world. Simplicity, freshness, spontaneity come less naturally to those who have fallen under the pervasive influence of this habit.
[Sidenote: Effect of Thought on Mankind]
There remains one other way in which the incessant play of thought may be said to have increased or improved the resources of mankind. Certain principles or ideas belonging to the moral and social sphere--to the moral sphere by their origin, to the social sphere by their results--make their way to a more or less general acceptance, and exert a potent influence upon human life and action. They are absent in the earliest communities of which we know, or are present only in germ. They emerge, sometimes in the form of customs gradually built up in one or more peoples, sometimes in the utterances of one gifted mind. Sometimes they spread impalpably; sometimes they become matter for controversy, and are made the battle-cries of parties. Sometimes they end by being universally received, though not necessarily put into practice. Sometimes, on the other hand, they continue to be rejected in one country, or by one set of persons in a country, as vehemently as they are asserted by another. As instances of these principles or ideas or doctrines, whatever one is to call them, the following may be taken: The condemnation of piracy, of slavery, and of treaty-breaking, of outrages on the bodies of dead enemies, of cruelty to the lower animals, of the slaughter of prisoners in cold blood, of polygamy, of torture to witnesses or criminals; the recognition of the duty of citizens to obey the laws, and of the moral responsibility of rulers for the exercise of their power, of the right of each man to hold his own religious opinion and to worship accordingly, of the civil (though not necessarily of the political) equality of all citizens; the disapproval of intoxication, the value set upon female chastity, the acceptance of the social and civil (to which some would add the political) equality of women.
[Sidenote: Men who Contributed to Progress]
[Sidenote: Slavery was Destroyed by Sentiment]
All these dogmas or ideas or opinions--some have become dogmas in all civilised peoples, others are rather to be described as opinions whose truth or worth is denied or only partially admitted--are the slow product of many generations. Most of them are due to what we may call the intelligence and sentiment of mankind at large, rather than to their advocacy by any prominent individual thinkers. The teachings of such thinkers have, of course, done much to advance them. Everybody would name Socrates and Confucius as among the men who have contributed to their progress; some would add such names as those of Mohammed and St. Francis of Assisi. Christianity has, of course, made the largest contributions. How much is due to moral feeling, how much to a sense of common utility, cannot be exactly estimated. Economic reasonings and practical experience would have probably in the long run destroyed slavery, but it was sentiment that did in fact destroy it in the civilised States where it had longest survived.
How much these doctrines, even in the partial and imperfect application which most of them have secured, have done for humanity may be perceived by anyone who will imagine what the world would be if they were unknown. They form one of the most substantial additions made to what may be called the intellectual and moral capital with which man has to work this planet and improve his own life upon it. And the most interesting and significant crises in history are those which have turned upon the recognition or application of principles of this kind. The Reformation of the sixteenth century, the French Revolution, the War of Secession in the United States, are familiar modern examples.
[Sidenote: Intellect Mightier than Population]
Putting all these forms of human achievement together--the extension of the scientific knowledge of Nature with consequent mastery over her, the scientific knowledge of social phenomena in the past and the present, the records of philosophic speculation, the mass of literary and artistic products, the establishment, however partial and imperfect, of regulative moral and political principles--it will be seen that the accumulation of this vast stock of intellectual wealth has been an even more important factor than the increase of population in giving man strength and dignity over against Nature, and in opening up to him an endless variety of modes of enjoying life--that is to say, of making it yield to him the most which its shortness and his own physical infirmities permit. The process by which this accumulation has been carried along is the central thread of history. The main aim of a history of the world must be to show what and how each race or people has contributed to the general stock. To this aim political history, ecclesiastical history, economic history, the history of philosophy, and the history of science, are each of them subordinate, though it is only through them that the process can be explained.
In these last few pages intellectual progress has been considered apart from the area in which it has gone on, and apart from the conditions imposed on it by the natural features of that area. A few words are, however, needed regarding its relation to the surface of the earth. The movement of civilisation must be considered from the side of space as well as from that of time.
[Sidenote: Contraction of the World]
Space is a material element in the inquiry because it has divided the families of mankind from one another. Some families, such as the Chinese and the Peruvians, have developed independently, some, such as the South and West European peoples, in connection with, or perhaps in dependence on, the development of other races or peoples. Hence that which each achieved was in some cases achieved for itself only, in other cases for its neighbours as well. The contributions made by different races have--at any rate during the last four thousand years, and probably in earlier days also--been very unequal; yet none can have failed to contribute something if only by way of influencing the others. Inequality in progress would seem to have become more marked in the later than in the earlier periods. Indeed, some races, such as those of Australia, appear during many centuries, possibly owing to their isolation, to have made no progress at all. They may even have receded.
When we regard the evolution and development of man from the side of his relations to space, three facts stand out--the contraction of the world, the overflow of the more advanced races, and the consequent diffusion all over the world of what is called civilisation.
By the contraction of the world, I mean the greater swiftness, ease, and safety with which men can pass from one part of it to another, or communicate with one another across great intervening spaces. This has the effect of making the world smaller for most practical purposes, while the absolute distance in latitude and longitude remains the same. The progress of discovery is worth tracing, for it shows how much larger the small earth, which was known to the early nations, must have seemed to them than the whole earth, which we know, seems to us.
THE ARTISTIC GENIUS OF TWO CITIES
A COMPARISON OF THE NATIVE POETS & ARTISTS OF FLORENCE & LONDON
“The quantity of production,” says Mr. Bryce, “bears no relation to the quality. Still less does the amount of good work produced in any given area depend upon the number of persons living in that area. Florence between A.D. 1250 and A.D. 1500 gave birth to more men of first-rate poetical and artistic genius than London has produced since 1250; yet Florence had in those two and a half centuries a population of probably only from forty to sixty thousand. And Florence herself has since A.D. 1500 given birth to scarcely any distinguished poets or artists, though her population has been larger than it was in the fifteenth century.”
THE GENIUS OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLORENCE, 1250 TO 1500, FAR EXCEEDED THAT OF LONDON FROM 1250 TO THE PRESENT DAY
Poets and Artists Born in Florence from 1250-1500
Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404-1472, architect, painter Albertinelli, Mariotto, 1474-1515, painter Andrea del Sarto, 1487-1531, painter Angelico da Fiesole, Fra Giovanni, 1387-1455, painter Botticelli, Alessandro, 1447-1510, painter Cavalcanti, Guido, 1255-1300, poet, philosopher Cimabue, Giovanni, 1240-1302, painter Credi, Lorenzo di, 1459-1537, painter Dante, Alighieri, 1265-1321, poet Donatello, 1386-1466, sculptor and painter Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 1378-1455, sculptor Ghirlandajo, Domenico, 1449-1494, painter Gozzoli, Benozzo, 1420-1498, painter Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, painter, sculptor Lippi, Fra Filippo, 1412-1469, painter Lippi, Filippino, 1459-1504, painter Lorenzo, Don, 1370-1425, painter Medici, Lorenzo de, 1448-1492, poet Orcagnia, Andrea di Cione, 1329-1368? sculptor, painter Perugino, Vannucci Pietro, 1446-1524, painter Pesellino, Francesco di, 1422-1457, painter Pesello, Giuliano, 1367-1446, painter, sculptor Pollajuolo, Antonio, 1429-1498, sculptor, painter Pollajuolo, Piero, 1443-1496, sculptor, painter Robbia, Andrea della, 1437-1528, sculptor Robbia, Luca della, 1399-1482, sculptor Rossi, Giovanni Battista de, 1494-1541, sculptor, painter Ruccellai, Giovanni, 1475-1525, poet Spinello, Aretino, 1334-1410, painter Ucello, Paolo, 1397-1475, painter Verocchio, Andrea, 1435-1488, sculptor, painter
THE LAST FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF FLORENTINE CULTURE HAVE BEEN LESS PRODUCTIVE THAN THE PRECEDING TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES
Poets and Artists Born in Florence since 1500
Allori, Christofano, 1577-1621, painter Bronzino, Angelo, 1502-1572, painter Cellini, Benvenuto, 1500-1571, sculptor Cigoli, Luigi Cardi da, 1559-1613, painter Cortona, Pietro da, 1596-1669, architect, painter Dolci, Carlo, 1616-1686, painter Doni, Antonio Francesco, 1513-1574, author Furini, Francesco, 1604-1646, painter Ligozzi, Jacobino, 1543-1627, painter Poccetti, Bernardino, 1542-1612, painter Salviati, Francesco, 1510-1563, painter San Giovanni, Giovanni da, 1599-1636, painter Santi di Tito, 1538-1603, painter Tacco, Pietro, 1580-1640, sculptor Venusti, Marcello, 1515-1579, painter
The Only Great Poet Born in London from 1250-1500
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1328-1400
Poets and Artists Born in London since 1500
Blake, William, 1757-1827, poet and painter Browning, Robert, 1812-1889, poet Byron, Geo. Gordon Noel, Lord, 1788-1824, poet Defoe, Daniel, 1659-1731, author Ford, Edward Onslow, 1852-1901, sculptor Gilbert, Alfred, R.A., 1854- --, sculptor Gray, Thomas, 1716-1771, poet Hogarth, William, 1697-1764, painter Hood, Thomas, 1799-1845, poet Hunt, William Holman, 1827-1910, painter Jonson, Ben, 1573-1637, poet and dramatist Keats, John, 1795-1821, poet Lamb, Charles, 1775-1834, essayist Linnell, John, 1792-1882, painter Lucas, John Seymour, 1849- --, painter Milton, John, 1608-1674, poet Morland, George, 1763-1804, painter Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744, poet Richmond, Sir William Blake, 1843- --, painter Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882, poet, painter Ruskin, John, 1819-1900, author and art critic Spenser, Edmund, 1552-1599, poet Stothard, Thomas, 1755-1834, painter, illustrator Swinburne, Algernon, 1837-1909, poet Walker, Frederick, 1840-1875, painter Watts, George F., 1817-1904, painter, sculptor
[Sidenote: The Small World of the Ancients]
The most ancient records we possess from Assyria, Egypt, Palestine, and from the Homeric poems, show how very limited was the range of geographical knowledge possessed by that small civilised world from which our own civilisation has descended. Speaking roughly, that knowledge seems in the tenth century B.C. to have extended about one thousand miles in each direction from the Isthmus of Suez. However, the best point of departure for the peoples of antiquity is the era of Herodotus, who travelled and wrote B.C. 460-440. The limits of the world as he knew it were Cadiz and the Straits of Gibraltar on the west, the Danube and the Caspian on the north, the deserts of Eastern Persia on the east, and the Sahara on the south, with vague tales regarding peoples who lived beyond, such as Indians far beyond Persia, and pygmies beyond the Sahara. He reports, however, not without hesitation, a circumnavigation of Africa by Phœnicians in the service of Pharaoh Necho.
Discovery advanced very slowly for many centuries, though the march of Alexander opened up part of the East, while the Roman conquests brought the Far North-West, including Britain, within the range of civilisation; and occasional voyages, such as that of Hanno along the coast of West Africa, that of Nearchus through the Arabian Sea, and that of Pythias to the Baltic, added something to knowledge. Procopius in A.D. 540 can tell us little more regarding the regions beyond Roman influence than Strabo does five and a half centuries earlier. The journeys of Marco Polo and Rubruquis throw only a passing light on the Far East. It is with the Spanish occupation of the Canary Isles, beginning in 1602, and with the Portuguese voyages of the fifteenth century, that the era of modern discovery opens. The re-discovery of America in 1492, for it had been already visited by the Northmen of Greenland and Iceland in the eleventh century, and the opening of the Cape route to India in 1497-1498, were hardly equal to the exploit of Magellan, whose circumnavigation of the globe in 1519-1520 marks the close of this striking period. Thereafter discovery proceeds more slowly. Some of the isles of the central and southern Pacific were not visited till the middle of the eighteenth century, and the north-west coast of America as well as the north-east Coast of Asia, remained little known till an even later date. Those explorations of the interior of North America, of the interior of Africa, of the interior of Australia, and of East Central Asia, which have completed our knowledge of the earth, belong to the nineteenth century. The first crossing of the North American Continent north of latitude 40° was not effected till A.D. 1806.
[Sidenote: The Thirst for New Territories]
The desire for new territory, for the propagation of religion, and, above all, for the precious metals, were the chief motives which prompted the voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These motives have remained operative; and to them has been added in more recent times the spirit of pure adventure and the interest in science, together with, increasing measure, the effort to secure trade. But the extension of trade followed slowly in the wake of discovery. China and Japan remained almost closed. The policy of Spain sought to restrict her American waters to her own ships, and the commerce they carried was scanty. Communication remained slow and dangerous across the oceans till the introduction of steam vessels (1825-1830).
[Sidenote: Round the World in 40 Days!]
Land transport, though it had steadily increased in Europe, remained costly as well as slow till the era of railway construction began in 1829. The application of steam as a motive power and of electricity as a means of communicating thought has been by far the greatest factor in this long process of reducing the dimensions of the world, which dates back as far as the domestication of beasts of burden, and the invention, first of paddles and oars, and then of sails. The North American Continent can now be crossed in five days, the South American (from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres) in under two, the Transandine tunnel having now been pierced. The Continent which stretches from the Baltic to the North Pacific can now be traversed in twelve days. By means of the Trans-Siberian line and its steamship connection with the ports of Japan, it is now possible to go round the globe in less than fifty days. Indeed, the journey has recently been done in forty days. Nor is this acceleration of transit more remarkable than its practical immunity, as compared with earlier times, not only from the dangers for which Nature is answerable, but from those also which man formerly interposed.
The increase of trade which has followed in the track first of discovery and latterly (with immensely larger volume) of the improvement of means of transport, has been accompanied not only by the seizure of transoceanic territories by the greater civilised States, but also by an outflow of population from those States into the more backward or more thinly-peopled parts of the earth. Sometimes, as in the case of North America, Siberia, and Australia, the emigrants extinguish or absorb the aboriginal population.
[Sidenote: Europeanisation of the World]
Sometimes, as in the case of India, Africa, and some parts of South America, they neither extinguish nor blend with the previous inhabitants, but rule them and spread what is called civilisation among them--this civilisation consisting chiefly in a knowledge of the mechanical arts and of deathful weapons accompanied by the destruction, more or less gradual, of their pre-existing beliefs and usages. Sometimes, again, as in the case of China, and to some extent also of the Mussulman East, though political dominion is not established, the process of substituting a new civilisation for the old one goes on despite the occasional efforts of the backward people to resist the process. The broad result is everywhere similar. The modern European type of civilisation is being diffused over the whole earth, superseding, or essentially modifying, the older local types. Thus, in a still more important sense than even that of communications, the world is contracted and becomes far more one than it has ever been before. The European who speaks three or four languages can travel over nearly all of it, and he can find on most of its habitable coasts, and in many parts of the lately-discovered interior, the appliances which are to him necessaries of life. The world is, in fact, becoming an enlarged Europe, so far as the externals of life and the material side of civilisation are concerned. The dissociative forces of Nature have been overcome.
[Sidenote: Triumph of Natural Science]
Putting together the two processes, the process in time and the process in space, which we have been reviewing, it will be seen that the main line of the development of mankind may be described as the transmission and the expansion of culture--that is to say, of knowledge and intellectual capacity. The stock of knowledge available for use and enjoyment has been steadily increased, and what each people accumulated has been made available for all. With this there has come assimilation, the destruction of weaker types of civilisation, the modification by constant interaction of the stronger types, the creation of a common type tending to absorb all the rest. Assimilation has been most complete in the sphere ruled by natural science--that is to say, in the material sphere, less complete in that ruled by the human sciences (including the sphere of political and social institutions), still less complete in the sphere of religious, moral, and social ideas, and as respects the products of literature and art. Or, in other words, where certainty of knowledge is attainable and utility in practice is incontestable, the process of assimilation has moved fastest and furthest.
[Sidenote: Nature & the Unity of Mankind]
The process has been a long one, for its beginnings reach back beyond our historical knowledge. So far as it lies within the range of history, it falls into two periods, the earlier of which supplies an instructive illustration of the later one which we know better. The effort which Nature--that is to say, the natural tendencies of man as a social being--has been making towards the unification of mankind during the last few centuries, is her second great effort. The first was in progress from the time when the most ancient records begin down to the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era.
Greek civilisation, which itself had drawn much from Egypt, as well as from Assyria, Phœnicia, and the peoples of Asia Minor, permeated the minds and institutions (except the legal institutions), of the Mediterranean and West European countries, and was propagated by the governing energy of the Romans. In its Romanised form it transformed or absorbed and superseded the less advanced civilisations of all those countries, creating one new type for the whole Roman world. With some local diversities, that type prevailed from the Northumbrian Wall of Hadrian to the Caucasus and the deserts of Arabia. The still independent races on the northern frontier of the Empire received a tincture of it, and would doubtless have been more deeply imbued had the Roman Empire stood longer.
Christianity, becoming dominant at a time when the Empire was already tottering, gave a new sense of unity to all whom the Greco-Roman type had formed, extended the influence of that type still further, and enabled much that belonged to it (especially its religious, its legal, and its literary elements) to survive the political dominion of the Emperors and to perpetuate itself among practically independent States which were springing up. The authority of Papal Rome helped to carry this sense of unity among civilised men through a period of ignorance, confusion, and semi-barbarism which might otherwise have extinguished it. Nevertheless, we may say, broadly speaking, that the first effort towards the establishment of a common type of civilisation was, if not closed, yet arrested by the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West. Close thereupon came the rise of Islam, tearing away the Eastern provinces, and creating a rival type of civilisation--though a type largely influenced by the Greco-Roman--which held its ground for some centuries, and has only recently shown that it is destined to vanish.
[Sidenote: Conquest and Civilisation]
The beginnings of the second effort toward the unification of civilised mankind may be observed as far back as the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its effective and decisive action may, however, be assigned to the fifteenth, when the spread of literary and philosophic culture, and the swift extension of maritime discovery, ushered in the modern phase wherein we have marked its irresistible advance. This phase differs from the earlier one both in its range--for it embraces the whole earth and not merely the Mediterranean lands--and in its basis, for it rests not so much upon conquest and religion as upon scientific knowledge, formative ideas, and commerce. Yet even here a parallelism may be noted between the ancient and the modern phase. Knowledge and ideas had brought about a marked assimilation of various parts of the ancient world to each other before Roman conquest completed the work, and what conquest did was done chiefly among the ruder races. So now, while it is knowledge and ideas that have worked for the creation of a common type among the peoples of European stock, conquest has been a potent means of spreading this type in the outlying countries and among the more backward races whose territories the European nations have seized.
[Sidenote: Language a Unifying Influence]
The diffusion of a few forms of speech has played a great part in both phases. Greek was spoken over the eastern half of the Roman world in the second century A.D., though not to the extinction of such tongues as Syriac and Egyptian. Latin was similarly spoken over the western half, though not to the extinction of the tongues we now call Basque and Breton and Welsh; and Latin continued to be the language of religion, of law, of philosophy, and of serious prose literature in general till the sixteenth century. So now, several of the leading European tongues are spoken far beyond the limits of their birthplace, and their wide range has become a powerful influence in diffusing European culture. German, English, Russian, Spanish, and French are available for the purposes of commerce, and for those who read books over nineteen-twentieths of the earth’s surface. The languages of the smaller non-European peoples are disappearing in those places where they have to compete with these greater European tongues, except in so far as they are a medium of domestic intercourse. Arabic, Chinese, and in less degree Persian are the only non-European languages which retain a world importance. English, German, and Spanish are pre-eminently the three leading commercial languages. They gain ground on the rest, and it is English that gains ground most swiftly. The German merchant is no doubt even more ubiquitous (if the expression be permitted) than is the English; but the German more frequently speaks English than the Englishman or American speaks German.
[Sidenote: Linking the Nations Together]
It has already been observed that assimilation has advanced least in the sphere of institutions, ideas, and literature. The question might, indeed, be raised whether the types of thought, of national character, and of literary activity represented by the five or six leading nations are not rather tending to become more accentuated. The self-consciousness of each nation, taking the form of pride or vanity, leads it to exalt its own type and to dwell with satisfaction on whatever differentiates it from other types. Nevertheless there are influences at work in the domain of practice as well as of thought, which, in creating a common body of opinion and a sense of common interest among large classes belonging to these leading nations, tend to link the nations themselves together. Religious sympathy, or a common attachment to certain doctrines, such as, for instance, those of Collectivism, works in this direction among the masses, as the love of science or of art does among sections of the more educated class. As regards the peoples not of European stock, who are, broadly speaking, the more backward, it is not yet possible to say what will be the influence of the European type of culture upon their intellectual development.
The material side of their civilisation will after a time conform to the European type, though, perhaps, to forms that are not the most progressive; and even such faiths as Buddhism and Islam may lose their hold on those who come most into contact with Europeans. But whether these peoples will produce any new types of thought or art under the stimulus of Europe, as the Teutons and Slavs did after they had been for centuries in contact with the relics of Greco-Roman culture, or whether they will be overborne by and merely imitate and reproduce what Europeans teach them--this is a question for conjecture only, since the data for predictions are wanting.
It is a question of special interest as regards the Japanese, the one non-European race which, having an old civilisation of its own, highly developed on the artistic side, has shown an amazing aptitude for appropriating European institutions and ideas. Already a Japanese physiologist has taken high rank among men of science by being one of the discoverers of the bacillus of the Oriental plague.
DOES HISTORY MAKE FOR PROGRESS?
One of the questions which both the writers and the readers of a History of the World must frequently ask themselves is whether the course of history establishes a general law of progress. Some thinkers have gone so far as to say that this must be the moral of history regarded as a whole, and a few have even suggested that without the recognition of such a principle and of a sort of general guidance of human affairs towards this goal, history would be unintelligible, and the doings of mankind would seem little better than the sport of chance.
[Sidenote: What is the Test of Progress?]
[Sidenote: What Mankind has Achieved]
Whatever may be thought of these propositions as matters of theory, the doctrine of a general and steady law of progress is one to which no historian ought to commit himself. His business is to set forth and explain the facts exactly as they are; and if he writes in the light of a theory he is pretty certain to be unconsciously seduced into giving undue prominence to those facts which make for it. Moreover, the question is in itself a far more complex one than the simple word “progress” at first sight conveys. What is the test of progress? In what form of human advance is it to be deemed to consist? Which of these forms is of the highest value? There can be no doubt of the advance made by man in certain directions. There may be great doubt as to his advance in other directions. There may possibly be no advance but even retrogression, or at least signs of an approaching retrogression, in some few directions. The view to be taken of the relative importance of these lines of movement is a matter not so much for the historian as for the philosopher, and its discussion would carry us away into fields of thought not fitted for a book like the present. Although, therefore, it is true that one chief interest of history resides in its capacity for throwing light on this question, all that need here be said may be expressed as follows:
There has been a marvellous advance in man’s knowledge of the laws of Nature and of his consequent mastery over Nature.
There has been therewith a great increase in population, and, on the whole, in the physical vigour of the average individual man.
There has been, as a further consequence, an immense increase in the material comfort and well-being of the bulk of mankind, so that to most men necessaries have become easier of attainment, and many things which were once luxuries have become necessaries.
Against this is to be set the fact that some of the natural resources of the world are being rapidly exhausted. This would at one time have excited alarm; but scientific discoveries have so greatly extended man’s capacity to utilise other sources of natural energy, that people are disposed to assume that the loss of the resources aforesaid will be compensated by further discoveries.
[Sidenote: The Gain and the Loss]
As to progress other than material--that is to say, progress in intellectual capacity, in taste, in the power of enjoyment, in virtue, and generally in what is called happiness--every man’s view must depend on the ideal which he sets before himself of what constitutes happiness, and of the relative importance to happiness of the ethical and the non-ethical elements which enter into the conception. Until there is more agreement than now exists or has ever existed on these points, there is no use in trying to form conclusions regarding the progress man has made. Moreover, it is admitted that nearly every gain man makes is accompanied by some corresponding loss--perhaps a slight loss, yet a loss. When we attempt to estimate the comparative importance of these gains and losses, questions of great difficulty, both ethical and non-ethical, emerge; and in many cases our experience is not yet sufficient to determine the quantum of loss. There is room both for the optimist and for the pessimist, and in arguing such questions nearly everybody becomes an optimist or a pessimist. The historian has no business to be either.
There is another temptation besides that of delivering his opinion on these high matters, of which the historian does well to be aware--I mean the temptation to prophesy. The study of history as a whole, more inevitably than that of the history of any particular country or people, suggests forecasts of the future, because the broader the field which we survey the more do we learn to appreciate the great and wide-working forces that are guiding mankind, and the more therefore are we led to speculate on the results which these forces, some of them likely to be permanent, will tend to bring about.
[Sidenote: Modern Mastery of Nature]
This temptation can seldom have been stronger than it is now, when we see all mankind brought into closer relations than ever before, and more obviously dominated by forces which are essentially the same, though varying in their form. Yet it will appear, when the problem is closely examined, that the very novelty of the present situation of the world--the fact that our mastery of Nature has been so rapidly extended within the last century, and that the phenomena of the subjugation of the earth by Europeans and of the ubiquitous contact of the advanced and the backward races are so unexampled in respect of the area they cover--that all predictions must be uttered with the greatest caution, and due allowance made for elements which may disturb even the most careful calculations. It may, indeed, be doubted whether any predictions of a definitely positive kind--predictions that such and such things will happen--can be safely made, save the obvious ones which are based on the assumption that existing natural conditions remain for some time operative.
[Sidenote: A Glimpse into the Future]
Taking this assumption to be a legitimate one, it maybe predicted that population will continue to increase, at least till the now waste but habitable parts of the earth have been turned to account; that races, except where there is a marked colour line, will continue to become intermingled; that the small and weak races, and especially the lower set of savages, will be absorbed or die out; that fewer and fewer languages will be spoken; that communications will become even swifter, easier, and cheaper than they are at present; and that commerce and wealth will continue to grow, subject, perhaps, to occasional checks from political disturbance.
There are also some negative predictions on which one may venture, and with a little more confidence. No new race can appear, except possibly from a fusion of two or more existing races, or from the differentiation of a branch of an existing race under new conditions, as the Americans have been to some slight extent differentiated from the English, and the Brazilians from the Portuguese (there having been in the latter case a certain admixture of negro blood), and as the Siberians of the future may be a different sort of Russians. Neither is any new language likely to appear, except, mere trade jargons (like Chinook or pigeon English), because the existing languages of the great peoples are firmly established, and the process of change within each of these languages has, owing to the abundance of printed matter, become now extremely slow. Conditions can hardly be imagined under which such a phenomenon as the development of the Romance languages out of Latin, or of Danish and Swedish out of the common Northern tongue of the eleventh century, could recur.
It may seem natural to add the further prediction that the great States and the great religions will continue to grow and to absorb the small ones. But when we touch topics into which human opinion or emotion enters, we touch a new kind of matter, where the influences now at work may be too much affected by new influences to permit of any forecast. Conditions might conceivably come into action which would split up some or most of the present great States, and bring the world back to an age of small political communities.
So, too, though the lower forms of paganism are fast vanishing, and the four or five great religions are extending their sway, it is conceivable that new prophets may arise, founding new faiths, or that the existing religions may be split up into new sects widely diverse from one another. Even the supremacy of the European races, well assured as it now appears, may be reduced by a variety of causes, physiological or moral, when some centuries have passed.
Whoever examines the predictions made by the most observant and profound thinkers of the past will see reason to distrust almost all the predictions, especially those of a positive order, which shape themselves in our minds to-day.
JAMES BRYCE
Within the memory of living men, the most advanced peoples of the world believed that the world itself had been created not 6,000 years ago. We have all learned now that the globe itself, that life--and long later mankind--came into being thousands, hundreds of thousands--it may be millions--of years ago.
How long precisely, none can tell. What we do know with certainty is that before the continents finally emerged in their present shape there was an Ice Age, immediately preceded by what is called the Drift Age, and that as early as the Drift Age man, the maker of implements, lived, and did battle with the cave bear and other monsters. Where man first came into being, how he spread over the globe, how the great races acquired their characteristics, we can only conjecture.
[Sidenote: The Birth of the Nations]
Wherever and whenever man appeared, the earliest traces show him to have been a sociable animal living in communities. The earliest unmistakable traces of civilisation, order, polity, are found in the basins of the Nile and the Euphrates, dating probably as far back as ten thousand years ago. The people who built the Pyramids had already advanced far in the knowledge which gives man the mastery over Nature; and the Pyramids were built certainly 3,000, and probably nearer 5,000, years before the Christian era. And while those pristine civilisations rose and fell in Egypt, civilisations were rising and passing away in Mesopotamia also.
In the fourth millennium there appears first a people with new characteristics--the Semitic race, gradually dominating the Mesopotamian civilisation, spreading westward in successive waves to the Mediterranean, surging into Egypt and out again; creating the Empires of Babylonia and of Assyria, and the Phœnician and Canaanite nations. And while the Semite Empires rose and fell, and Egypt held upon her ancient way, still mightier nations were coming to birth. The great Aryan or Indo-European migrations began, the Celt, the Latin, and the Hellene rolling westward by the Euxine and the Northern Mediterranean; while another group passed southward, to the East of the Semites, spreading the Aryan conquest over the greater part of the Indian peninsula.
[Sidenote: Conflicts of Ancient Peoples]
Of the doings of the great Semitic Powers in the second millennium B.C. we have some knowledge from the Hebrew records; and year by year fresh light is thrown on those records by inscriptions and tablets newly discovered or newly deciphered, Egyptian, Assyrian, or Hittite. Of the Hittite or early Syrian dominion we know little enough, except that it successfully defied the invading armies of Assyrian kings and Egyptian Pharaohs. Before 1500 the Semite conquerors of Egypt, the Hyksos, were driven out--an event associated by some authorities with the Hebrew Exodus. From this time the ebb and flow of Egyptian and Assyrian dynasties are more definitely recorded. In the closing centuries the prosperity of Tyre and Sidon reached its height, and the theocratic Hebrew nationality formed a kingdom. We become aware of Hellenic or kindred Powers in Asia Minor, at Troy, in Crete, at Mycenæ; of Achæans and Danaans in Egypt.
[Sidenote: The First Formation of States]
Before another five hundred years had passed, throughout the coasts and islands of the Ægean Sea, Æolians, Ionians, Dorians established themselves in cities, and every city rapidly grew into a highly-organised State. Over the Mediterranean, to Southern Italy, to Sicily, to Marseilles, the new Greek civilisation carried its commerce and its culture. In Italy the Latin races were in like manner forming themselves into city-states, developing conceptions of Government undreamed of by Oriental minds. Rome was founded, and acquired a leadership. Throughout the Hellenic and the Latin world the idea of civic freedom took root; the primitive monarchical systems disappeared, and, through revolutions and temporary despotisms, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, the States took on for the most part a Republican form.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: B.C. 8000 to 500 | | | | This Chronology, prepared as a companion to the Summary of the | | World’s History, sets forth in tabular form for ready reference | | the events dealt with in the narrative on opposite pages | +-----+-------------------------------------------------------+------+ |B.C. | Early civilisation of the Nile Basin. Egypt before | B.C. | |8000 | the Pyramids. | 8000 | |7000 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 7000 | | | Asiatic invasion of Egypt | | | | Pre-Semitic civilisations of the Euphrates Basin. | | | | Susa founded. | | |6000 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 6000 | | | Invasion of Egypt by dynastic race, 5800. Mena rules | | | | all Egypt. First dynasty, 5500. | | | | Babylonian kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad. Ea founds | | | | Eridu and civilises Babylonia. | | |5000 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 5000 | | | Egypt. The Pyramid builders. Great Pyramid built by | | | | Khufu (Cheops), 4700. | | | | Earliest monuments to kings in Babylonia, 4700. | | |4000 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 4000 | | | Egypt invaded from the north. First, or Babylonian, | | | | Semitic wave in the Euphrates Valley. Rise of | | | | Babylonian kingdoms. Sargon and Naram-Sin, Semitic | | | | rulers of Akkad. Middle kingdom of Egypt. Revival | | | | of art. Twelfth dynasty (3400). | | | | Gudea’s rule in Babylon. Development of commerce, | | | | 3300. | | |3000 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 3000 | | | Egypt invaded by the Hyksos, nomadic Semitic | | | | conquerors, the “Shepherd Kings.” Fifteenth Dynasty | | | | (2500). Second Hyksos movement (2250). | | | | Conquest of Babylon by Elamites. Rule of Hammurabi | | | | (Amraphel of Gen. xiv.), 2129. | | | | Second, or Canaanite, Semitic wave, extending to the | | | | Mediterranean. | | | | First Aryan migration westward over Europe, and | | | | southward; conquest of Hindostan. | | |2000 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 2000 | | | The Hyksos dominate Egypt. New kingdom. Eighteenth | | | | dynasty, 1580. | | | | Expulsion of the Hyksos, about 1560. | | | | Rise of Assyria. | | | | The Kassite dynasty in Babylon, about 1750-1130. | | | | Hittite Empire in Syria. | | | | Latin and Hellenic entry into Europe and Asia Minor. | | | | Third (Aramæan) Semitic wave, dominating W. Asia, but | | | | absorbed in existing states. | | |1500 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 1500 | | | FAR EAST: Beginning of definite Chinese history, with | | | | the Chau dynasty. | | | | EGYPT: Nineteenth dynasty, Sethos and the Ramesides; | | | | struggle with Hittite Empire. | | | | WESTERN ASIA: Burnaburiash, 1380. Pashe dynasty in | | | | Babylon, 1130-1000. | | | | Period of Phœnician prosperity. | | | | Rise of the United Kingdom of the Hebrews. | | | | Crete, Troy, and Mycenæ. The Ionic and Doric | | | | migrations. | | |1000 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 1000 | | | WESTERN ASIA: The Hebrew kingdom divided into Judah | | | | and Israel or Samaria. | | | | Rise of Aramæan kingdom of Syria. Chaldean | | | | domination in Babylon. | | | | Assyrian Middle Empire. | | | | EGYPT: Twenty-second dynasty (“Shishak” king of | | | | Egypt). | | | 900 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 900 | | | EUROPE: Early monarchical governments replaced | | | | usually by aristocracies. | | | | Probable period of the Homeric poems. | | | | WESTERN ASIA: Successful resistance of Syria to | | | | Assyria. | | | | Appearance of the (Aryan) Medes in the East. | | | | AFRICA: Founding of Carthage. | | | 800 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 800 | | | EGYPT: Domination of Ethiopians or Cushites. | | | | WESTERN ASIA: Assyrian New Empire; conquest of Syria, | | | | Samaria, and Babylon. | | | | Lydian and Phrygian kingdoms in Asia Minor. | | | | EUROPE: Development of city states in Greece and | | | | Italy. Lycurgan legislation of Sparta, about 800. | | | | Rome founded as a monarchy, 753. | | | | Spread of Greek colonies along Mediterranean | | | | coasts and islands. | | | 700 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 700 | | | WESTERN ASIA: Extension of Lydian kingdom in Asia | | | | Minor 687-546. | | | | Irruption of Cimmerians from the North. | | | | Repulse of Sennacherib before Jerusalem. Decline of | | | | Assyria. | | | | EGYPT: Invasion by Esarhaddon. Expulsion of Cushites. | | | | The Saitic dynasty. | | | | EUROPE: Between 700 and 500, sporadic displacement of | | | | aristocracies by “tyrannies,” followed either by an | | | | oligarchical restoration or by democracies. | | | | Rome becomes head of the League of Latin cities. | | | | FAR EAST: Japanese history begins. | | | 600 +-------------------------------------------------------+ 600 | | | WESTERN ASIA: Narbonaid, King of Babylon (556-538). | | | | Overthrow of Assyrian by New Babylonian Empire; the | | | | Babylonish captivity. | | | | Rise of Media, of which Cyrus, the Persian, makes | | | | himself master. | | | | Persian Empire: Overthrow of Lydia, New Babylonia, | | | | and Egypt. Aahmes (Amasis), 570-526. | | | | FAR EAST: Confucius and Lao-Tse in China, and Buddha | | | | in India. | | | | EUROPE: Greek states consolidated. Athens: Solon 594. | | | | Pisistratidæ expelled, 510. | | | | ROME: Expulsion of the kings, about 510. The | | | | Commonwealth. Administration aristocratic: Army and | | | 500 | legislative assembly on basis of land-ownership. | 500 | | B.C.| Etruscan--pre-Latin--domination in Italy. | B.C.| +-------------------------------------------------------------+------+
In the East an Aryan Power overthrew the last of the Assyrian-Babylonian dynasties; but these Persian conquerors became assimilated to the conquered nations. Fundamentally their empire was of the same type as its predecessors. The Persian sway, however, extended not only into Egypt but over the partly Hellenised Asia Minor; and the Ionic revolt, in the first year of the fifth century B.C. brought the spirit of the East and the spirit of the West into fierce collision. The great king hurled his hosts against defiant Hellas; at Marathon and at Salamis, Athens shattered his army and his fleets. Thenceforth, for a thousand years, the West was the aggressor.
[Sidenote: Athens and the Greek Immortals]
But the rolling back of the “barbarian” tide was not the only glory that fell to Athens; in that same century the little state bore sons whose names stand in the front rank of the immortals for all time: Æschylus and Sophocles, Phidias, Pericles, Socrates, and Plato; in the next half century, Demosthenes; with others almost if not quite, on the same plane. The character of Athens, idealised, no doubt, is epitomised by Thucydides in the speech of Pericles. She was the sum of all that was best and noblest in Hellenism--its love of freedom, of beauty, of energy, of harmony, and its public spirit. Politically, the story of the period which followed Salamis is mainly one of the rivalry between Athens and Sparta; until the rise of Macedon, when King Philip made himself master of all Hellas.
[Sidenote: The Coming-up of Alexander]
Then, with the beginning of the last quarter of the fourth century, Alexander the Great blazed upon the world, toppled the empires of Western Asia before him, conquered Egypt, and swept over the great mountain-barriers into India, where Buddhism had already begun to displace the ancient Brahmanism of the first Aryans. The Greek influences did not long linger in the far East after the great conqueror’s death. His empire broke up. Asia west of the Euphrates remained, indeed, under the dominion mainly of one Grecian dynasty, the Seleucidæ; Egypt under that of another, the Ptolemies. Yet Alexander’s attempts to blend East and West failed. Orientalism abode, unconquered, ineradicable; Hellenism prevailed almost after the fashion of British domination in India to-day, in the land, but not of it.
Meanwhile, the struggle between Aryans and non-Aryans had been running a partly separate course in the West. The Phœnicians of Carthage and the pre-Aryan Etruscans, the dominant power in Italy, made a joint assault on the Greeks of Sicily and the Latins of the mainland at the beginning of the fifth century. They were beaten back, but for a century the struggle continued between Rome and Veii. The great Celtic incursion of the Gauls threatened destruction to Rome, but completed the destruction of Etruria. In the fourth century and the first half of the third century B.C. Rome was chiefly engaged in the double task of achieving supremacy, passing into actual dominion among the Latin states, and of establishing the great Senatorial oligarchy, against whose stubborn resolution the Epirote Pyrrhus hurled himself in vain.
Just sixty years after Alexander’s death began the sixty years’ struggle between Rome and Carthage, in the latter years of which the genius of Hannibal was pitted against the grim persistence of the Roman oligarchy. Carthage fell; Rome triumphed, and with her triumph entered on her career of extended conquest.
[Sidenote: The Triumph of Rome]
The organisation which had ruled the city-state itself not ill, and raised it to an immense pre-eminence, sufficed also to maintain its powers of conquest, but not its political virtue. Rome’s armies subdued the divided and disorganised realms which more or less recognised the over-lordship of Macedon; they made the Ptolemies and the Seleucidæ acknowledge their supremacy; they shattered the new barbarian hordes, which began to pour across the Alpine passes, and the African tribes of Numidia. But the lofty public spirit was gone which had made Rome so great when she was battling for life. Reformers arose, only to prove that there was no power in the constitution strong enough to enforce reform. Victorious generals with their legions behind them began to dictate legislation; Marius and Sulla, democrats or reactionaries, signalised their political successes by slaughtering hecatombs of their opponents.
At last, statesmanship and generalship found their supreme incarnation in one person, Julius Cæsar. For many years one of the two foremost men in the Republic, he finally crushed his rival Pompeius and became acknowledged head of the state. Before he could complete the work of reconstruction, Cæsar fell beneath the daggers of Republican enthusiasts; but ere many years had passed his adopted son Octavian triumphed over all rivals, and established the Principate or Empire, the absolute dominion of one ruler over the whole Roman world--although that dominion was still maintained under the Republican forms.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: B.C. 500 to 1 | | | | Collision of East and West. The Glory of Greece. Alexander and | His Conquests. The Rise of Rome. Overthrow of Carthage and the | | Establishment of the Roman Empire | +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+ | B.C.| The East and Africa | Europe | B.C.| | 500 | GREECE: Revolt of Ionian | GREECE: Repulse of Persia | 500 | | | Greeks from Persia, | at Marathon (490), | | | | 499. | Salamis (480) and Plataea | | | | Liberation from Persia | (479) and of Carthage by | | | | of Greek States in | Syracuse at Himera (480). | | | | Asia Minor. | | | | | | ROME: Increase of political | | | | Revolt of Egypt from | power of Plebeians. | | | | Persia: re-conquest. | Tribunes. First Roman | | | | | Legal Code (the XII. | | | | | Tables). | | | 450 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 450 | | | | GREECE: Age of Pericles, | | | | | the great Athenian | | | | Egypt again independent | dramatists, and Phidias. | | | | of Persia. | Struggle for supremacy | | | | | between Athens and | | | | | Sparta. | | | | | ROME: Decadence of Etruscan | | | | | power. | | | | | Progress of Plebeians in | | | | | obtaining administrative | | | | | power. | | | 400 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 400 | | | | GREECE: Socrates and Plato. | | | | | Spartan and Theban | | | | | supremacies. | | | | | ROME: Invasion by the Gauls.| | | | | The land question: the | | | | | Licinian Laws. | | | | | Establishment of new | | | | | “Senatorial” oligarchy. | | | | Revival of Persian | Extension of Roman | | | | energy under | military settlements | | | | Artaxerxes Ochus. | or colonies. | | | 350 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 350 | | | Overthrow of Persia by | GREECE: Philip of Macedon. | | | | Alexander; India | Demosthenes at Athens. | | | | invaded. | Aristotle. | | | | Partition of Alexander’s | Conquests of Alexander | | | | Empire. The Ptolemies | the Great, 334-322. | | | | in Egypt, and the | ROME: Second Roman treaty | | | | Seleucidæ in Asia. | with Carthage. | | | | Friendly relations | Dissolution of Latin | | | | between Seleucus and | League. Supremacy of | | | | Chandragupta of | Rome in Italy. Samnite | | | | Hindostan. | wars. | | | 300 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 300 | | | | ROME: Legislative power of | | | | | Plebeian Comitia. Tributa | | | | | established. | | | | | Pyrrhus in Italy and | | | | | Sicily. | | | | Contests between Syria | Treaty between Rome and | | | | (Seleucidæ) and Egypt | Egypt. | | | | (the Ptolemaic dynasty). | Senatorial supremacy at | | | | | Rome. | | | | | First Punic War | | | | | (264-241). | | | | | GREECE: Rise of the Achæan | | | | | League. | | | 250 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 250 | | | Asoka, king of Maghada | Carthaginian power | | | | (Hindostan), Buddhist. | established in Spain. | | | | Extension of the Seleucid| ROME: Second Punic War, | | | | dominion under | 218-201. Hannibal in | | | | Antiochus the Great. | Italy, 218-203. Scipio | | | | Rise of the Parthian | in Spain, 211-206. | | | | dominion of the | Zama, 202. | | | | Arsacidæ. | Extension of Roman dominion | | | | Fall of Carthage, 202. | over Spain and North | | | | | Africa. | | | 200 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 200 | | | Wars between Parthia and | Organisation of provinces | | | | the Seleucidæ. | subject to the Imperial | | | | | Republic. | | | | Maccabean revolt of | History of Europe merges in | | | | Judæa. | that of ROME. | | | | | Collision of Rome with (1) | | | | Antiochus Epiphanes | Macedon; (2) the Syrian | | | | conquers Egypt, but | kingdom of the Seleucidæ. | | | | retires. | | | | | | Macedon becomes a Roman | | | | Egypt and Syria become | province. | | | | Roman protectorates. | Rome assumes protectorate | | | | | of Egypt and Syria. | | | 150 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 150 | | | | Third Punic War, and | | | | Nabatæan State in Arabia.| destruction of Carthage, | | | | | 146. | | | | | Greek States absorbed into | | | | A Tartar kingdom | province of Macedonia. | | | | established in east | Development of political | | | | of Parthia. | power of (1) demagogues; | | | | | (2) soldiers. | | | | | The Gracchi, 133-121. | | | | Jugurthan War in Africa. | Conquest of South Gaul: | | | | | defeat of Teutones and | | | | | Cimbri by Marius. | | | 100 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 100 | | | | Social war. Marius and | | | | Mithradatic wars, 88-63. | Sulla. The Proscriptions. | | | | | The Sullan Constitution, 81.| | | | The East, to the | Pompey. Rise of Julius | | | | Euphrates, brought | Cæsar. | | | | under Roman dominion. | The East brought under | | | | | Roman dominion. | | | | Judæa: fall of the | Cæsar conquers Gaul; | | | | Maccabees. | lands in Britain. | | | 50 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 50 | | | Scythian or Tartar | Overthrow of Pompey: Cæsar | | | | incursion into India, | virtual emperor. | | | | and admixture with | Murder of Cæsar, 44. | | | | Punjab races. | Rivalry of Antony and | | Octavian, 43-30. | | | | | The Principate, or Empire, | | | | Egypt becomes a Roman | established under Augustus| | | | province, 30. | (Octavian) in virtue of | | | | | the Imperium Proconsulare | | | | | (27) and Tribunicia | | | | | Potestas (23). The Empire | | | 1 | | organised. | 1 | | B.C.| | Cicero, Virgil Livy, Horace.| B.C.| +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+
[Sidenote: The Birth of Christ]
A tremendous event in itself, the reign of Augustus also witnessed one which has had a great influence on the history of the world--the birth of Christ. His ministry, to which perhaps the term event should be applied, was during the reign of the second Emperor, Tiberius. The new faith born on the soil of Judæa was to modify profoundly all the ideals, social and political as well as theological and personal, of the entire Western world; but for many years its adherents remained nothing more than a persecuted yet steadily growing sect; suspected and hated as anarchists rather than as misbelievers, in a world where the rankest and wildest superstitions lived side by side with a general intellectual scepticism.
For four centuries the Imperial city ruled over nearly the whole known world. Beyond the Euphrates on the east, beyond the Rhine and the Danube, she could maintain no permanent footing; within her own borders it seemed as though her sway became a part of the natural order--so much so that when her power had passed away her very conquerors did her homage and took upon themselves titles as her officers.
[Sidenote: Rome in her Decline]
But the overthrow was yet a long way off. The reconstruction organised by Augustus and his Ministers was developed by able rulers--Tiberius, Trajan, Hadrian, the Antonines--during some two hundred years, in spite of intervals when a murderous tyranny or a feeble incompetence occupied the throne of the Cæsars. From the Pillars of Hercules to the river of Mesopotamia, northward as far as Britain, southward to the deserts of Africa, Roman civilisation, Roman law and justice, Roman military discipline, and Roman roads maintained the Roman peace.
[Sidenote: Fall of Rome and Rise of Goths]
Then came an era when the Imperial purple became the prize of successful generals acclaimed by their legions; and the frontier armies, themselves largely formed out of Teutonic or other semi-“barbarian” tribes, found themselves face to face with new barbarian hordes which for another century and a half they held in check. But the tremendous external pressure on frontiers so vast made it imperative that the Government should be somewhat decentralised. At the end of the third century Diocletian parted the empire into four great divisions. The new system could not endure; Constantine the Great again became sole emperor. Under him Christianity was at length adopted as the state religion; the Church herself became a fundamental factor in the political system; and the political centre of gravity was transferred from Rome to Byzantium.
[Sidenote: Beginning of Byzantium]
Again the empire was partitioned, and then, for a brief while before the end of the fourth century, united again under Theodosius. But the end was at hand. For a few years the great general Stilicho held the Teutonic Goths at bay in Italy, while Vandals and Sueves poured through Gaul into Spain. Then, early in the fifth century, Stilicho died. Alaric led his conquering hordes to the gates of Rome, and sacked the Eternal City. His successor, Ataulf, took his Goths away, to drive the Vandals out of Spain into Africa, and set up a great western kingdom on their own account. But after the Goths, fresh barbarians swarmed in--Tartar Huns under Attila, who wrought huge devastation and then vanished for ever; then fresh Teutonic armies, which took possession of Italy, though in the East the Empire still held its own. And in Gaul the (German) Franks under their king, Clovis (Chlodwig, Ludwig), established the dominion which was to give its name to France when the Frankish element had almost passed out of the country. Far-away Britain had already been abandoned, and was falling a prey to the Saxons and the Angles, the “English” who were driving the earlier Celtic inhabitants before them into the mountain fastnesses of the west and north. Again, in the East, in the sixth century, the empire centred at Byzantium asserted its power. Justinian is memorable for that great codification of Roman Law on which the legal systems of half the jurists in Europe have been based. His reign is famous also for the exploits of his brilliant general, Belisarius, who destroyed the Vandal kingdom in Africa, restored the Imperial rule in Italy, and recovered provinces in Asia which had been in danger of falling into the grip of the now aggressive rulers of Persia. But in the West, the success was only temporary. Under pressure of Tartar or Slavonic hosts from the East, a fresh Teutonic swarm, the Lombards, entered Italy and mastered the North. The significance of Rome now lay in the supremacy of her pontificate, unacknowledged in the East.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 1 to 500 | | | | Organisation of the Roman Empire. The Rise of Christianity. | | Partition of the Empire. The Barbarian Invasion and Fall of the | | Western Empire. Rise of the Franks | +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+ |A.D. | The East and Africa | Europe |A.D. | | 1 | | Beginning of the Christian | 1 | | | | Era. | | | | | Imperial system completed | | | | | under Tiberius. | | | | | Rhine, Danube, and Euphrates| | | | | form frontiers of the | | | | | Empire. | | | | | Caligula and Claudius | | | | | emperors. | | | | | BRITAIN: Roman occupation. | | | | | Spread of Christianity. | | | 50 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 50 | | | | Nero emperor: Galba, Otho, | | | | | Vitellius. | | | | Destruction of Jerusalem | Vespasian: the “Flavian” | | | | by Titus, 70. | emperors. | | | | | Nerva chosen by Senate in | | | | | succession to Domitian. | | | | | The “Five good Emperors,” | | | | | 96-180. | | | | | Succession of Trajan, 98. | | | 100 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 100 | | | Arabia designated as a | Trajan’s campaigns in Dacia.| | | | Roman province. | Administration organised | | | | Trajan’s expedition to | under Hadrian. | | | | the Persian Gulf | Roman law systematised by | | | | unsuccessful. Eastward | Salvius Julianus. | | | | expansion of Rome | Antoninus Pius. | | | | checked. | | | | 150 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 150 | | | Establishment of Roman | Development of Roman | | supremacy in Armenia. | civilisation in Gaul | | | | | and Spain. | | | | | Campaigns of Marcus Aurelius| | | | | in Pannonia. | | | | | The legions in Illyria, | | | | | largely composed of | | | | | “barbarians,” acquire | | | | | power. | | | | | After Commodus, series of | | | | | emperors by military | | | | | selection. | | | | Successful campaigns of | Severus temporarily assigns | | Severus against | the West to Clodius | | | | Parthians. | Albinus. | | | 200 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 200 | | | Persian kingdom of the | Further systematising of | | | | Sassanides displaces | Roman law by the juris | | | | the Parthian Empire. | consulti, Ulpian, etc. | | | | | Increasing pressure of | | | | | Teutonic tribes on the | | | | | frontier. Campaigns of | | | | | Maximinus. | | | | | Decius emperor: official | | | | | persecution of | | | | | Christianity. | | | 250 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 250 | | | Overthrow of Emperor | Advance of the Goths and | | | | Valerian in the East by| Alemanni checked | | | | the Persians. | by Claudius and Aurelian. | | | | Destruction of Palmyra | Diocletian emperor. Division| | | | in the reign of | of the Empire under a | | | | Zenobia. | subordinate “Augustus” and| | | | | two subordinate “Cæsars”. | | | 300 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 300 | | | Extension of Buddhism | Last persecution of | | | | in China. | Christians under | | | | | Diocletian. | | | | | Constantine the Great. | | | | | Constantinople (New Rome, | | | | | Byzantium) is made the | | | | | centre of the Empire. | | | | | Christianity established as | | | | | the State religion | | | | | Council of Nicæa. | | | 350 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 350 | | | Unsuccessful Roman | Temporary revival of Paganism| | | | campaign against | under Julian the | | | | Persia. | Apostate. | | | | | Advance of the Goths checked | | | | | by Theodosius. | | | | | Empire separated into East | | | | | and West, 396. | | | | | Alaric the Visigoth held in | | | | | check in the Western Empire| | | | | by Stilicho. | | | | | Westward movement of Vandals | | | | | through Gaul to Spain. | | | 400 +-------------------------+------------------------------+ 400 | | | | Sack of Rome by Alaric, after| | | | | death of Stilicho. | | | | | End of the Roman occupation | | | | | of Britain. | | | | | The Goths withdraw westwards.| | | | | Establishment of the | | | | | Visigothic kingdom of | | | | | Theoderic in Spain and | | | | Vandals, expelled from | Aquitania. | | | | Spain, established in | Irruption of the Huns under | | | | Africa. | Attila. | | | 450 +-------------------------+------------------------------+ 450 | | | | BRITAIN: The coming of the | | | | | Saxons. | | | | | Barbarian “Patricians” set up| | | | | and depose Western | | | | | Emperors. | | | | | Odoacer, “King” in Italy, | | | | | recognises supremacy of the| | | | | Eastern Emperor Zeno. | | | | | Theoderic the Ostrogoth | | | | | founds a Teutonic State in | | | | | Italy. | | | 500 | | Rise of the Franks in Gaul, | 500 | |A.D. | | under Clovis. |A.D. | +-----+-------------------------+------------------------------+-----+
In Spain, the Gothic supremacy gave promise of an orderly and just government. In the wide realms of the Franks anarchy and bloodshed were almost ceaseless. In neither did the dominant Teutons drive out the older Iberian and Celtic populations, as the English were doing in the open lands of the northern island. In both, the German institutions were developing into that feudal system which was utterly incompatible with the maintenance of a strong central rule, since it enabled a powerful vassal to bid defiance to his nominal suzerain. Throughout the sixth and seventh centuries progress was stayed in ancient Gaul; in Spain it was to be revolutionised by a new invader.
[Sidenote: Islam in Being]
Eastward, at the end of the sixth century, the Slavonic wave was surging upon the empire’s northern frontier; in Asia, Persia was again forcing her way towards the Mediterranean. Both were checked by the Emperor Heraclius early in the seventh century. But, meantime, a new Power had come into being. Mohammed had arisen. Inspired by the fanatical fervour of Islam, the warriors of Arabia, soon to be known as the Saracens, swept all before them. They did not at first make Europe their objective; the Caliphs carried their conquering arms over Western Asia, into Egypt, and along the southern coasts of the Mediterranean. Then they began to beat against the empire itself. The eighth century had hardly opened when they poured into Spain; dissensions among the Gothic chiefs gave them prompt victory. They swept up to the Pyrenees; but their advance was stayed by Charles Martel, the virtual lord of the Frankish kingdom. On the East their armies assailed Constantinople, but were disastrously repulsed by the Emperor Leo the Isaurian.
Now, for the first time, Papal sanction was demanded and obtained for a change of dynasty. The last Merovingian king of the Franks was deposed in favour of Pepin, the son of Charles Martel. He was succeeded by his son, Karl, a German of the Germans, despite the French form of his popular title Charlemagne.
[Sidenote: Charlemagne and His Empire]
During his long reign the Moors in Spain were driven back beyond the Ebro; the Saxon tribes across the Rhine were forced to submit and to accept Christianity; the Lombard oppressors of Italy were vanquished; and on the Pope’s initiative, Charlemagne himself was acclaimed and crowned at Rome as emperor and successor of the Cæsars. All of the West that remained to Byzantium was Southern Italy. The revived empire came into being on Christmas Day, A.D. 800.
The great dominion and the organisation constructed by Charlemagne fell into divisions after his death. The lands east of the Rhine remained German; on the west, the Teutonic forces yielded to the Latinised Celtic spirit. Slowly France and Germany emerged. In England the supremacy among the rival peoples passed from the Angles of Northumbria or of the Midlands to the Saxon house of Wessex. Hungary was held by the Mongolian Avars, presently to be displaced by their Magyar kinsmen; otherwise Eastern Europe, Illyria, as well as the Trans-Danube districts, was being gradually possessed by the Slavonic races. Their westward movement was decisively stayed in the tenth century by Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great, who, for the second time, revived the “Holy Roman Empire” in the West in a form which effectively translated it into the “German Empire.” Meanwhile, the Vikings from the north first ravaged the western coasts, then wrung great provinces from the kings of England, and of “Francia,” preparing for the day when the Norman spirit should set the tone of Western Europe.
[Sidenote: Birth of Feudalism in Europe]
In the Eastern Mohammedan world the Saracen dominion was passing to Tartar races--to the Seljuk Turks or the Ghaznavid Turks, and later to the Ottomans; the genuine Saracens had seen their greatest days in the times of Harun-al-Raschid, when the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne was being dismembered. Europe in the eleventh century had passed, or was passing, into what is distinctively known as the Feudal Period, or later Middle Ages. Everywhere it became the object of the great rulers to establish a strong central government, and of the Papacy to establish a supremacy over all governments. Feudalism and the Papacy were the rivals of the centralising tendency.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 500 to 1000 | | | | Teutonic Races Dominate the West. Rise of Mohammed: extension of | | Mohammedan Rule from Cordova to Kabul. Western Empire Revived | | by Charlemagne and again by Otto | +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+ |A.D. | The East and Africa | Europe |A.D. | | 500 | | Franks predominant on Rhine | 500 | | | | and in Gaul. | | | | | Justinian emperor at | | | | | Constantinople. | | | | Overthrow of the African | Roman Law codified in the | | | | Vandal kingdom by | Institutes. | | | | Belisarius, general of | Overthrow of Gothic kingdom | | | | Justinian. | in Italy by Belisarius. | | | | | Advance of Saxons (South) | | | | | and Angles (East) in | | | | | England. | | | 550 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 550 | | | Buddhism introduced in | Lombard conquest of North | | | | Japan. | Italy. | | | | | Spread of Celtic | | | | | Christianity in Britain by| | | | | St. Columba. | | | | Advance of Persia against| Pontificate of Gregory the | | | | the Eastern Empire. | Great. | | | | | Latin Christianity | | | | | introduced into Kent by | | | | | St. Augustine, 597. | | | 600 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 600 | | | Overthrow of Persia by | ENGLAND: Supremacy of | | | | Emperor Heraclius. | Northumbria. | | | | MOHAMMED. The Hegira | | | | | (622). | ITALY: North under Lombard | | | | | dominion; South attached | | | | Conquest of Egypt and | to the Eastern Empire. | | | | Syria by the Caliphs | | | | | Abu-bekr and Omar. | Avar dominion in Hungary. | | | | Conquest of Persia, and | | | | | extension of Caliphate | Slavonic settlement in | | | | over West Asia. | Servia. | | | 650 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 650 | | | Saracens (Caliphate) | ENGLAND: Final overthrow of | | | | attack the Empire in | Paganism. | | | | the East and in Africa.| Triumph of Roman over Celtic| | | | | Christianity. | | | | Rise of the Shiite sect | FRANKS: Dukes of Austrasia | | | | of Mohammedans. | (East Franks) dominate the| | | | | Merovingian kings. | | | 700 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 700 | | | Revival in India of | Saracens (or Moors) | | | | Brahmanism, gradually | overrun Spain. | | | | developing into modern | Saracen advance checked by | | | | Hinduism. | Emperor Leo the Isaurian | | | | | at Constantinople, and by | | | | | Charles Martel at Tours. | | | | | Beginning of the | | | | | Iconoclastic controversy. | | | | | Discussions between Papacy | | | | | and Eastern Church. | | | 750 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 750 | | | | ENGLAND: Supremacy of | | | | | Mercia. | | | | Division of the Caliphate| FRANKS: Fall of the | | | | into Eastern (Abassid) | Merovingian dynasty. | | | | at Bagdad and Western | Pepin the Short founds the | | | | (Ommeiad) at Cordova. | Karling or Carolingian | | | | | Dynasty. | | | | Rise of the Turks in the | Empress Irene at | | | | Caliphate armies. | Constantinople. | | | | | FRANKS: Karl the Great | | | | Harun-al-Raschid Caliph | (Charlemagne) succeeds | | | | at Bagdad. | Pepin as king of the | | | | | Franks. He drives the | | | | | Moors beyond the Ebro, | | | | | conquers the Lombards, and| | | | | is crowned as Roman | | | | | Emperor by the Pope. | | | | | (800). | | | 800 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 800 | | | | Subjugation of the Saxons | | | | | by Charlemagne. | | | | Increasing power of the | Division of Charlemagne’s | | | | Western Caliphate. | dominion among his | | | | | grandsons. | | | | | ENGLAND: Supremacy of | | | | | Wessex under Egbert. | | | | | The Danes, or Northmen, | | | | | harry the coasts of | | | | | Europe. | | | 850 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 850 | | | Fatemide Mohammedan | Carolingian dominion divided| | | | dynasty established in | into West (Francia), East | | | | Egypt. | (Franconia, Germany), | | | | Decline of the Abassid | Central (Burgundy) and | | | | Caliphs. | Italy. | | | | | Pressure of Slavonic peoples| | | | | on East Germany. | | | | | ENGLAND: Alfred the Great. | | | | | Settlement of the Danes | | | | | in the Danelagh. | | | | | Organisation of | | | | | Government, Law, etc. | | | | | Advance of Magyars in | | | | | Hungary. | | | | | Iceland colonised, 874-950. | | | 900 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 900 | | | | FRANCE: Duchy of Normandy | | | | | ceded to Rollo. | | | | | NORWAY united under Harold | | | | | Haarfager. | | | | | ENGLAND: House of Wessex | | | | | kings of all England. | | | | | GERMANY: Henry the Fowler, | | | | | Saxon King of Germany, | | | | | and his son Otto the | | | | | Great, check the Magyar | | | | | advance. | | | | | Pressure of Slavs on | | | | | Eastern Empire. | | | 950 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+ 950 | | | Recovery of Eastern | EMPIRE: Otto becomes King | | | | Provinces from the | of Italy and Roman | | | | Saracens by the | Emperor. The Holy Roman | | | | Byzantine Empire. | Empire is from this time | | | | | definitely German. | | | | | FRANCE: The Capet dynasty | | | | | replaces the Carolingian. | | | | | Slavs driven back by Eastern| | | | | Emperors. Russians | | | | | Christianised. Slav | | |1000 | | dominion established in |1000 | |A.D. | | Poland. |A.D. | +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+
[Sidenote: England and France]
In England, where a Norman dynasty and Norman aristocracy established themselves, the unifying process was astonishingly rapid. The country was comparatively shielded from Papal interposition by distance. A series of vigorous and able monarchs prevented pure feudalism from ever getting developed; it resulted that in the thirteenth century baronage and people made common cause in imposing not feudalism, but constitutional control over the kings. In France, the victory of the crown over feudalism was far slower; the feudatories were too powerful, and among them were the kings of England, as dukes or counts of great territories within France. The Hundred Years’ War was, in fact, not so much a contest for the French crown as a struggle between the French kings and their mightiest vassals. It was not till the English had been finally expelled that Louis XI. was enabled to make the crown supreme in France. There, as in England, the monarchy never submitted to the Papacy; it was so far victorious in that struggle that in the fourteenth century the seat of the Roman pontificate was transferred to Avignon, and the Pontiff himself became literally the creature of France.
[Sidenote: Christendom and the Crusades]
Spain and Byzantium alike remained for the most part outside the general European current. They were the buffers between Christendom and Islam. In the Spanish Peninsula the Moors were held more or less at bay, but the land was not freed from their dominion till the close of the fifteenth century. Byzantium held the Turks at bay till the middle of the same century; then she fell for ever. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, Christendom carried on against Islam the long contest of the Crusades; but the warriors who took part in those wars neither fought nor organised as though themselves forming an organic body; the Christian hosts in Palestine were mere miscellaneous gatherings, united only in the temporary fits of enthusiasm. The Holy Sepulchre was gained, but within a century it was lost again; the crusading cause was one to which not states, but individuals only, devoted themselves. Conquest would have been possible only if the Crusaders had gone forth prepared to make their own homes in Asia. The East could not be held by garrisons with no abiding interest there.
Islam, then, held, and more than held, its own against the West; while during these same centuries it swept east and south through the passes of the Punjab into India, establishing Turk and Afghan kingdoms over most of the great peninsula; though the vast bulk of the population there held to the Hinduism which, born of the earlier Brahmanism, had almost expelled the Buddhist religion, which, however, had established itself permanently in Further India and China.
[Sidenote: Empire, Feudalism, & Papacy]
The might of Islam could have been overthrown only by a united Christendom, and for that the disintegrating forces were too great. England and, more slowly, France freed themselves from feudalism. But Christendom required one head. If the Papacy had stood by the empire, feudalism might have been broken down, and the emperor have become that head. But the Papacy aimed at supremacy for itself--the spiritual power was at war with the temporal. Anti-imperial factions claimed the support of the Church; the efforts at consolidation of the great Hohenstaufen Emperors, Barbarossa and Frederick II., were unsuccessful. The empire itself became only a congeries of kingdoms and dukedoms, counties, bishoprics, free cities, and leagues of cities, under the Austrian house of Hapsburg; while Rome, mighty from the days of Gregory VII. to Innocent III., lost its prestige in the captivity at Avignon and by the Great Schism which followed. In England Wycliffe’s voice was raised; on the south-east of the empire the Hussite wars raged, premonitory of the Reformation.
[Sidenote: End of the Middle Ages]
In 1453 Constantinople fell, and the Turk was permanently established in the east of Europe. As a counterstroke, in the west, not forty years later, the Moorish dominion in Spain was wiped out, Spain emerging as a united Christian kingdom. Before the end of the century Columbus and Gama had discovered America, and virtually rediscovered India. Across the ocean a new, almost unlimited field for expansion, for enterprise, for rivalry had been opened to the European peoples. Already in the realms of intellect old forgotten knowledge had been gradually recovered by the Renascence, the revival of learning and letters; with the intellectual expansion and the invention of the printing press paths to new knowledge were being opened. Men were shaking themselves free from the shackles of authority and tradition. Hence, the sixteenth century witnessed that revolt of half Western Christendom from Rome which we call the Reformation; in its essence, though by no means in its form at the first, a revolt against the interposition of any human authority between the individual man and his Maker. With that revolt political and national divisions were inextricably blended, while the whole was complicated by the new conditions of political supremacy created by the New World.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 1000 to 1500 | | | | Development of Feudalism. The Rise and Decadence of the Papacy. | | The Crusades. Holy Roman Empire. The Organisation of England, | | France, and Spain. The Renaissance | +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+ |A.D. | The Non-Christian World | Christendom |A.D. | |1000 | | |1000 | | | Mahmud of Ghazni. | Scandinavian power: Canute, | | | | Beginning of | King of Norway, Sweden, | | | | Mohammedan invasions | Denmark, and England. | | | | of India. | Franconian line of emperors;| | | | | Burgundy reunited to | | | | | Empire. | | | | | Dynasty of Hugh Capet in | | | | | France. | | |1050 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1050 | | | | ENGLAND: The Norman | | | | | conquest, 1066. | | | | | Norman conquests in Sicily | | | | | and S. Italy. | | | | Power of the Seljuk | Power of the Empire under | | | | Turkish Dynasty. | Henry III. | | | | | Pontificate of Gregory VII. | | | | | (Hildebrand). Beginning | | | | | of the struggle between | | | | | Papacy and Empire (Henry | | | | | IV.) | | | | | First Crusade. | | |1100 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1100 | | | | Development of Papal power. | | | | | ENGLAND: Organisation of | | | | | central government under | | | | | Henry I. checked under | | | | | Stephen. | | | | | Norman kingdom of Sicily. | | | | | Conrad, first Hohenstaufen | | | | | emperor. Beginning of | | | | | Guelphs (Papal) and | | | | | Ghibellines (Imperial). | | |1150 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1150 | | | | The Angevin dominion of | | | | | II., comprising half | | | | | France. | | | | Establishment of | ENGLAND: End of feudal | | | | Mohammedan (Ghori) | anarchy. Maximum power of | | | | dynasty at Delhi. | Crown. Henry worsted in | | | | | the struggle with the | | | | | Church. | | | | Conquests of the Saracens| Chivalry typified in Richard| | | | under the Seljuk | Cœur-de-Lion. | | | | Saladin. | Frederick Barbarossa | | | | | emperor, 1155-1190. | | | | Third Crusade | City development. Lombard | | | | (Cœur-de-Lion). | League; and German Free | | | | | Cities. | | | | | Advance of Moors in Spain. | | |1200 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1200 | | | Genghis Khan: Tartar | Highest power of Papacy, | | | | conquests in Asia and | under Innocent III. | | | | irruption into Europe. | Francis of Assisi: | | | | Buddhism obsolescent in | institution of Mendicant | | | | India. | Friars. | | | | | ENGLAND: Magna Charta; | | | | | contest of Crown and | | | | | Barons. Loss of Angevin | | | | | dominion. | | | | | FRANCE: Development of | | | | | central power under Louis | | | | | VIII. and IX. | | | | | Institution of the Teutonic | | | | | knights. | | | | | Break up of the Eastern | | | | | Empire. Venice. | | |1250 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1250 | | | | Decadence of Imperial power.| | | | | First Habsburg emperor. | | | | | End of the Crusading period.| | | | Rise of the Ottoman | ITALY: Rise of Florence. | | | | (Othman) Turks. | Dante. Giotto. | | | | Khublai Khan in Eastern | ENGLAND: Establishment of | | | | Asia. | Parliament (Montfort and | | | | | Edward I.). Organisation | | | | | of the English nation. | | |1300 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1300 | | | | The Papacy “in captivity” | | | | | at Avignon. | | | | Mameluke Sultans in | Independence of Scotland. | | | | Egypt. | Independence of Switzerland.| | | | | Ottoman Turks establish a | | | | | footing in Europe. | | | | | ENGLAND AND FRANCE: | | | | | Beginning of the 100 | | | | | Years’ War. | | |1350 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1350 | | | Rise of the Ming dynasty | The Jacquerie in France. | | | | in China: expulsion of | The Great Schism: period | | | | Mongols. | of dual Papacy. | | | | | ENGLAND: Peasant revolt. | | | | Conquests of Timur the | Failure of Richard II.’s | | | | Tartar (Tamerlane) | attempt at absolutism. | | | | | Wycliffe. | | | | | Union of Lithuania with | | | | | Poland. | | |1400 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1400 | | | Empires of Mexico and | End of Great Schism. | | | | Peru. | Hussite wars. | | | | | English conquest of France, | | | | | and subsequent expulsion. | | | | | Increasing powers of | | | | | Parliament. | | | | | Invention of printing press.| | |1450 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1450 | | | | Turks capture | | | | | Constantinople. | | | | | ENGLAND: Wars of the Roses, | | | | | 1455-1485. | | | | | Maritime greatness of | | | | | PORTUGAL. | | | | | SPAIN consolidated under | | | | | Ferdinand and Isabella. | | | | Discovery of America by | FRANCE consolidated under | | | | Christopher Columbus; | Louis XI. | | | | and of Cape route to | ENGLAND consolidated under | | | | India by Vasco da Gama.| Henry VII. Establishment | | | | | of absolutism under | | | | | constitutional forms. | | |1500 | | Revival of learning. | 1500| |A.D. | | Humanists. Savonarola. |A.D. | +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+
[Sidenote: Growth of Modern Nations]
The next two centuries, then, saw France, already a consolidated state, develop into the first military Power under the most absolute monarch in Europe--through a stage of prolonged religious strife which ended by establishing the tolerationist Bourbon, Henry IV., on the throne, through the rule of the two great cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin, to the intolerant autocracy of Louis XIV., with a close aristocracy no longer in opposition to the crown but allied to it.
In England the development was on different lines. There we find an absolutist movement, the outcome of the Wars of the Roses. But however autocratic the Tudors were, they held by constitutional forms, and preserved the intense loyalty of their people. On Elizabeth’s death, a century-old matrimonial alliance placed the sceptres of England and Scotland in a single hand.
Then, on the theory of Divine right, the Crown attempted to override the constitution; the Civil War gave the power neither to king nor parliament, but to a military dictator. On his death the country reverted to a compromise between Crown and Parliament; the Stuarts, again, with the aid of their cousin, the autocrat of France, attempted to recover absolutism. They were driven from the country, and constitutionalism--in effect, government by an oligarchy of landowners--was decisively established. The religious problem had found a decisively Protestant solution at an early stage; but Anglicanism and Puritanism soon grew mutually intolerant; it was only with the Revolution of 1688 that toleration and constitutionalism definitely triumphed together.
[Sidenote: Europe in Development]
Meanwhile, in the reign of Elizabeth, England had asserted her intellectual eminence by giving birth to Shakespeare and to Bacon; and had decisively displaced Spain from the rulership of the seas. In the next century her colonisation of North America counterbalanced the Spanish dominion in the south and centre of the Western Hemisphere, though it was not unchallenged by France. In the East a great commercial rivalry had grown up between English, Dutch, and French--a rivalry still to be fought out.
[Sidenote: Collision of the Dynasties]
In the early years of the sixteenth century matrimonial alliances had joined Spain, the Low Countries, and the empire under a single ruler, a Hapsburg of the (Austrian) Imperial house. The vast dominion was extended by the acquisition of the golden territories of the American continent. The Empire passed to one Hapsburg branch, Spain and her dependencies to another. In the empire, a temporary modus vivendi was established between Roman Catholics and Protestants; but Spain, the colossus which threatened to dominate Europe, was split by the revolt of the Netherlands, and her power shaken to its foundations by the collision with England. In the sixteenth century, Germany was devastated by the religious Thirty Years’ War; Austria emerged only as the chief among a number of German states, and Holland won a naval and commercial position second only to that of England. The Ottoman Turks, still aggressive, were still held in check. In India, a Turkish dynasty known as the Moguls (Mughàls, Mongols) extended its sway from Kabul to the mouth of the Ganges, and almost to Cape Comorin.
At the opening of the eighteenth century the aggressive Continental policy of Louis XIV. involved Europe in the “War of the Spanish Succession.” The French king’s armies were shattered by repeated blows at the hands of Marlborough and Eugene, but he finally obtained his primary object, the recognition of his grandson as king of Spain. The threat of a Hapsburg domination passed into the threat of a Bourbon domination. In the east of Europe a final limit was set to the Ottoman aggression. In Britain, the incorporation of Scotland was completed, formally by the Union of 1707, effectively by the suppression of Jacobitism in 1746.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 1500 to 1700 | | | | New World Entered, and East Re-entered. The Reformation. | | Organisation of European Nations under Absolute Monarchies. | | Constitutional Struggle in England. English Naval Supremacy | +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+ |A.D. | Asia and Africa | Europe and America |A.D. | |1500 | | |1500 | | | The New World bestowed | Raphael, Michael Angelo, | | | | on Spain and Portugal | and Titian. | | | | by the Bull of Pope | Rivalry of Henry VIII. | | | | Alexander VI. | (1509-47), Francis I. | | | | Portuguese dominion | (1515-47), and Charles V. | | | | established in the | (1519-56), who combines | | | | Indian seas by | Spain, Burgundy, and the | | | | Albuquerque. | Empire. | | | | Conquest of Egypt by | Luther challenges the | | | | Ottoman Turks. | Papacy, 1517-20. | | | | Safid dynasty in Persia | The Reformation era opens. | | | | (“The Sofy”). | | | |1520 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1520 | | | First circumnavigation | Turkish advance under | | | | completed, 1522. | Solyman the Magnificent. | | | | Invasion of Hindostan | Gustavus Vasa in Sweden, | | | | (Northern India) by | 1523-60. | | | | Baber, the first | Spain conquers Mexico (1520)| | | | “Mogul” emperor, 1526. | Peru (1533). | | | | Expulsion of Moguls: | REFORMATION: Subjection | | | | dynasty of Sher Shah | of Church to Crown | | | | at Delhi, 1540. | (England). Confession of | | | | | Augsburg: Protestant | | | | | League. Calvin creates | | | | | Presbyterianism. | | |1540 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1540 | | | | RUSSIA: Ivan the Terrible. | | | | | Order of Jesuits formally | | | | | established. | | | | François Xavier in | GERMANY: Contest between | | | | Japan. | Charles V. and Protestant | | | | | princes of Germany ended | | | | | by compromise at Peace of | | | | | Augsburg. | | | | Restoration of Moguls, | ENGLAND: Protestant | | | | 1556. | Revolution (Edward VI.) | | | | | followed by Romanist | | | | | reaction (Mary), and | | | | | final establishment of | | | | | Protestantism (Elizabeth) | | | | | in England and Scotland. | | |1560 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1560 | | | Rule of Akbar, 1556-1605.| SPAIN: Philip II. and the | | | | Toleration of Hinduism. | Inquisition. | | | | | Council of Trent defines | | | | | limits of Roman | | | | | Catholicism. | | | | | FRANCE: Series of civil | | | | | wars of religion, | | | | | 1562-95. | | | | | Revolt of Netherlands from | | | | | Spain. | | | | | Turkish advance checked at | | | | | Lepanto, 1571. | | | | | PORTUGAL absorbed by Spain. | | |1580 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1580 | | | Mogul dominion | Gradual success of the | | | | established and | Netherlands revolt. | | | | organised throughout | English naval supremacy | | | | Northern India. | proved by the Armada 1588.| | | | | Decadence of Spain. | | | | | FRANCE: Toleration secured | | | | | by Henri IV. | | | | | Spenser, Marlowe, and | | | | | Shakespeare. | | |1600 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1600 | | | Development of Japanese | Galileo and Bacon. | | | | Feudalism. | Union of English and | | | | Reign of Jehan Gir in | Scottish Crowns, 1603. | | | | Hindostan, 1605-27. | Dutch and English commerce | | | | First English factory at | in the East Indies. | | | | Surat, 1611. | Virginia, first successful | | | | First English Embassy to | British colony in North | | | | Delhi, 1615. | America, 1606. | | | | | HOLLAND: Independence | | | | | established, 1609. | | | | | GERMANY: Thirty Years’ War | | | | | begins, 1618-48. | | |1620 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1620 | | | Reign of Shah Jehan, | Gustavus Adolphus. | | | | 1627-58. | FRANCE: Richelieu organises | | | | The Taj Mahal built. | absolutism. | | | | End of the Portuguese | ENGLAND: Constitutional | | | | power in the East. | struggle between Charles | | | | Extension of the Mogul | I. and Parliament. The | | | | dominion into the | Petition of Right, 1628. | | | | Deccan. | PORTUGAL recovers | | | | | independence. | | |1640 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1640 | | | Rise of the Manchu | FRANCE: Rule of Mazarin: | | | | (Tartar) dynasty in | absolutism established. | | | | China. | ENGLAND: Civil War, | | | | | resulting in military | | | | | protectorate. | | | | Reign of Aurangzib, | Thirty Years’ War ended by | | | | 1658-1707. | Peace of Westphalia. | | | | Rise of the Mahrattas | Commercial and naval rivalry| | | | under Sivaji. | of English and Dutch. | | | | | Development of France into | | | | | the leading military | | | | | power. | | |1660 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1660 | | | France enters the field | FRANCE: Louis XIV. initiates| | | | in India. | policy of aggression. | | | | Revival of intolerant | ENGLAND: Charles II. | | | | Mohammedanism by | undermines supremacy of | | | | Aurangzib. | Parliament. Repression of | | | | Expansion of the Mogul | Nonconformity by | | | | Empire over Southern | Parliament. | | | | India. | Louis XIV. attacks Holland, | | | | | with occasional support | | | | | from Charles II. | | | | | ENGLAND: Attack on Romanism.| | |1680 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1680 | | | | Aggressive movement of | | | | | Turkey. | | | | | FRANCE: Louis XIV. revokes | | | | | Edict of Nantes, 1685. | | | | | Constitutionalism | | | | | established in England | | | | | by the revolution of 1688.| | | | | Wars of England and Holland | | | | | against France. | | |1700 | | RUSSIA: Peter the Great. | 1700| |A.D. | | Newton and Leibnitz. |A.D. | +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+
[Sidenote: Settling Down of the Powers]
From 1739 to 1763 Europe was again plunged into wars, with an eight years’ interval. The motives of those wars, and of the combinations of states on either side, were complicated; the results were simple. Prussia, under Frederick the Great, emerged as a first-class Power; France lost her North American Colonies to Great Britain; the British East India Company defeated the attempt of the French to establish a paramount influence with the native princes, the Mogul Empire having broken up into a congeries of practically independent satrapies; and the British themselves became established as a territorial Power by the conquest of Bengal. Russia also, organised at the beginning of the century by Peter the Great, had taken her place definitely among the great Powers.
During the next twenty years (1763-1783) Poland was absorbed by her neighbours. The British Empire was sundered by the revolt of the older American Colonies, which were established as the United States of America; while Canada remained loyal. By this time the whole of Europe was practically governed by absolute monarchies; but a cataclysm was at hand. France became the scene of a tremendous revolution. Crown and aristocracy were toppled into the abyss.
[Sidenote: Napoleon and the Revolution]
France proclaimed herself the liberator of the peoples; the monarchs of Europe combined to suppress the proletariat. During the last decade of the century one revolutionary constitution after another was set up in Paris, while the revolutionary armies shattered monarchical armies, and turned the “liberated” peoples into subject dependencies of the Republic. On the seas, however, Britain successfully asserted her supremacy. Of the commanders of the Republic, the most brilliant was the Corsican Bonaparte. He dreamed of making Egypt the basis for achieving an Asiatic empire, and thence overwhelming Europe; but the dream was shattered when he found himself isolated by Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir in the Battle of the Nile. Returning to Paris, he transformed the republic into an empire; he set up his brothers or his generals as rulers over half the kingdoms in Europe; he dictated terms to every government except Britain. Britain annihilated his fleets, and fought and beat his generals in the Spanish Peninsula. He conquered the kings, but the nations rose against him, and overthrew him; his last effort was crushed at Waterloo.
Absolutism was reinstated, but the proletariats had learnt to demand freedom. Steam-power and steam-traction so changed the conditions of production as to revolutionise the relations between labour and capital, and between the landed and the manufacturing interests. In Great Britain political power passed from the landowners to the manufacturers with the great Reform Bill of 1832, and from the wealthy to the labouring classes with the Franchise Bills of 1867 and 1884. Every monarchy has been compelled to submit to limitations of its own powers more or less copied from Britain.
[Sidenote: The World as it is]
Britain herself, not untaught by the breach with America, has learned to establish responsible government in her Colonies, making them virtually free states; and among those states the idea of federation has taken root and is bearing fruit. In India, challenged by one native race after another, she has extended her sway over the whole peninsula, and has abolished the anomaly of governing her great dependency through a trading company. In the West her kinsmen have raised the United States into a mighty nation.
In Europe France has passed through monarchy and republic and second empire into a stable republic; Italy has revolted against foreign rulers, and become a united nation; the small peoples of the Balkan Peninsula have now achieved by arms their liberty from Turkish rule. Prussia has won the hegemony of the German states, and established a new German Empire. Russia, the bogey of the West, and of Britain in particular, has shown her weakness in collision with the sudden development of Japan.
Finally, the Dark Continent has been explored and partitioned: in the south, after a sharp conflict, British and Dutch are on the way to become a united people; in the north, Egypt has been reorganised under British administration. We end, as we began, with the land of the Pyramids.
ARTHUR D. INNES.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 1700 to 1914 | | | | Struggle for Colonial Supremacy. French Revolution and Napoleonic | | Wars. Growth of Democracy and Consolidation of European States. | | Colonial Extension of Responsible Government | +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+ |A.D. | Asia, Africa, and | Europe and America |A.D. | |1700 | Australasia | |1700 | | | | | | | | | War of Spanish Succession, | | | | | 1702-13. Bourbons | | | | | established in Spain. | | | | | Career of Charles XII. of | | | | | Sweden, 1697-1718. | | | | | GREAT BRITAIN: Incorporating| | | | | union of England and | | | | | Scotland, 1707. | | | | | Turkish advance decisively | | | | | stopped by Eugene, 1717. | | | | | Alliance of France and | | | | | Great Britain. | | |1720 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1720 | | | | Anglo-Spanish War, combined | | | | | with War of the Austrian | | | | | Succession, 1739-48. | | | | | Development of Prussian | | | | | military power under | | | | | Frederick William. | | |1740 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1740 | | | Struggle between British | GREAT BRITAIN: End of | | | | and French in Southern | Jacobitism (the | | | | India, 1746-61. | Forty-five) consolidates | | | | | the union. | | | | | Seven Years’ War (1756-63): | | | | | Prussia and Great Britain | | | | | against France, Austria, | | | | Clive conquers Bengal; | and Russia. Achievements | | | | beginning of British | of Frederick. Overthrow of| | | | territorial power in | France at sea, and in | | | | India, 1757. | Canada and India. | | |1760 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1760 | | | British dominion receives| Treaties of Paris and | | | | Mogul’s sanction. | Hubertsburg exclude France| | | | | from America and India, | | | | | and confirm the position | | | | | of Prussia. | | | | Haidar Ali in Mysore. | Partition of Poland. | | | | Governor-Generalship of | GREAT BRITAIN: Quarrel | | | | Warren Hastings | with Colonies; leading to | | | | (1774-85), establishes | War of American | | | | the British power. | Independence, 1775-83. | | |1780 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1780 | | | Dual control in India by | British recovery of naval | | | | East India Company and | predominance. | | | | Parliamentary Board of | UNITED STATES: Independence | | | | Control set up by | established 1783. | | | | Pitt’s India Act. | FRANCE: French Revolution, | | | | | 1789. | | | | Administration of British| War between European | | | | India systematised. | Coalitions and French | | | | | Republic, 1792-1802. Rise | | | | | of Bonaparte. Triumphs of | | | | | French Army and British | | | | Overthrow of Mysore, and | Navy. | | | | and institution of | GREAT BRITAIN: Legislative | | | | subsidiary alliances by| Union with Ireland. | | | | Lord Wellesley. | Kant and Goethe. | | |1800 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1800 | | | Overthrow of Mahratta | War renewed (1803) between | | | | power by Lord Hastings | European Coalitions and | | | | (1819): extensive | Emperor Napoleon (1804). | | | | annexations. | Trafalgar and Austerlitz, | | | | Acquisition of Cape | 1805. Peninsula War, | | | | Colony from Holland by | 1808-13. Moscow Campaign, | | | | Great Britain. | 1812. Waterloo Campaign, | | | | Gradual planting of | 1815. | | | | Australasian Colonies. | European reconstruction. | | | | | Absolutist reaction: the | | | | | Holy alliance. | | |1820 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1820 | | | | Independence of South and | | | | | Central American States. | | | | | Greek War of Independence, | | | | | 1822-29. | | | | Aggressive Eastward | FRANCE: Constitutional | | | | movement of Persia | Monarchy under Louis | | | | checked at Herat. | Philippe, 1830-48. | | | | First Afghan Wars, | GREAT BRITAIN: Parliamentary| | | | 1839-42. | Reform and manufacturing | | | | CHINA: First collision | development. Railways. | | | | with Europe. | | | |1840 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1840 | | | Sikh Wars, 1845-49. | Charles Darwin. | | | | Annexations under | Revolutionary movements in | | | | Dalhousie. | Europe. | | | | Indian Mutiny, 1857. | FRANCE: Republic (1849) | | | | Transfer of Indian | passing to Empire of | | | | Government to British | Napoleon III. (1852). | | | | Crown, 1858. | Crimean War, 1854-56. | | | | JAPAN: Admission of | Establishment of responsible| | | | foreign traders. | government in British | | | | | Colonies. | | |1860 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1860 | | | JAPAN: Revived power of | American Civil War, | | | | the Mikado. | 1861-65. Abolition of | | | | | Slavery. | | | | Advance of Russia in | Independence of United Italy| | | | Central Asia towards | under Victor Emmanuel. | | | | India. | Prussia acquires leadership | | | | | of German States 1866. | | | | Second Afghan War, | Franco-Prussian War, | | | | 1878-80. | 1870-71. New German | | | | | Empire, and new French | | | | | Republic. | | | | | Russo-Turkish War, 1877-78. | | |1880 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1880 | | | Mahdism in the Eastern | British control established | | | | Sudan; ended at | in Egypt. | | | | Omdurman in 1898. | Repeated disturbances in the| | | | British control | Balkan States established | | | | established. | by the Russo-Turkish War. | | | | Partition of Africa into | First Peace Conference of | | | | “Spheres of Influence.”| European powers at the | | | | War between China and | Hague, 1899. | | | | Japan. | Norway separates from | | | | Annexation of Philippines| Sweden and elects King | | | | by United States. | Haakon, 1905. | | | | South African War | Second Peace Conference at | | | | (1899-1902) and | the Hague, 1907. | | | | incorporation of Dutch | | | | | States into British | | | | | Empire. | | | | | Federation of Australian | | | | | Colonies, 1901. | | | | | War between Russia and | | | | | Japan, 1904-5. | | | |1910 +--------------------------+-----------------------------+1910 | | | CHINA: Revolution: Manchu| Allied Balkan States defeat | | | | dynasty displaced by | Turkey, 1912. | | | | Republic, 1912. | Creation of Albania as | | | | Tripoli annexed by Italy | independent state, 1914. | | | | from Ottoman Empire, | Revolution in Mexico, | | |A.D. | 1912. | 1913-14. |A.D. | +-----+--------------------------+-----------------------------+-----+
A TIME-TABLE OF THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD
FROM THE BEGINNING OF HISTORY TO THE PRESENT DAY
Showing at a glance the fate of all nations, their rise, their sway, their decline, and their successors
On this double-page are shown the empires of the ancient world to the rise of Rome, and on the succeeding double-page the ruling powers from Rome until the present day. The chronology is in divisions of a hundred years, except the first four, which, for convenience of space, are shown in longer periods
---------------------------------------------------------------- 1000
975 B.C. Division of the Hebrew kingdom into Judah and Israel after the death of Solomon.
Growth of the Hellenic States.
The age of Homer.
---------------------------------------------------------------- 900
850 B.C. Foundation of Carthage.
Beginnings of the Latin and Etruscan peoples.
---------------------------------------------------------------- 800
Assyrian conquest of Babylon, Syria, and Israel.
753 B.C. The foundation of Rome.
Rapid spread of the Greek Colonies.
---------------------------------------------------------------- 700
Beginnings of the Macedonian kingdom.
Rise of Media.
Beginnings of Japanese history.
Decline of Assyria, fall of Nineveh, and establishment of new Babylonian Empire.
---------------------------------------------------------------- 600
Cyrus, King of Persia, conquers Media, establishes his empire over Lydia, Assyria, and Babylonia (538 B.C.). His son Cambyses conquers Egypt, 525 B.C.
---------------------------------------------------------------- 500
The Greek States revolt against Persia and are triumphant.
Egypt regains independence.
Steady growth of Roman ascendancy in Italy.
Struggle between Athens and Sparta.
---------------------------------------------------------------- 400
Conquests of Alexander the Great (334-322 B.C.). He conquers Persia, masters Egypt, and invades India. At his death his empire is divided: Egypt falls under the Ptolemies, Syria under the Seleucidæ.
---------------------------------------------------------------- 300
Babylon absorbed by Parthian Empire.
Carthage dominates Spain.
Wars between Rome and Carthage. Overthrow of Carthage (202 B.C.).
---------------------------------------------------------------- 200
Judea attains independence under the Maccabees.
Growing power of Rome. Macedon a Roman province; Egypt and Syria made Roman protectorates. The Greek States are absorbed into province of Macedon.
---------------------------------------------------------------- 100
Cæsar conquers Gaul and lands in Britain.
Egypt becomes a Roman province.
Augustus Cæsar. Establishment of the Roman Empire. B.C.
----------------------------------------------------------------
NOTABLE EVENTS
----------------------------------------------------------------
For the first four centuries of the Christian era the Roman Empire absorbed the “known” world, bounded in Europe by the ocean, the Rhine, and the Danube, and in Asia by the Euphrates, and including the Mediterranean districts of Africa. Germanic tribes bore with ever-increasing pressure upon her European borders, and the Parthians defied her in the East. At the close of the third century the centre of political gravity was passing from Rome itself to Byzantium, preparing for the scission of the Empire, into Eastern and Western, which was practically at the close of the fourth century, when it was becoming increasingly clear that Rome could not stand against the Barbarian invaders, notably the Goths under Alaric.
----------------------------------------------------------------
In the fifth century the Empire, long weakened by corruption and the tyranny of the army, was overwhelmed by the Barbarians. Vandals, Western Goths, and Suevi poured into Spain; Franks and Alemanni spread over Gaul; Ostro-Goths and Lombards settled in North Italy; Huns and Avars attacked Thrace.
Britain was invaded by Saxons, Jutes, and Angles.
----------------------------------------------------------------
The seventh and eighth centuries were marked by the rapid rise of Mohammedanism in Arabia; the conquests of the Saracens in Egypt, Africa, and West Asia; the establishment of the Caliphate at Bagdad; and their invasion of Spain. Here they were checked by the Franks.
Charlemagne, son of Pippin, King of the Franks in Germany and Gaul, was crowned in 768, conquered Lombardy in 774, calling himself “King of the Franks and Lombards and Patrician of the Romans.” His empire was divided after his death; from it emerged modern France and Germany. His coronation by the Pope at Rome (A.D. 800) originated the idea of the Holy Roman Empire.
----------------------------------------------------------------
JAPAN
CHINESE EMPIRE
{BRITISH {INDIAN {EMPIRE
AFGHANISTAN
PERSIA
ARABIA
EGYPT
TURKEY {BALKAN {STATES
GREECE
RUSSIAN EMPIRE
ITALY
AUSTRO-HUNGARY
GERMAN EMPIRE
BELGIUM
HOLLAND
SWITZERLAND
FRANCE
PORTUGAL
{SOUTH {AMERICAN {STATES
SPAIN
MEXICO
MOROCCO
GREAT BRITAIN & IRELAND
UNITED STATES
DENMARK
NORWAY
SWEDEN
----------------------------------------------------------------
Disintegration of the Empire of the Caliphs, and rise in Asia Minor of the Seljuk Turks, making war against the Byzantine Empire and the Crusaders, and conquering Egypt.
India is invaded by Mohammedan Afghan rulers, who eventually establish a dynasty at Delhi.
----------------------------------------------------------------
The Kingdoms of Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland, converted to Christianity in the tenth century, come into increasing prominence.
The Kings of Castile, Navarre, Aragon and Portugal war against the Moors, who (A.D. 1248) are restricted to Granada.
The Mamelukes (Slave kings) conquer Egypt (1252).
Switzerland attains independence.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Failure of England to absorb Scotland, or to conquer France. The Hundred Years’ War.
----------------------------------------------------------------
The Turks capture Constantinople (1453).
The Netherlands (Burgundy) united to the House of Hapsburg. (1477).
Spain united; overthrow of the Moorish dominion.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Bohemia and Hungary united to Austria. Spain and Portugal take possession of the New World. Mogul Empire established in Hindostan. The Reformation leads to revolt of the Netherlands from Spain; Spain absorbs Portugal.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Union of English and Scottish crowns (1603); followed by legislative union (1707). Disruption of Germany in the Thirty Years’ War. Establishment of English Colonies in America. Portugal recovers independence.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Spain becomes a Bourbon Power. Rise of Russia and Prussia. Partition of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Further disintegration of German Empire. British dominion in India and North America. Independence of United States.
----------------------------------------------------------------
France predominant under Napoleon. Rise of South American States. Establishment of British India. Italy independent. Egypt, Greece, and Balkan States freed from Turkey. Foundation of German Empire.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Independence of Norway (1905).
----------------------------------------------------------------
+-------------------------------------------+ | CONTEMPORARY FIGURES IN HISTORY | +------+------------------------------------+ | TIME | | | B.C. | | +------+--------------+---------------------+ | 500 |India |Buddha | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |China |Confucious | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Persia |Darius | | | |Xerxes | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Greece |Æschylus | | | |Themistocles | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Rome |Tarquin the Proud | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Judah |Haggai | | | |Zechariah | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 450 |Persia |Artaxerxes | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Greece |Socrates | | | |Plato | | | |Pericles | | | |Herodotus | | | |Thucydides | | | |Sophocles | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Judah |Nehemiah | | | |Ezra | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 400 |Greece |Euripides | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 350 |Greece |Aristotle | | | |Demosthenes | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Macedon |Philip | | | |Alexander | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 200 |Rome |Hannibal | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Judah |Judas Maccabæus | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 50 |Rome |Julius Cæsar | | | |Cicero | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Egypt |Cleopatra | | +--------------+---------------------+ |Jesus |Rome |Augustus | |Christ| |Tiberius | | | |Horace | | | |Virgil, Livy | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Judah |John the Baptist | +------+--------------+---------------------+ +------+------------------------------------+ | A.D. | | +------+--------------+---------------------+ | 50 |Britain |Boadicea | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Rome, Italy |Seneca | | | |St. Paul | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Africa & East |Josephus | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 300 |Rome, Italy |Constantine | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Africa & East |Athanasius | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 400 |Rome, Italy |Alaric | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Africa & East |Augustine | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 600 |France |Chas Matel | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 700 |Britain |Bede | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 800 |Britain |Alfred | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |France |Charlemagne | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Africa & East |Haroun-al-Raschid | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1100 |Spain |The Cid | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Africa & East |Omar Khayyam (Persia)| | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1200 |Rome, Italy |St. Francis | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1300 |Britain |Chaucer | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Switzerland |William Tell | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Rome, Italy |Aquinas | | | |Dante | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Africa & East |Tamerlane | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1350 |Britain |Wycliffe | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |France |Froissant | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Switzerland |Arnold von Winkelried| | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Rome, Italy |Petrarch | | | |Boccaccio | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Africa & East |Hafiz (Persia) | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1450 |Britain |Caxton | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Rome, Italy |Da Vinci | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1500 |Britain |Knox | | | |Latimer | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |France |Rabelais | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Germany |Luther | | | |Copernicus | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Switzerland |Calvin | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Rome, Italy |Columbus | | | |Savonarola | | | |Machiavelli | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Spain |Ignatius Loyola | | | |St. Theresa | | | |Ferdnd. & Isabella | | | |Cortez | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1550 |Britain |Philip Sidney | | | |Spenser | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |France |Montaigne | | | |Scaliger | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Rome, Italy |Cellini | | | |Tasso | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Spain |Alva | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Netherlands |William the Silent | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Russia |Ivan the Terrible | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1600 |Britain |Shakespeare | | | |Raleigh | | | |Bacon | | | |Jonson | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |France |Corneille | | | |Richelieu | | | |Descartes | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Germany |Kepler | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Rome, Italy |Galileo | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Spain |Cervantes | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Scandinavia |Gustavus Adolphus | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Netherlands |Rubens | | | |Van Dyck | | | |Grotius | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1650 |Britain |Cromwell | | | |Milton | | | |Bunyan | | | |Dryden | | | |Locke | | | |Hobbes | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |France |Pascal | | | |Racine | | | |Molière | | | |Fénélon | | | |Rochefoucauld | | | |Louis XIV. | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Germany |Leibnitz | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Netherlands |Spinoza | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Russia |Peter the Gt. & | | | | Catherine | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1700 |Britain |Swift | | | |Steele | | | |Addison | | | |Walpole | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Germany |Handel | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Scandinavia |Holberg | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1750 |Britain |Chatham | | | |Burke | | | |Pitt and Fox | | | |Wesley | | | |Burns | | | |Goldsmith | | | |Sheridan | | | |Dr. Johnson | | | |Coleridge | | | |Flaxman | | | |Reynolds | | | |Gainsboro’gh | | | |Nelson | | | |Wellington | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |France |Voltaire | | | |Lavoisier | | | |Napoleon | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Germany |Fredk the Gt | | | |Goethe | | | |Schiller | | | |Haydn | | | |Mozart | | | |Kant | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Switzerland |Rousseau | | | |Gessner | | | |Pestalozzi | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |America |Franklin | | | |Washington | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1800 |Britain |Faraday | | | |Scott | | | |Byron | | | |Keats | | | |Shelley | | | |Wordsworth | | | |Lamb | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Germany |Hegel | | | |Beethoven | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Scandinavia |Tegner | | | |Thorwaldsen | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1825 |Britain |Gladstone | | | |Macauley | | | |Disraeli | | | |Landseer | | | |Mill | | | |Livingstone | | | |Ruskin | | | |Dickens | | | |Carlyle | | | |Thackeray | | | |Browning | | | |Tennyson | | | |Darwin | | | |Huxley | | | |Spencer | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |France |Balzac | | | |Dumas | | | |Victor Hugo | | | |Georges Sand | | | |Lesseps | | | |Napoleon 3 | | | |Gambetta | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Germany |Wagner | | | |Heine | | | |Bismarck | | | |Moltke | | | |William I. | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Rome, Italy |Garibaldi | | | |Mazzini | | | |Cavour | | | |Victor Emmanuel | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |Scandinavia |Hans Andersen | | | |Runeberg | | | |Wergeland | | | |Welhaven | | | |Ibsen | | | |Bjornson | | +--------------+---------------------+ | |America |Irving | | | |Emerson | | | |Longfellow | | | |Whittier | | | |Lowell | | | |Holmes | | | |Lincoln | | +--------------+---------------------+ | | Russia |Turgenieff | | | |Tolstoy | | +--------------+---------------------+ | | Hungary |Kossuth | | +--------------+---------------------+ | 1900 | | | +------+--------------+---------------------+
THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH
BY PROFESSOR SOLLAS
The origin of our planet is a problem which has appealed to the intellect of thoughtful men from the most remote times, and the earliest recorded speculations concerning it--those of the Mosaic cosmogony--possess a peculiar interest, since they embody the views of the ancient Chaldeans, who were not only systematic observers of the heavens, but made practical use of their results.
[Sidenote: Beginning of a Famous Theory]
The Mosaic cosmogony is not unworthy of the great people among whom it took its rise; it recognises the fact that the earth had a history antecedent to the advent of man, and its account of the order of events in this history is not only remarkable as a feat of a priori reasoning, but accords in some respects with the results achieved after much labour by modern science.
It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the reign of evolution began, and attempts were made to trace the history of a planetary system from its source in a primeval nebula on purely mechanical grounds. Swedenborg (1735) was the pioneer in this direction, then came Thomas Wright (1750) of Durham, whose work furnished inspiration to Emanuel Kant (1755), and led him to construct a consistent scheme of the Universe. The last of this group of cosmic philosophers is Laplace (1796), whose admirable description of the evolution of the solar system was arrived at independently, and without knowledge of the previous work of Kant.
Laplace assumed as his starting-point the existence of a nebula formed of incandescent gas, and extending beyond the limits of the outermost planet of our system. It was in rotation about a central axis, and possessed in consequence a disc-like or lenticular form. Radiating its heat away in all directions through surrounding space, it grew continually colder, and in cooling diminished in bulk. As a consequence of this contraction its rate of rotation increased, till at length the centrifugal force of the outermost part became so great that this could no longer continue to follow the contracting mass within, and thus remained behind as a great rotating ring. The continued contraction of the internal mass, and the resulting increase in the velocity of rotation, again brought about the same condition of things, and a fresh ring was left behind.
[Sidenote: Cooling of the Nebula]
This process was repeated time after time, till as many rings were formed as there are planets in the solar system; the central mass which survived within the innermost ring condensed to form the sun. The rings were highly unstable--that is to say, a slight disturbing force was sufficient to destroy their continuity; they broke across and rolled up into great nebulous globes, which revolved round the sun in the same direction as the original nebula, and rotated on their axes in the same direction as that in which they revolved. Most of them repeated the behaviour of the original nebulæ, leaving behind rings as they contracted, and these rings either rolled up to form moons or satellites, or, in the solitary instance of Saturn’s rings, retained their annular form. The rings are now known to consist of a multitude of solid bodies, as proved by Clerk-Maxwell.
[Sidenote: The Temperature of the Earth]
By this hypothesis, so beautiful in its simplicity, an explanation was afforded embracing all the more important facts of our system; the revolution of all the planets in nearly circular orbits and in the same direction as that in which the sun rotates, and the revolution of their satellites, also in circular orbits and in the same direction as their primaries; the comparatively high temperature and consequent low density of the larger planets and the sun, as well as a variety of other phenomena, all seem to follow naturally from it. The fundamental assumption seems to be in harmony with a number of known facts. Thus in the case of our own planet the volcanoes distributed around the margins of the oceans, and the hot springs scattered irregularly over the whole terrestrial surface, suggest that great stores of heat exist beneath our feet, a presumption which finds confirmation in the fact that whenever we descend towards the interior of the earth, as in deep mines or wells, the temperature continues steadily to rise after we have passed a depth below which seasonal and diurnal changes of temperature cease to be felt, the rise being in some cases as much as 3 deg. for 100 ft., in others only 1 deg. for the same distance, but on the average 1 deg. for 60 ft. or 70 ft. If this increase of temperature continues down to great depths, and there seems to be no reason why it should not, then a point will be reached, say, at thirty or forty miles down, where the interior will attain a white heat.
[Sidenote: The Earth as a Star]
Thus the earth might be regarded as a white hot body surrounded with a film of rock growing continually cooler towards the surface. But such a hot body suspended in space must be cooling, just as all bodies which are hotter than their surroundings. It is cooler to-day than it was yesterday, or--what is the same thing--it was hotter yesterday than it is to-day, and so of all previous yesterdays. And thus as we travel backwards in time we perceive that the earth will be growing hotter, the level of white heat will be mounting upwards towards the surface, and will at last reach it, so that the earth, instead of being, as it now is, a dark body shining only with the reflected light of the sun, will be self-luminous, a tiny star of a magnitude so diminutive as to have awakened resentment on the part of some terrestrial inhabitants, who have regarded it as disproportionate to their dignity. But we cannot arrest imagination at this stage; our thought still extends its retrospective glance into the abyss of past time, and we perceive the earth still growing hotter, till its temperature transcends those limits at which it can exist in the solid state. It becomes molten--nay, more, it becomes gaseous, and thus resumes the nebular state from which it sprang. Precisely the same argument applies to the sun; our mighty luminary is also a cooling body, and if we could restore to it the heat which it has lost in the course of past æons it would resume a completely gaseous state. Modified in one way or another, this chain of reasoning seemed irrefragable in those happy days which preceded the discovery of radium.
[Sidenote: Universe still in Evolution]
The question may be considered from another point of view. On searching the heavens we find that many of the stages which are assumed in Laplace’s hypothesis are still represented by actual existences. There are, to begin with, those immense diffused nebulæ, almost incapable of definition, which are proved, on spectroscopic examination, to emit that kind of light which is characteristic of glowing gas; from these we pass to others which are resolvable by the telescope into a central and more condensed nucleus, with two mighty nebulous arms whirled round in a spiral, and bearing more condensed masses in their midst; even ring nebulæ are known to exist; and, finally, there are nebulous halos which surround some of the stars. Then we come to the stars themselves, which are suns of various degrees of magnitude, some immensely larger than our own luminary, and these are evidently in various stages of existence. Some are blue, and afford evidence of a higher temperature than that of our sun; others are yellow, and make a nearer approach to the solar temperature; while, again, others are red, and certainly colder.
These, in conjunction with other considerations, lead to the conviction that the universe is in a state of evolution, and that the solar system at one time existed in a nebular state. But whether Laplace’s description of the series of events through which the original nebula passed is the true one or not is a very different matter; it presents so many difficulties that scarcely any student now supports it.
[Sidenote: Laplace’s Theory Abandoned]
A fundamental difficulty is the extreme tenuity of the gas which is assumed to have formed the planetary rings. A second difficulty, which has been emphasised by Professors Chamberlin and Moulton, is to be found in the comparatively small amount of rotational energy which the system at present possesses, for this is less than 1/200 of that which, on the most favourable assumption, must have been contained within the original nebula. Less fundamental, but equally fatal, is the fact that one of the satellites of Saturn revolves round its primary in a direction opposed to that of the rotation of the planet itself. [Recently Mr. Stratton, following out a suggestion of Professor W. H. Pickering, has shown that this is quite consistent, and, indeed, is a natural deduction from Laplace’s hypothesis.] Hence for these and other reasons we are reluctantly compelled to abandon an hypothesis which for over a century has exercised an influence on our conception of the cosmos not less profound, penetrating, and far-reaching than that of the famous Darwinian doctrine of natural selection, now on its trial.
[Sidenote: What are the Nebulæ?]
At present, unanimity of opinion, even on questions of the most primary kind, is far to seek. Philosophers are not even agreed as to the constitution of the nebulæ. It is questioned whether even those least resolvable and most diffused forms which give bright line spectra really consist of masses of incandescent gas. Many observers, among them Sir Norman Lockyer, now maintain that they are formed of swarms of meteorites, which, moving with prodigious velocity, meet in frequent collision, and by their impact evolve sufficient heat to become self-luminous. Others, again, like the distinguished investigator Arrhenius, while admitting the gaseous nature of these nebulæ, deny that they are incandescent, and assert that their temperature is not much above that of surrounding space. Their exterior parts consist of the lighter gases in a highly rarefied state, and minute particles of negative electricity, which are always careering through space, on penetrating these gases produce a luminous discharge. A nebula composed of swarms of meteorites would, as Sir George Darwin has shown, behave very much in the same way as one composed of gas, and if in rotation would rotate as a solid mass. The meteorites would stand in the same relation to the nebula as molecules to a gas, and thus the question of the constitution of the nebula, although of great interest in itself, becomes of subsidiary importance in tracing its subsequent history.
[Sidenote: Shaping of the Planets]
One of the latest attempts to frame a nebular hypothesis is that of Professor J. H. Jeans. His reasoning is of a highly mathematical character, and his conclusions are expressed in the most general terms. Starting with a spherical nebula of gas or meteorites endowed with a small amount of rotation, he shows that as it cools or loses energy the temperature of the interior will not fall continuously in precise correspondence with the cooling of the outer parts, and this “lag” of the interior temperature will bring about a tendency to instability. The contraction of the nebula due to cooling will increase the velocity of rotation, and this again will tend to instability. As a result of the instability so produced the nebula will change its form, and become more or less pear-shaped. The narrow end of the pear will then separate from the body and assume an independent existence as a primitive planet. This process will recur again and again till the nebula is resolved into a sun with its attendant planets. The planets, existing at first as gaseous masses or quasi-gaseous masses, will be liable to the same kind of transformation, and may thus bud off moons or satellites.
If the nebula were not in rapid rotation, a slight disturbing cause, acting at the critical moment when a planet was being ejected, might determine the inclination of the planet’s orbit, which might thus be very oblique to the equatorial plane of the nebula. Thus the hypothesis is not open to one of the objections which have been urged against that of Laplace--namely, that the orbits of some of the planets in the solar system are inclined at a large angle with the plane of the sun’s equator.
[Sidenote: Heavenly Bodies in Collision]
Jeans mentions two disturbing causes in particular which might easily arise--one the penetration of the nebula by a wandering meteorite, which might precipitate an event already on the verge of happening, and simultaneously determine both the birth of a planet and the obliquity of its orbit; the second, the presence of some distant mass, such as a star, which, by raising a quasi-tide in the nebula, would give the final touch required to overturn its equilibrium. The influence of a distant body, such as a passing star, has been invoked by Moulton in another version of the nebular hypothesis. In conjunction with Chamberlin, he calls special attention to the spiral nebulæ, which are by far the commonest kind, as presenting the closest approach to the conditions which obtain when planets are actually in course of formation. Chamberlin and Moulton enter on a detailed account of the manner in which they suppose the planets to have grown by the gradual accretion of meteoric masses as these encountered each other while moving in various elliptical orbits.
At present it would seem impossible to speak with certainty as to the precise history of the solar system. Meanwhile, we may console ourselves with the closing words of Professor Jeans’ paper, to the effect that “no difficulty need be experienced in referring existing planetary systems to a nebulous or meteoric origin on the ground that the configurations of these systems are not such as could have originated out of a rotating mass of liquid.”
An investigation by Sir George Darwin, which has furnished inspiration to such hypotheses as that of Jeans, brings us nearer the immediate subject of this essay, since it treats of one of the last acts in the great drama of planetary existence, and attempts to derive the earth and moon from a common origin in a single rotating sphere.
[Sidenote: Why the Day is Growing Longer]
It is well known that, owing to the frictional effects produced by the tides, the earth is being gradually slowed down as it rotates upon its axis. Thus the day is constantly getting longer, so that in a few millions of years it will have increased in length from twenty-four to twenty-five hours. On the other hand, in past time it must have been shorter than at present: a few millions of years ago it was only twenty-three hours in length, and many millions of years earlier it was still less, only some five hours or so. At that time the earth was hotter than it is now, less rigid, more yielding, and, owing to its rapid rotation, less stable. The action on the moon of the tides produced in it by the earth is similar, and the rotation of the moon has been so far diminished by them that its day has become as long as the month--i.e., our satellite only turns once round on its axis in the time that it takes to revolve once round the earth; it is for this reason that our satellite keeps always the same face turned towards us.
[Sidenote: The Moon Was Part of Our Sphere]
The retardation of the earth in its rotation has, however, a very remarkable effect on the revolution of the moon; it involves--by the principle of the conservation of moment of momentum--a corresponding acceleration of the moon in its orbit, and, as a consequence of this, an enlargement of this orbit--that is, the moon is pushed away from us, as it were, and thus becomes more remote. But if so, the moon must have been nearer to us in times past. It is possible to trace the approach of the moon to the earth as we go backwards in time till the distance between them was only two and a half terrestrial radii instead of the sixty radii which now separate them. Mathematics do not take us farther back than this. But it is difficult to resist the suggestion that in the immediately preceding stage of development the earth and moon formed together a single sphere.
If we may adopt this view, then we must regard the sphere as subject to the tidal influence of the sun. It was much hotter, and therefore more yielding, than the present earth; it was also rotating much faster, probably once in about four or five hours. It would be contracting as a consequence of cooling, and the contraction would lead to instability (gravitational instability); its rapid rotation would also tend toward instability (rotational instability). It is difficult to say which of these two, gravitational or rotational instability, would be the most effective; but the combined result would be to give a pear-shaped form to the rotating mass, and eventually to deepen the constriction between the narrow and the broad end, till the smaller protuberance became completely dissevered from the larger mass, and so entered on an independent existence as the moon. This final step in the process would probably depend on the tide-producing power of the sun; the larger mass remained behind as the earth, whose individual existence may be said to date from this event.
[Sidenote: How the Moon Broke Away]
The young earth would be subject to very much the same conditions after as before the ejection of the moon, and might very possibly again pass into a pear-shaped form, but without proceeding further through those subsequent changes, which would have led to the formation of another satellite; and while possessing some such form as this, she might very well have consolidated. With advancing years she would lose, as we have seen, the activity of her youth, the drag of the tides would cause her to spin ever more slowly on her axis, till the day would become prolonged to the twenty-four hours of the present. With this diminished rate of spin, the earth, if free to yield, would lose the pear-shaped form and become an oblate spheroid, and the oblateness of this spheroid would continually diminish, so that it would continually approach towards a true sphere. Suppose, however, that the earth as it cooled lost its power of readily yielding--and at present it is more rigid than a globe of steel--then it would pass from form to form, not by a flowing movement, but by a series of ruptures, and its form at any moment might be a little in arrear of that which it would have possessed if it had been in the fluid state.
Thus it might indeed be possible still to discover some trace of an old-fashioned form in the existing planet; and a careful examination of the distribution of land and sea as represented on a terrestrial globe does, in fact, reveal a remarkable symmetry, in which we seem to recognise a surviving vestige of its early state. The great continent of Africa projects like the narrow end of a pear; around it are oceans--the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea, which was once of far greater extent; then comes a great dismembered ring of land, the two Americas, the Antarctic continent, Australia, Asia, and Europe. Within these, on the side opposite to Africa, is the great Pacific Ocean, which covers over the broad end of the pear.
[Sidenote: Earth’s Unknown Changes]
A line drawn from somewhere in Central Africa to its antipodes in the Pacific, through the centre of the earth, would correspond to the long axis of the pear; a second, at right angles to this, would correspond to its breadth; and a third, at right angles to both, would correspond to the axis on which it rotates. A diameter of the earth taken through the equator is almost 8,000 miles in length, the Polar diameter is about sixteen miles shorter, and this slight difference measures the oblateness of the spheroid, or the departure of the form of the earth from a true sphere. Further, it would appear that the diameter drawn through Africa is about half a mile longer than the equatorial diameter taken at right angles to it, and this insignificant quantity measures the departure of the form of the earth from that of an oblate spheroid to that of a pear, so nearly complete is the adjustment of its form to existing conditions. Before this nice adjustment was reached, the earth must have suffered many changes, passed through many times of stress and storm, and witnessed many geological revolutions.
[Sidenote: An Age of Red-hot Rain!]
If, at the beginning of her career, the earth was molten, or at a very high temperature, she must have been surrounded by a very deep and dense atmosphere, for all the waters which now rest on her surface--oceans, lakes, and rivers--would have contributed to it in the state of steam; and not till the temperature of the ground had fallen to 380 deg. C. could liquid water have begun to accumulate. Then a steady downpour of almost red-hot rain would have set in, filling up the neck of the pear and extending far and wide over its broad end.
The temperature would now fall somewhat rapidly, and in a short space of time the surface of the earth would have become as cool as it is at the present day. Directly the waters of the firmament had collected into the oceans, leaving behind an atmosphere like that which now exists, geological agencies of the kind we are now familiar with would begin their sway. Air and rain would exert their insidious power upon the rocks, sapping their strength, converting the hardest granite into soft sand and clay, which would be washed away by the rain through brooks and rivulets into the channels of many rivers, all hastening with their burden of sediment, to deposit it finally in the sea. Here it would accumulate, layer after layer, building up those mighty masses of strata which now form the greater part of the visible land. While this general action was everywhere in progress, wearing down continents and islands towards the level of the sea, more specialised activities were assisting to the same end.
The waves which fall upon our coasts are now constantly undermining the cliffs and extending the margin of the sea at the expense of the land, and rivers not only serve to transport sediment, but cut down their channels deep into the rock, and so carve out the most varied landscapes of hill and valley from monotonous tableland.
[Sidenote: Action of Winds and Tides]
When we enter into calculations we are astonished at the rapidity with which these agents perform their work even at the present day; but as we proceed farther back into the past, when the earth was full of youthful energy, their power must have been greatly enhanced. We might almost take the measure of the day as the measure of their work, for they probably accomplished as much during the eight hours’ day which once existed as they do now in twenty-four hours. A little consideration will make this clear. It is the winds which, blowing over the surface of the ocean, produce the sea waves, and it is these falling on our coasts that perform the work of marine denudation. But the winds are due in the first place to the heat of the sun, and the difference of temperature established at the equator and the poles; and, in the next place, to the rotation of the earth. Thus, with the increased rapidity of rotation which we know to have existed, and with increased radiation from the sun, a very probable contingency, the winds would increase in strength and more powerfully erode our coasts. Again, with the moon in greater proximity, and with a more rapid rotation of the earth, the tides would be much higher and more frequent, and these, raising and lowering the cutting edge of the sea, greatly assist it in its work of destruction. The winds and the tides produce various marine currents, and these help to distribute the sediment which the rivers deliver into the sea, so that when stronger currents flowed as a result of more powerful tides and more violent winds, the sediments would be strewn over wider areas; hence, the more ancient strata of our planet are far more widely distributed than are those of later time.
[Sidenote: Building Up the Earth]
Finally, a heavier rainfall would result from a more active atmospheric circulation, creating larger rivers, and thus, at the beginning, all those denuding agents which are engaged in wearing the land down into the sea would be working at a more rapid pace. Correspondingly, all the agents which are occupied in building up deposits of sediments would have extended their operations over a wider area, laying down a foundation broad and deep.
On the other hand, the contraction of the earth, due to the loss of its energy of rotation as well as of its internal heat, would also have proceeded more rapidly, new land would have emerged from the sea, old lands would have been submerged beneath it far less slowly than at the present day; ruptures of the crust, accompanied by earthquakes and volcanic action, would have been more frequent and thus, by the more rapid loss of its intrinsic energy, the renovation of the earth would have kept pace with its accelerated destruction.
One effect of the contraction of the earth which has manifested itself in even late geological times is the crumpling up of the terrestrial crust into the sharp folds of mountain chains; but at the beginning this crumpling must have been far more universal and energetic. In this connection it is interesting to observe that the most ancient rocks known to us--the Archæan--never present themselves under any other form than as intensely plicated masses. They originally consisted of lava flows and volcanic ashes, of ancient sediments and limestones, into which subterranean masses of granite and other molten, deep-seated rocks have been injected; but under the intense pressures to which they were subjected after their formation they and the invading granite have entirely lost their original character, and have been metamorphosed into gneisses, schists, and marble, all sharply and closely folded together. In any given district the direction of their folding is maintained with wonderful constancy over great distances. There is no succeeding system of rocks that has been so completely transformed, so universally plicated, as this ancient Archæan complex.
In later times we can pass from stratum to stratum of the sedimentary series and read their history almost as we turn over the pages of a book; in the Archæan all are kneaded together into a state of such desperate entanglement as to defy the powers of human ingenuity to unravel them. Thus the line of demarcation between the Archæan and subsequent sedimentary systems is the sharpest and most absolute that is known to us in the history of the earth. It marks the close of our planet’s infancy, the several events of which have passed into oblivion as profound as that of our own forgetfulness of our earliest days. Later events, on the other hand, are recorded in the stratified series with a faithfulness which increases as we approach existing times.
[Sidenote: How We Know These Wonders]
[Sidenote: The Ocean 100 million Years old!]
[Sidenote: The Part Radium may play]
A history without dates must seem very unsatisfactory to a historian, and the question will naturally arise whether we can assign any definite time to the various critical events recorded in the evolution of the earth. At present we can only make more or less plausible estimates. Thus, from a consideration of the thickness of the sedimentary crust, and the rate at which sediments are now being deposited, it has been asserted that the interval which separates us from the close of the Archæan era may amount to about twenty-six millions of years. Professor Joly, basing his argument on the undoubted fact that the ocean derives the greater part of its salt from the dissolved material contributed to it by rivers, comes to the conclusion that the ocean first came into existence about one hundred millions of years ago. As regards the birth of the moon, Sir George Darwin has given a minimum limit of fifty-four millions of years, but he adds that it may have taken place many hundreds of millions of years before this. Lord Kelvin has attempted to determine the time which has elapsed since the earth first acquired a solid crust. If we only knew the rate at which the earth is cooling we might calculate back to this time with some assurance of certainty, always, however, on the assumption that the earth is simply a hot body cooling like any other hot body--such, say, as a red-hot cannonball. But a few years ago it began to be seriously suspected that this assumption was a very doubtful one, for a new element--radium--was discovered in 1898, which possesses the remarkable property of spontaneously liberating heat, and this not in small quantities, but at an astonishing rate. One gramme of radium, for example, gives out enough heat in one hour to raise the temperature of one gramme of water to boiling point; hour after hour, year in, year out, this wonderful substance is setting free the energy it contains, and will continue to do so until, some thousands of years hence, it has exhausted its store. If this element should happen to exist in sufficient quantity within the earth, then the earth could not be said to be cooling just like a piece of hot iron, and the increase of temperature we experience as we descend towards the interior of the earth might possibly be due to the heat set free from radium. Indeed, the argument is not confined to the earth; it may apply also to the sun, and much of the heat we derive from that luminary may be provided by bursting atoms of radium. This was pointed out by Sir George Darwin and Professor Joly in 1903.
It became obviously a question of the first importance to discover what proportion of the earth’s crust consists of radium, and an investigation was undertaken for this purpose by the Hon. R. J. Strutt, who finds that the rocks composing the earth’s crust contain a superabundance of radium--sufficient, if this element is uniformly distributed through the whole earth in the same proportion as it occurs at the surface, not only to make good the heat which is radiated away into space, but actually to raise the temperature of our planet, which, on this evidence, should, therefore, be growing not colder, but hotter.
This is a result as disconcerting at first sight as it is astonishing, and its effects are very wide-reaching. Of course, it completely destroys the validity of Lord Kelvin’s argument, but it also deprives the nebular hypothesis of one of its cherished lines of evidence--a loss which the force of the general argument enables us to bear with equanimity.
[Sidenote: On the Eve of great Events]
In any case, the vast body of facts bearing on the history of the earth suffices to show that its temperature cannot be rising. Mr. Strutt has, therefore, imagined that the radium is not uniformly distributed throughout the mass of the planet, and supposes that it is restricted to an external zone forty-five miles in thickness; this would suffice to maintain the earth at its existing temperature. If, however, we admit a restriction of this kind, we are in no way bound to fix the limit at forty-five miles. All we can say is that we do not know how far downwards the radium reaches--for aught we know five miles, or even less, is as likely a limit as forty-five miles. Professor Joly, indeed, maintains that the radium we meet with is not proper to the earth at all, but comes from the sun.
Radium is a short-lived element, its existence being limited to a few thousand years; but as fast as it decays it is reproduced at the expense of another element--uranium--the lifetime of which is measured by hundreds of millions of years.
The last quarter of a century has proved fertile in great discoveries--more so than any corresponding period in the past. As a result, the whole world of scientific thought has been thrown into commotion; old-established theories, and even the most fundamental notions, seem to be in a state of flux. Under the stimulus of new ideas great questions, such as the constitution of matter, the origin of species, and the birth of worlds are being re-investigated with renewed energy, and we seem to be on the eve of great events.
WILLIAM JOHNSON SOLLAS
FOUR PERIODS OF THE EARTH’S DEVELOPMENT
A Postscript to Professor Sollas’s Chapter on the Wonderful Story of the World’s Birth, beginning on page 79
The earth was once “a fluid haze of light.” The whole solar system once formed a vast nebula, consisting of glowing gas, or a swarm of meteoroids. Our planet was slowly shaped into a globe out of this primitive nebula.
This globe was at first intensely hot, and probably liquid. A solid crust formed on the surface as heat was lost by radiation, and this crust consisted of the oldest rocks of igneous formation like the granites and gneisses. During this Archæan or Eozoic Period, the earth acquired its atmosphere and its oceans, and it is probable that the mysterious origin of life took place.
The later history of the earth since the stratified rocks began to appear, and life existed, is divided into four main periods, of which the first is known as Primary, or Palæozoic.
The First Period of the Earth
CAMBRIAN SYSTEM. The rocks formed in the Cambrian Age are mainly grits, quartzites, and conglomerates, with shales, schists, and limestones. The earth was then mostly covered by seas, and the first well-defined forms of life were of marine origin.
SILURIAN SYSTEM. The Silurian rocks are mostly sandstones, shales, and slates deposited in the seas. The first vertebrates made their appearance as fishes, whilst insects began to flutter in the air, and occasionally to alight on the emerging land.
DEVONIAN SYSTEM. This was the age of the old red sandstone. Fishes reached a high state of development, whilst the first traces appeared of land vegetation, ferns and lycopods.
CARBONIFEROUS SYSTEM. This system is exceptionally important, because its chief rock is coal, the fossilised remains of the luxuriant vegetation which grew in tropical swamps. The first terrestrial animals, true air breathers, now appeared.
PERMIAN SYSTEM. The last of the primary systems gave us the new red sandstone, distinguished from the old by lying above the coal measures. The Permian Age was apparently unfavourable to life, and is only notable for the first appearance of the land reptiles into which the amphibians developed.
The Second Period of the Earth
The Secondary Period marks the emergence of the dry land into importance greater than that of the sea.
TRIASSIC SYSTEM. The Triassic rocks chiefly consist of sandstones and hardened clays laid down in shallow sea basins. Land vegetation now first began to assume a modern type, with conifers and cycads. The seas were still richly peopled, and the land first gave a home to huge reptiles, or dinosaurs.
JURASSIC SYSTEM. This system is marked by a great variety of limestones, the product of dead sea creatures. It is essentially the age of reptiles. The ichthyosaurus disputed the seas with the plesiosaurus; the pterodactyl ruled the air; whilst on land, huge monsters like the brontosaur and diplodocus browsed on tropical vegetation. From these reptiles the birds were developing, whilst small marsupials, the oldest of the great mammalian race, skipped under the branches.
CRETACEOUS SYSTEM. This was the age of the great chalk deposits. The birds, now emerging from their reptilian ancestry, dominated its life, and the first modern plants appeared on the land.
The Third Period of the Earth
The Tertiary Period marks the true beginning of modern geological history, when the great outlines of geography were laid down, and the first representatives of modern plants and animals made their appearance.
EOCENE SYSTEM. The Eocene rocks are mainly limestones, with sandstone and hardened clays. We owe them to the sea and its organisms. Modern evergreen trees now first appeared. The mammals come to the front, with the tapir-like palæotherium and the first recognisable ancestor of the horse.
MIOCENE SYSTEM. The Miocene Age was a mountain-building period, when the great chain which runs from the Alps into Central Asia received its final uplift. Deciduous trees, like the beech and elm, now made their appearance. The giant mastodon and the formidable sabre-toothed tiger roamed the Miocene forest, and true apes--man’s first forerunners--mopped and mowed in the boughs.
PLIOCENE SYSTEM. The last of the Tertiary ages set the final stamp on the geological moulding of the earth’s crust. Its plants were transitional to the flora of modern Europe. Great herds of herbivora now appeared.
The Fourth Period of the Earth
The Quaternary Period is that in which we are still living. Its outstanding feature is the appearance of man.
PLEISTOCENE OR GLACIAL SYSTEM. Its essential feature was the appearance of glacial conditions over most of the northern hemisphere, when great ice sheets rubbed our land into shape. The vegetation was Arctic, and only animals like the reindeer and the hairy mammoth could endure the cold.
HUMAN OR RECENT SYSTEM. The precise antiquity of man is still uncertain, but it was only after the close of the Glacial Period that he made his home in Europe, where he shared a precarious existence with mammoth, cave-bear, and rhinoceros. Man developed through the Palæolithic and Neolithic ages of stone implements to the Bronze and Iron ages, when metal was first worked. In the last of these we live.
GEOLOGICAL CLOCK OF THE WORLD’S LIFE
This page is an effort, based on Professor Lester Ward’s calculations in “Pure Sociology,” to show the comparative length of each geological period, and the thin white line between Tertiary and Archæan indicates the period of human history. Thin as this line is--and we could not show it thinner--it is too thick, and out of proportion to the rest of the clock. If we assume that from the beginning of the world--from its first forming into a solid sphere--to the present, time may be represented by a day of twenty-four hours, the time occupied by human history does not exceed twelve seconds. This is reckoning human history as ten thousand years. There is, of course, no possibility of obtaining more than relative figures for such a scheme as this, which should be regarded in connection with the previous page and the chart of the Beginnings of Life, facing page 96
TABLE SHOWING PROPORTIONS OF YEARS AND HOURS
Geological Periods | Years | Hours ------------------------+-------------+--------- Archæan | 18,000,000 | 6 Laurentian | 18,000,000 | 6 Cambrian | 6,000,000 | 2 Silurian | 6,000,000 | 2 Devonian | 6,000,000 | 2 Carboniferous | 6,000,000 | 2 Triassic | 3,000,000 | 1 Jurassic | 3,000,000 | 1 Cretaceous | 3,000,000 | 1 Tertiary and Quaternary | 3,000,000 | 1 ------------------------+-------------+--------- The Quaternary Period | 72,000,000 = 24 is that in which we live|
TERTIARY AND QUATERNARY PERIODS
At a rough guess, three million years may be allowed for the Tertiary and Quaternary periods
--------------------+-----------+------+------+------ Geological Periods | Years | Hrs. | Min. | Sec. --------------------+-----------+------+------+------ Tertiary | 2,600,000 | -- | 52 | -- Pleistocene | 300,000 | -- | 6 | -- Human | 100,000 | -- | 2 | -- +-----------+------+------+------ Total | 3,000,000 | 1 | -- | -- --------------------+-----------+------+------+------ Human History | 10,000 == == 12
HOW LIFE BECAME POSSIBLE ON THE EARTH
BY DR. ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
Early writers on the relation of man and animated nature to the material universe not only assumed that the latter existed for the former, but that both alike were the results of special acts of creation.
Furthermore, they usually took it for granted that all things were created very much in the condition in which we now see them, and that any changes that have since taken place are but slight superficial modifications of a permanent and unchanging whole. Not only were the sun and moon and stars created as appanages of the earth, but the earth itself in all its details of sea and land, hills and valleys, mountains and precipices, swamps and deserts, was made and fashioned just as we now see it, and every feature of its surface was supposed to have some purpose in connection with man.
[Sidenote: The Old Ideas of Creation]
These purposes we could, in some cases, understand, while in others they seemed wholly unintelligible, and much ingenuity was bestowed by the natural theologian and others to explain more and more of the observed facts from this point of view. The same opinions prevailed in regard to the infinite variety of animals and plants, each individual species being supposed to have been an independent creation, and all to have some definite and preordained purpose in relation to mankind.
These views, however absurd they seem to most people now, were almost universally held so recently as during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and were thus coincident with one of the most brilliant epochs of our literature and our dawning science. It was only towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, when geology became widely studied and its results were fully appreciated, that the more rational conception of a very slow development of the earth’s surface during countless ages began to be generally accepted.
[Sidenote: Changing Conditions of the Earth]
The grand nebular hypothesis of Laplace came to reinforce the views of the geologists, by showing how the earth itself may have originated as a gaseous or molten globe; and its slow process of cooling, with the reaction of the interior and exterior on each other, served to elucidate the facts of the heated interior, as shown by hot springs and volcanoes, as well as many of the phenomena presented by the distorted and metamorphosed strata which formed its crust. Hence it gradually came to be perceived that the condition of the earth, with all its endless variations of surface, of continents and oceans, of seas and islands, of vast plateaux and lofty mountain ranges and extensive low plains, with their ravines and cataracts, their great lakes and stately rivers, was subject to perpetual change from that remote epoch when it seems to have been actually the case that “the earth was without form and void,” and that owing to the greater density of the vapour-laden atmosphere, “darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
[Sidenote: Changing Forms of Life]
Another field of geological research forced us to the conclusion that the same continued process of change had affected the forms of life upon the earth. When carefully investigated, the crust was found to abound in the fossilised remains of animals and plants. Careful study of these showed that the oldest of all were of comparatively simple structure, and that the higher forms only appeared in more recent epochs; while the highest of all were probably very little older than man himself. It is only during the last half century that the theory of Evolution has been elaborated and has become generally accepted as applicable to the whole of the vast cosmic process--from the development of the nebulæ into stars and suns and systems, with a corresponding development of planets from an early condition of intense heat, through a more or less lengthy period of cooling and contraction, to an ultimate state of refrigeration, the earlier and later stages being alike unsuited to the existence of life.
[Sidenote: Theory of Natural Selection]
More important still, the discovery of the theory of Natural Selection by Darwin--and at a later period by myself--has led to a satisfactory explanation of the successive appearance of higher and more complex forms of life, and also of that wonderfully minute and complex adaptation of every species to its conditions of existence and to its organic as well as its inorganic environment, which all other theories--even the most recent--have failed to grapple with.
[Sidenote: Wonderful Complexity of the Universe]
The logical completeness as well as the extreme simplicity of this explanation of organic evolution has led great numbers of thoughtful but ill-informed persons to reject it, because it seems to render unnecessary the existence of a primary intelligent cause; while another equally large but, as I think, equally ill-informed class--the so-called monists--use it to demonstrate the non-existence, or, at all events, the needlessness, of any such cause. Both alike err, because they fail to take cognisance of the fact that every form of evolution, and pre-eminently that of the organic world, is an explanation of a process of change, a law of development, not in any sense or by any possibility an explanation of fundamental laws, causes, or origins. It presupposes the existence not only of matter--itself a thing whose nature is becoming more and more mysterious and unthinkable with the advance of physical science--but of all the vast complex of laws and forces which act upon it--mechanical, physical, chemical, and electrical laws and forces--all more or less dependent on the still more mysterious, all-pervading ether. Thus, the universe in its purely physical and inorganic aspect is now seen to be such an overwhelmingly complex organism as to suggest to most minds some vast intelligent power pervading and sustaining it.
Persons to whom this seems a logical necessity will not be much disturbed by the dilemma of the agnostics--that, however wonderful the material universe may be, a being who could bring it into existence must be more wonderful, and that they prefer to hold the lesser marvel to be self-existent rather than the greater. When, however, we pass from the inorganic to the organic world, governed by a new set of laws, and apparently by some regulating and controlling forces altogether distinct from those at work in inorganic nature; and when, further, we see that these organisms originated at some definite epoch when the earth had become adapted to sustain them, and thereafter developed into two great branches of non-sentient and sentient life, the latter gradually acquiring higher and higher senses and faculties till it culminated in man--a being whose higher intellectual and moral nature seems adapted for, even to call for, indefinite development--this logical necessity for some higher intelligence to which he himself owes his existence, and which alone rendered the origin of sentient life possible, will seem still more irresistible.
[Sidenote: Mind Behind the World]
The preceding remarks are intended to suggest that the theory of evolution, combined with the quite recent and very startling advances in physical science, so far from making the universe around us more intelligible as a self-sustaining and self-existent whole, has really rendered it less so, by showing that it is infinitely more complex than we had formerly supposed; and further, that matter itself, instead of being, as was once believed, a comparatively simple thing, eternal and indestructible, is in all its various forms subject to decay and disintegration. We now see that the only thing known to us that we can conceive as having unending existence is mind itself; and, just as Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection has opened up to us an infinite field of study and admiration in the forms and colours and mutual relations of the various species of animals and plants, so does modern science open up to us new and unfathomable depths in the inner structure of matter and of the cosmos, and thus compels us more and more to recognise a mental rather than a mere physical substratum to account for its existence.
There is, however, another set of relations which have been hitherto very little studied--those between the organic and the inorganic worlds in their broader aspects. These are now found to be very much more complex and more remarkable than is usually supposed, and they also have an important bearing upon the great problem of the origin and destiny of man. This is a subject which opens up a variety of considerations of extreme interest, showing that the exact adaptations of our earth--and presumably of any other planets--to enable it to sustain organic life, from its first appearance and through its long course of development, is as varied and complex and as much beyond the possibilities of chance coincidences as are any of the individual adaptations of animals and plants to their immediate environment. Most of these latter adaptations have been made known to us by Darwin and his followers, and they have excited the admiration and astonishment of all lovers of Nature. When the antecedent and grander relations of planet to life are studied with equal care, these also will, I believe, excite deeper admiration, still more profound astonishment, because any secondary laws that could have brought them about are less easy to discover, or even to imagine.
[Sidenote: Essential Conditions of Life]
Before we can form any adequate idea of the nature of a world which shall be able to support and develop organic life, we must consider what are the special conditions that alone render such life possible. We, of course, refer to the whole of the organic world, from the lowest to the highest, not to the few exceptional cases in which life may be possible under conditions that would be fatal to the higher as well as to most of the lower forms.
[Sidenote: The Miracle of Human Life]
The one striking speciality of the higher animals--and to a less degree of the higher plants--is that of continuous, all-pervading motion, every portion of their substance being in a state of flux: each particle itself moving, growing, living and dying, and being replaced by other particles of the same nature and fulfilling the same functions. To keep up this growth, and to enable every part of the structure to be continually renewed, food is required. This is taken into the stomach of animals in the solid or liquid form, is then decomposed and recomposed, that which is useless or superfluous being thrown off by the intestines, while what is needed for growth is transformed into blood and by a wonderfully intricate system of branching tubes is carried to every part of the body, furnishing nourishment and repair alike to bone and muscle, to all the internal organs and all the outward integuments, and to that marvellously complex nervous system which also permeates every part of the body and is essential to the higher manifestations of life--to the exertion of force, voluntary motion, and, apparently, to thought itself. Add to this the constant influx of air, which at once purifies the blood and supplies animal heat, and is so important that its cessation for a few minutes is usually fatal, and we have a machine so complex in its structure and mode of action that the most elaborate of human machines is but as a grain of sand to a world in comparison.
[Sidenote: Basis of Physical Life]
Now the very possibility of such a material organism as this depends upon a highly complex form of matter termed protoplasm, which is at once extremely plastic and of extreme instability, and is yet capable of secreting or building up its atoms into such solid and apparently durable forms as bone, horn, and hair, besides the various liquids and semi-solids which build up the organism. This fundamental organic substance consists of only four chemical elements--nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, and almost all animal and vegetable structures and products have the same elemental constitution, though with such widely different characteristics. Four other elements--sulphur, lime, silicon, and phosphorus--also occur in small quantities in organic tissues, to supply special needs; but these are not essential to all forms of life, and are only taken up and utilised by the living protoplasm when required. Protoplasm is undoubtedly the basis of physical life, yet it only exists in, and is produced by, living organisms. The moment such an organism dies, disorganisation and decay set in, and the whole mass becomes gradually changed into more stable compounds, or into its constituent elements. It appears, therefore, that some agency--usually termed “vital force”--must be at work, first to produce this wonderful compound, then to form it into “cells”--the physiological units of all organisms--and afterwards to direct the energies supplied by heat and light so as to build up the excessively complex structures, with all their wonderful powers and potentialities, which we term animals and plants. All this seems to imply not “a force” only, but very many forces, all of which must have some kind of mind in or behind them, to direct these forces to such infinitely varied yet perfectly defined ends.
[Sidenote: A Marvel of Every Day]
Consider for a moment one of the simplest of these cases. Let us take the minute seed of one of the great tropical fig-trees, and another seed of a strawberry, or of garden cress. Both will be about the same size and shape, and the most acute microscopist would not find any difference in the internal structure that could intelligibly account for the different results when these little grains of protoplasm are exposed to identical conditions. For, even if planted near each other, and exposed to the same amount of heat and moisture, to the very same atmosphere, and the same kind of water, as well as identically the same soil, yet invariably the one will grow into a large tree, the other into a small herb, and in the course of time, still with no change whatever of the physical conditions to which both are exposed, each will produce its peculiar foliage, and flowers, and fruit, very different in all their characters from those of the other. Were this result not so common as to seem to us “natural,” we should call it a miracle; and it is really and essentially as inexplicable as many things which are termed miracles only because they are unfamiliar and inexplicable.
Now, this wonderful substance, the physical base of all life--and as it is the only base that exists, or has ever existed, on the earth, we may fairly assume that no other is possible--can only maintain itself and perform its functions under certain very definite conditions, which conditions are now maintained on our earth’s surface, and must have been maintained throughout the long geological periods during which life has been slowly developing. What these conditions are we will now proceed to show.
[Sidenote: The First Essential for Life]
The first essential for organic life is a certain very limited range of temperature. We are so accustomed to consider the change of temperature from winter to summer, from day to night, and that which occurs when we pass from the tropics to the Polar regions as being very great, that we do not realise what a small proportion such changes bear to the whole range of temperature that exists in the known universe. The absolute zero of temperature is calculated to be minus 461° F., while the heat of the sun has been determined to be over 10,000° F., and many of the stars are known to be much hotter than the sun. The actual range of temperature is therefore enormous; but any development of organic life is possible only within the very narrow limits of the freezing and boiling points of water, since within those temperatures only is the existence of liquid water possible. But a much less range than this is really required, because albumen, one of the commonest forms of protoplasm, is coagulated or solidified at a temperature of about 160° F. Now, if, as is generally believed, the earth has been once a liquid or even a gaseous mass and has since cooled to its present temperature on the surface, and the sun is undergoing a similar process of cooling, we are able to understand that the very limited range of temperature within which life development is possible implies an equally limited period of time as compared with that occupied by the whole process of solar and planetary development.
[Sidenote: We Live by the Heat of the Sun]
It must be understood, however, that the present temperature of the earth’s surface is due entirely to sun-heat, and that if that were withdrawn or greatly diminished the whole surface of the globe would be permanently far below the freezing point and all the oceans be frozen for a considerable depth; so that all organic life would become extinct. Under such conditions no renewed development of life would be possible; and it is therefore quite certain that the sun has actually maintained the uniform moderate temperature required, and must continue to maintain it for whatever future period man is destined to continue his existence upon the earth.
But it is not only a certain amount of heat that is required, but also a sufficient quantity of light; and this implies a further restriction of conditions, because light is due to vibrations of a limited range of wave-length, and without these particular rays plants cannot take the carbon from the carbonic acid in the atmosphere, and by its means build up the wonderful series of carbon compounds, including protoplasm, which are essential for the life of animals. What is commonly termed dark heat, therefore, would not be sufficient for the development of any but the lowest forms of life, even though it produced the necessary temperature during a sufficient period of time.
All organisms, from the lowest to the highest, whether plant or animal, consist very largely of water, and its constant presence either in the liquid or gaseous form is essential for organic life. On our earth oceans and seas occupy the greater part of the surface, while their average depth is so great that the quantity of water is sufficient to cover the whole of the globe free from inequalities two miles deep. It is this enormous amount of water that supplies the air with ample moisture, such as renders the life of the tropics so luxuriant. Yet even now the inequality of water-supply is such that large areas in all parts of the earth are what we term deserts, only supporting a very few forms of life that have become specially adapted to them, and certainly unfitted for the continuous development of life from lower to higher forms.
[Sidenote: Water and the Atmosphere]
Water is also of immense importance as an equaliser of temperature, the currents of the ocean conveying the warmth of the tropics to ameliorate the severity of temperate and Polar regions, while the amount of water-vapour in the atmosphere acts as a retainer of heat during the night, without which it is probable that the surface of the earth would freeze every night even in the tropics. When we consider that water consists of two gases--oxygen and hydrogen--in definite proportions, and that without their presence in these proportions and in the necessary quantity the development of organic life would have been impossible, we find that we have here a remarkable and very complex set of conditions which must be fulfilled in any planet to enable it to develop life.
But this is not all. The atmosphere is so intimately associated with water in its life-relations, and is itself so absolutely essential to the existence from moment to moment of the higher animals, that the two require to be duly proportioned to each other and to the globe of which they form a part.
[Sidenote: How Water Protects Earth by Night]
In the first place the atmosphere must be of a sufficient density, this being needed in order that it may be an adequate storer up of solar heat, and also in order that it may be able to supply sufficient oxygen, water-vapour, and carbonic-acid gas for the requirements of both vegetable and animal life. We have a striking example of the use of air as a storer-up and distributor of heat and moisture in the very different character of our south-west and north-east winds. The effect of the density of the air is equally well shown when we ascend lofty mountains where we find perpetual snow and ice, due simply to the fact that the air is not dense enough to retain the heat of the sun--which is actually greater than at low levels--so that at night the temperature regularly falls below the freezing point. On the other hand a very much denser atmosphere would absorb so much water vapour as probably to shut out the light of the sun, and thus have a prejudicial effect on vegetable life.
Again, there is good reason to believe that the proportions of the various gases in the atmosphere are, within certain narrow limits, such as are most favourable not only for the life that actually exists, but for any life that could be developed from the elements that constitute the universe. Oxygen has properties which seem absolutely essential to organic life; but nitrogen, though only serving to dilute the oxygen so far as the higher animals are directly concerned, is yet indirectly essential for them, since it is in vegetables a constituent of that protoplasm which is the very substance of their bodies.
[Sidenote: Use of Thunderstorms]
[Sidenote: The Wonder of the Atmosphere]
Now, plants obtain their nitrogen mainly from the minute proportion of ammonia that exists in the atmosphere, and this ammonia is formed by the union of the nitrogen of the air with the hydrogen of the water-vapour under the influence of electric discharges--that is, of thunderstorms. It is evident, then, that the required amount of this essential compound will depend upon a due adjustment of the quantities of nitrogen and aqueous vapour always present; while the electric discharges seem to be due to the friction of various strata of air with each other and with the earth’s surface, due to the winds and storms; and winds are due to highly complex causes, involving the rate of the earth’s rotation, the rise and fall of the tide, the density of the atmosphere, the quantity of its aqueous vapour, and the amount of solar heat which it receives. Unless all these very diverse factors existed in their due proportion, some of the results might be highly prejudicial if not quite inimical to the development of life. To these various adaptations of our gaseous envelope we must add one other. Carbonic acid gas in the atmosphere is absolutely essential to vegetable life, while it is directly antagonistic to that of the higher animals. Its quantity must, therefore, be strictly proportionate to the needs of both; and that beneficial proportion must have been preserved throughout the whole period of the existence of the higher air-breathing animals.
These various considerations show us that our atmosphere, consisting as it does mainly of two common gases mixed together, and therefore seeming to most people one of the simplest things possible, is really a wonderfully complex arrangement which is adapted to serve the purposes of living organisms in a great variety of ways. But this by no means exhausts the subject of its adaptation to support and develop organic life, because its very existence on the earth in a suitable quantity and composed of the essential elements can be shown to depend on other and deeper relations which will now be pointed out.
The older writers on the subject of the habitability of the planets took no account whatever of the importance of size, distance from the sun, period of rotation, and obliquity of the ecliptic as determining the possibility of organic life, but simply assumed that, because the earth possessed an abundant life-development, all the other planets must also possess it. But we know that the above-mentioned factors are of very high importance, as we will proceed briefly to point out.
[Sidenote: Earth’s Envelope of Gas]
It is now believed that the amount of atmosphere possessed by a planet is due mainly, perhaps entirely, to the planet’s mass, and its consequent gravitative power. Spectrum-analysis has shown that vast masses of gaseous matter exist in the universe, and it is probable that, in a state of extreme tenuity, these are very widely diffused. Just as meteoric dust is constantly attracted to the earth, and periodically in larger quantities, so are gases, and supposing the aggregations of free gaseous matter to have been distributed with some approach to uniformity, then, as planets grew in size, they would also tend to secure a larger amount of the diffused gases, thus forming deeper atmospheres. The observed facts agree with this view. The largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, have such a depth of atmosphere as permanently to obscure any solid interior they may possess. The only planet closely approaching the earth in size and density--Venus--has an atmosphere which appears to be loftier than ours, but it may be composed of different gases. Mars, which has only one-ninth the mass of the earth, has a lofty but very tenuous atmosphere, and probably no water, the Polar snows being due probably to the freezing of some dense gas. The climate and physical condition of Mars is, however, still a subject of much controversy, which I hope to discuss in a separate work dealing with the arguments of Professor Lowell [see page 105]. In that volume the reader will find, fully set forth my reasons, on scientific grounds, against the supposed habitability of Mars.
[Sidenote: The Earth Selects and Uses Gas]
But, besides attracting cosmic masses of gaseous matter to form its atmosphere, there is another equally important function of the mass of a planet--its selective power on the kind of gases it can permanently retain in a free state. The molecules of gases are in a condition of rapid motion in all directions, which explains the elastic force they exhibit. The speed of this motion has been determined for all the chief gases, and also the gravitative force necessary to prevent them from continually escaping into space from the upper limit of the atmosphere. Thus the moon, which has a mass only one-eightieth that of the earth, can retain no free gas whatever on its surface. Mars can retain only the very heavy gases, but neither hydrogen nor water-vapour. The earth, however, has force enough to retain all the gases except hydrogen, which is just beyond its limit; and this may explain why it is that there is no free hydrogen in the atmosphere, although this gas is continually produced in small quantities by submarine volcanoes, is emitted sometimes from fissures in volcanic regions, and is a product of decaying vegetation. Once united with oxygen to form water, it becomes amenable to gravity in the form of invisible aqueous vapour, and is thenceforth a permanent possession for us in its most valuable form.
The very accurate adjustments that render our earth suitable for the production and long-continued development of organic life, culminating in man, may be well shown by another consideration. If our earth had been 9,600 miles instead of 8,000 miles in diameter--a very small increase in view of the immense range of planetary magnitudes from Mercury to Jupiter--with a slight proportionate increase in density, due to its greater force of gravitative compression, its mass would have been about double what it is now. This would probably have led to its having attracted and retained double the amount of gases, in which case the water produced would have been double what it is--perhaps even more, because hydrogen gas would not then escape into space as it does now. But the surface of the globe would have been only one-half greater than at present; so that, unless the ocean cavities were twice as deep as they actually are, the whole surface of the earth--except, perhaps, a few tops of submarine volcanoes--would have been covered several miles deep in water, and all terrestrial life would have been impossible.
[Sidenote: The Deep Atmosphere of Venus]
From the various considerations here set forth it appears clear to me that no other planet of the solar system makes any approach to the conditions essential for the development of a rich and varied organic life such as adorns our earth. One only--Venus--has a sufficient bulk and density to give it the needful atmosphere; but as it receives about twice as much solar heat as does the earth, it is probable that its very deep atmosphere may be mainly due to the fact that a large proportion of its water is held in a state of vapour, its seas and oceans being proportionately reduced in extent. Judging from what happens on the earth, this would probably lead to an excessive area of deserts, and thus be inimical to life. But this planet appears to possess one feature which renders it fundamentally unsuitable for organic life.
[Sidenote: Why there is no Life on Venus]
Several modern observers have found that the older astronomers were all in error in giving Venus a rotation-period almost exactly the same as ours, an error due to the indefinite and variable markings of its surface. They have now deduced a period about equal to that of its revolution round the sun--a rate which has been confirmed by spectrum-analysis, and further confirmed by the fact that this planet has no measurable polar compression. As during transits of Venus over the sun’s disc the conditions for the accurate measurement of the compression, if any exist, are the best possible, and as none has been found, this alone affords a demonstration that the rate of rotation must be very slow, because the laws of motion necessitate a definite amount of equatorial protuberance corresponding to that rate. Half the surface has, therefore, perpetual day and the other half perpetual night, leading to violent contrasts of heat and cold for the two hemispheres with, in all probability, correspondingly violent winds, rains, and electrical disturbances--conditions so entirely opposed to the uniformity of temperatures and stability of meteorological phenomena during long geological epochs which are essential for the full development of organic life, that such development is perhaps less probable on this planet than on any other.
I think I have now shown not only that no other planet in the solar system makes any approach to the possession of the varied and complex adaptations which are essential for a full development of organic life, but also that on the Earth itself the conditions are so numerous and so nicely balanced that very moderate deviations in excess or defect of what actually exists in the case of any one of them--and of others not referred to here--might have rendered it equally unsuitable, so that either no organic life at all, or only a very low type of life, could have been developed or supported.
[Sidenote: There is Purpose in our World]
If, then, the more superficial indications of design in the relations of animals to their environment, and of man to the universe, have been shown by modern science to have required no special interference of a higher power to bring them about, but that they have been due to natural laws acting in accordance with and in subordination to the deeper laws and forces that determine the very constitution of matter and the unknown power and principle we term “life,”--yet, on the other hand, we find that a more careful study of the outer universe, or cosmos, reveals a new set of adaptations not less wonderful or more easily explicable by chance coincidence than those presented by the organic world.
Even the very brief sketch of the subject here given suggests the idea of purpose in a world so precisely and uniquely adapted to develop organic life, and to support that life during the countless ages required for the completed evolution of man. But that suggestion becomes a logical induction when the whole of the available evidence is set forth, as I have attempted to set it forth in my work on “Man’s Place in the Universe.” I have there shown not only that the cumulative evidence for the earth being the only supporter of a fully-developed organic life within the solar system is irresistible, but that there is some direct, and much more indirect, evidence that this uniqueness extends to the whole stellar universe; and it is certain that no particle of direct evidence for the existence of organic life elsewhere has been, or is likely to be, adduced.
I have also shown (in an appendix to the second edition of my book) that the purely biological argument for the uniqueness of the development of man--as the culminating point of one line of descent throughout the diverging ramifications of the animal kingdom--is overwhelmingly strong; hence the logical conclusion from the whole of the evidence is that man is the one supreme product of the whole material universe.
My object in the present essay has been limited to showing that, besides and beyond the special adaptations of the various kinds of animals and plants to their special environments, there exist in the earth as a planet, in its various physical and cosmical relations, a whole series of adaptations of a very remarkable character which, so far as we can judge, are essential to its function as a life-producing world. The study of these adaptations, therefore, may be considered to be appropriate here, as constituting a preliminary chapter in the natural history of the Earth and of Mankind.
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
THE BEGINNING OF LIFE ON THE EARTH
BY DR. C. W. SALEEBY
[Sidenote: The Earth Without Life]
For some decades past we have been faced with a critical difficulty at the most critical and important point in the history of the earth. In the first place, it has been definitely established that in the earlier period of its history there was no life whatever--as the word is usually understood--upon the earth, as is abundantly shown elsewhere in this work. None of the conditions that make life possible, as we know it, were satisfied. As a recent French writer has said, life is an aquatic phenomenon, absolutely incapable of existence except in the presence of liquid water; and there was an age of vast duration in the history of the earth when all its water must have been in the gaseous state. Other reasons of equal cogency may be at present ignored. The broad fact is that, however widely students of this matter may differ on other points, there is absolute agreement upon the cardinal and initial fact that whereas there is life upon the earth now, there was a time when there was none.
[Sidenote: A Gap in the Philosophy of Evolution]
Now, in the ever memorable year 1859, Charles Darwin published a volume, the main thesis of which is now universally accepted, wherein the following is the last sentence: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” “The Origin of Species” may be said, in a word, to establish the doctrine of the evolution of living organisms upon the earth “by laws acting around us”--to use Darwin’s own phrase. But Darwin’s work begins with and assumes the existence of life as an established planetary fact. There obviously remains a tremendous gap in the evolutionary philosophy as it stands in our statement of it thus far; and the first fact which we have to note is that the existence and recognition of this supposed gap, so far from being a matter of common recognition from the earliest times, so far from being an observation made by the critics of the doctrine of evolution, is, on the contrary, a special doctrine peculiar to scientific study and of quite recent origin, being indeed established--as was supposed--within the memory of many now living.
If we turn to the first chapter of Genesis, we shall see no suggestion or recognition of the supposed difficulty involved in the beginning of life upon the earth. In this immortal piece of ancient poetry it is stated that after the creation of the heaven and the earth, which were at first “without form and void,” God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass ... and it was so”; and later God said, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life ... let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind.” Here we have suggested to us the natural origin of living creatures in earth and sea under the will and direction of the Creator as conceived by the poet.
[Sidenote: First Ideas on the Origin of Life]
[Sidenote: The Coming of Darwin]
Partly to the influence of Genesis, partly to the apparent facts of observation, and partly to the views which would naturally be held by poets and thinkers, we may attribute the belief which has been held by man, simple and philosophic alike, since first men began to think, until, we may say, the third quarter of the nineteenth century--the belief that the lowest of living things arose by a natural genesis or so-called spontaneous generation in suitable materials already provided on the land or in the sea. It was not suggested or believed that very large and conspicuous living creatures were thus bred, though it is true that the ancients thought even crocodiles to be generated by the action of the sun upon the slime of the Nile. The living creatures supposed to arise naturally in the womb of earth--the all-mother--were mostly small creatures, like insects and worms. The ordinary belief of the uninstructed to-day--a belief which they share with the greatest thinkers of antiquity and the Renaissance--is that the cheese-mite, for instance, is evolved from the substance of the cheese. Now, it is of particular moment to observe the vast contrast between the significance of this belief prior to the publication of “The Origin of Species” and its significance to-day. Before we accepted the doctrine of organic evolution, the supposed spontaneous origin of the cheese-mite in cheese, or of the maggot in putrid meat, was of no very great moment; a maggot or a cheese-mite is an extremely insignificant object. So far as the great problems of the universe are concerned, a cheese-mite, as we say, is neither “here nor there,” and its spontaneous generation was not regarded as a fact of any great moment.
But then there arose Darwin, who, in establishing the doctrine of organic evolution already supported by his own grandfather, by Lamarck, and Goethe, and Herbert Spencer, gave an entirely new importance to the question. He demonstrated how we could conceive the evolution of all organisms, including man, from a “few simple forms,” under the continuous influence of natural law; and thus such forms ceased to be insignificant, and the manner of their genesis came to be a vital problem in more senses than one. Such organisms--the mite, the maggot, and even the mould--could no longer be regarded as insignificant, for they were revealed as not unlike the ancestors of man himself.
[Sidenote: Evolution a Continuous Process]
The question of the beginning of life upon the earth had only to be satisfactorily answered for the establishment of the belief in a continuous process of evolution by natural law, even from the very beginning of the earth itself “without form and void,” until the production of the highest living organisms which it displays in our own time. And all ages, even by the mouths of their great thinkers and closest observers, had agreed in giving an apparently satisfactory answer to this question. It might well have been thought that Darwin was quite entitled to ignore altogether, as he did, the question of the origin of life. Everyone knew, so to say, that simple living organisms were every day evolved in organic refuse and elsewhere. Darwin himself, if we may judge from a casual remark in a letter, regarded the question apparently as purely speculative, and of small real moment. It is all rubbish, he says, thinking about the origin of life; we might as well argue about the origin of matter. We must beware of illegitimately attributing opinions to the immortal dead, but this remark, though a casual one, does seem to suggest that Darwin regarded these two questions as on all-fours, if not, indeed, as different forms of the same question, and that, if he had actually formulated his views, they would have taken the shape of the doctrine which asserts that life is implicit and potential in matter; in other words, that when suitable conditions arose--such, for instance, as the presence of liquid water--matter would display the properties of life.
[Sidenote: An Abyss that could not be Bridged]
Now, the remarkable fact--one of the most striking in the history of science--is that the time-honoured belief in spontaneous generation should have been attacked, and attacked with apparent success, just at the very time when it would otherwise have begun to assume real philosophic importance. For ages it had been accepted, taken as a matter of course, and not regarded as having any particular bearing upon the supreme questions. Then there came the time when this belief would have been an all-important link, without which the chain of evolution could not be completed, a link without which we were left to contemplate a perfect chain of inorganic evolution--the history of the earth before life--and a perfect chain of organic evolution--the history of life upon the earth, with an abyss between the two that could not be bridged, for how came life where there was no life? A series of experiments were made, experiments in which, strikingly enough, some of the greatest evolutionists of the day took a leading part, and these seemed to upset, just when it was most wanted by themselves for the establishment of their new doctrine, the belief which had gone without question for so many ages.
[Sidenote: Is Life only Self-movement?]
Now, some may be inclined to wonder how it should be that certain pioneers of the new doctrine of evolution, such as Tyndall and Huxley, should devote themselves with such persistence and labour and force to the overthrow of a doctrine which was so necessary for the complete establishment of their own case--so much so, that when they had overthrown it, they found themselves, as regards their own doctrine of evolution, placed in a difficulty from which they did not live to emerge. It is my own belief that this question can be answered, and the answer is of strict relevance to our present inquiry. I believe that Huxley and Tyndall were largely impelled by the desire to oppose a doctrine of the nature of life which was current in their time and is usually called “vitalism.” We shall not begin to understand the question of the beginning of life upon the earth, as that question may be legitimately stated to-day, unless we fully realise in what terms the doctrine of spontaneous generation was accepted in the past, and an understanding of this will teach us that the present-day revival of this doctrine presents it in a form very different from that which it so long held. Our discussion must be somewhat philosophic in character, but the question at issue is a highly philosophic one, and the reason why we have made so little progress in answering it hitherto is that men of science have too frequently discussed it without paying any serious attention to the profound philosophic questions which really underlie it. We have permitted ourselves to talk freely about life and matter, whilst claiming the right to take for granted the absolute validity of our conceptions of life and our conceptions of matter.
It was universally held by those, philosophic and simple, who also held throughout so many centuries the belief in spontaneous generation, that there is an overwhelming contrast between living and lifeless matter, and it was their belief in this overwhelming contrast that led them to give to the doctrine of spontaneous generation, as they held it, a form which cannot possibly be defended. The great character of life was conceived to be self-movement, this self-movement being displayed in the matter which composed the living organisms. But it was universally held that matter, as it was seen otherwise than in living organisms, was obviously and notoriously inert, gross, brute, and dead.
[Sidenote: The Influence of Plato]
The great influence of Plato taught men to despise matter in this fashion, and there was the everyday experience that a stone lies where it is placed until something from outside moves it, being, therefore, inert, whilst a living creature such as a bird moves freely at its own will. The more strongly men held the natural matter of which the earth is composed to be inert, the more necessary was it to suppose that when life was displayed in it the difference consisted in the taking possession of this dull clay by a vital force--a mystic and wonderful principle of quickening--which endowed even gross, inert matter with activity and power. From the time of Plato until the last few years of the nineteenth century thinkers vied with one another in insisting upon the impotence and grossness and inertness of matter, and each fresh insistence upon this doctrine rendered more necessary a corresponding doctrine of vital force or vitalism, which should explain the amazing transformation undergone by, let us say, the gross and inert matter composing food, when that food was converted by the “living principle” into the tissue of a living creature, and then displayed self-movement.
[Sidenote: Philosophy of Dead Matter]
[Sidenote: The Great Work of Pasteur]
This doctrine of vitalism, which held sway for so long, was naturally invoked to explain the origin of life upon the earth, when the advance of astronomy and geology demonstrated a natural evolution for the earth and proved that there must have been a time when no life was possible upon it. The prevalent conception of matter came in at this point and denied altogether any such monstrous doctrine as that the wonderful thing called life could spontaneously arise in the despicable thing called matter. The material of the earth, whether solid, liquid or gaseous, consisted of eternal, unchangeable, and indestructible atoms. These were moved as forces from outside moved them. They had no energy or power of their own. Men simply thought of them as of incredibly minute grains of sand of various shapes and sizes, and it was as impossible to conceive of life being spontaneously generated in a chance heap of inert atoms as to conceive that a heap of grains of sand should organise themselves into a little organism. As for spontaneous generation occurring on the earth to-day, the development of mites from cheese and so forth, that was a very different matter, men must have thought--in so far as they thought at all--since cheese and flesh and so forth were themselves products of life. It is well worth noting that the common doctrine of spontaneous generation was always held in reference to organic materials, such as the slime of the Nile--not the dry sand of the desert. The reader may be inclined to say that men’s beliefs on this subject in the past generation make very confused reading, and indeed, that is true. But the fact is that their beliefs were most confused. The work of Darwin had staggered everybody, and straightforward, systematic, unprejudiced thinking was very nearly impossible in the welter of controversy. Nevertheless, something apparently definite was done. The doctrine of the beginning of life upon the earth was left almost undiscussed, and the accepted notion of the nature of matter--a notion which to us who know radium seems puerile--was left unchallenged in all its falsity. But the work of the great French chemist Pasteur led to a close examination of the belief that humble forms of life are daily produced from lifeless organic materials, and the conclusion was reached that no such spontaneous generation occurs.
[Sidenote: Every Living Thing from a Living Thing]
This conclusion is of great importance in the history of modern thought, and it was proclaimed with much rejoicing and vigour as a great achievement of science, whilst some of its chief advocates seemed at times to forget the extreme awkwardness of the inferences which had to be made from it. The doctrine may be stated in Latin in the form of the familiar dogma, “Omne vivum ex vivo,” every living thing from a living thing. Just as the existence of a man is quite sufficient to prove to us the prior existence of living human parents, just as we feel sure that every beast of the field has had living parents and that every oak has sprung from an acorn developed in a previous oak, so, according to the doctrine of “Omne vivum ex vivo,” we must believe that every living creature, whether human, animal, or vegetable, whether as big as the mammoth or as small as the smallest microbe not one-twenty-thousandth part of an inch in diameter, has sprung from living parents. Nature, according to this doctrine, was divided--as Nature, being a mighty whole, can never be divided--into two absolute categories, the living and the lifeless, or living matter and dead matter. Dead matter was notoriously dead and impotent, and life could not conceivably arise in it, though it could be used by life for purposes of food. On the other hand, living matter rejoiced in the possession of all those great attributes which lifeless matter lacked, and, in accordance with the contrast between the two kinds of matter, the living could never be produced from the lifeless but only from the living: for every creature, microbe or mammoth or man, we must trace back in imagination a series of living ancestors, differing perhaps in various characters, but always living. This series must be traced back and back and back until----?
[Sidenote: Life Evolved from the Lifeless]
And there the difficulty arose. For the uninhabitableness of the primitive earth was a fact of which men of science were as certain as if from some habitable planet they had been able to gaze upon it. Notwithstanding the dogma of “Omne vivum ex vivo,” it was impossible to assert that every living creature has an endless series of ancestors. How, then, did life begin?
What we may call the doctrine of the older orthodoxy--the doctrine of special creation, of supernatural interposition for the introduction of a new entity into the scheme of things--offered one alternative. To accept it, however, would be to abandon the whole modern conception of natural law and of a universe which was not created once on a day, and has not been tinkered with subsequently, but from everlasting to everlasting is the continuous expression to us of the Infinite and Eternal Power which to some eyes it veils and to others it reveals. Unless we are to abandon our philosophy, this alternative cannot be accepted, and it is now accepted by no philosophic thinker.
Thus, whether “Omne vivum ex vivo” be true or false to-day, we are compelled to accept the only other alternative, which is that it has not always been true, or, in other words, that life was spontaneously evolved from the lifeless (so-called) at some remote age in the past. Just at the present time philosophic biology is out of fashion. Minds of the great cast which endeavour to see things in their eternal aspect have been lacking to the science of life since the days when Huxley and Spencer were in the plenitude of their powers. Anyone who cares to compare the principal reviews of the last decade with those same reviews from the year of, say, 1875 to 1890, can readily see this fact for himself. In the absence of that deliberate thought and discussion without which clear ideas on any subject are impossible, what may be called the official opinion of biology at the present time is thus most remarkable and contradictory. On the one hand, it is strenuously asserted as a matter of dogma that at the present day no life is produced or producible upon the earth except by the process of reproduction of previously existing life; and on the other hand it is asserted--when the direct question is put, though otherwise the subject is simply ignored--that life must somehow or other have been naturally evolved in the past, presumably once and for all. I have called this opinion contradictory, and it is indeed far more contradictory and unsatisfactory than it may at present appear. The obvious question that the critic asks is, “If then, why not now?”
[Sidenote: “If then, why not now?”]
[Sidenote: Is Life Now Arising from the Lifeless?]
The answer alleged is that, of course, the experiments of Pasteur and Tyndall, to which some reference must afterwards be made here, merely demonstrated the impossibility of the spontaneous generation of life in our own day or under any conditions similar to those of our own day; but doubtless the first few simple forms of living matter arose by natural processes at some distant epoch “when the conditions were very different from those that obtain to-day.” Now it happens to be true that every difference between past and present conditions which physics and geology and chemistry can assert tends to the probability that if spontaneous generation is impossible now, it must have been a hundredfold more impossible a hundred million years ago. Yet for some three decades the great majority of biologists have been content to believe that spontaneous generation is impossible now, even though land and sea and sky are packed with organic matter under the very conditions which obviously favour life--as the all but omnipresence of life abundant to-day demonstrates--but that spontaneous generation was possible in the past when, by the hypothesis, there was no organic matter present at all, and when life had to arise in the union and architecture of such simple substances as inorganic carbonates! Such biologists are like those who know that the human organism can be developed from the microscopic germ in a few years, but find it incredible that man can have been developed from lowly organisms in æons of æons. Nor has any living biologist even attempted to make an adequate answer to the question, why what is impossible now should have been possible a hundred million years ago. On the contrary, so soon as the matter is looked at philosophically, we see that all the probabilities, all the analogies, all the great generalisations of science, are in favour of the belief that life must be arising from the lifeless now, as in the past, whenever certain conditions, such as the assemblage of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen in the presence of liquid water, are satisfied.
For the moment, however, I propose to postpone this question of the truth of “Omne vivum ex vivo” at the present day, for I desire to throw into the forefront of my argument two quite recent developments of science, unreckoned with because non-existent in the controversy of the ’seventies, and in my judgment not yet duly appraised to-day. In the present and future discussion of the manner and causation of that supreme event in the earth’s history, the beginning of life upon it, we must reckon with two new orders of inquiry relating to facts unthinkably contrasted in physical magnitude yet equally relevant to our subject. The first series of facts with which I will deal are astronomic, and the second atomic.
[Sidenote: The Evidence from Other Worlds]
[Sidenote: Vegetable Life on Mars]
In discussing the origin of life upon the earth, we of the twentieth century must recognise such facts as may be obtainable in regard to life upon other orbs than ours. Now, in the first place, there is at least one illustrious contemporary astronomer, Professor Pickering, the chief living student of the moon, in whose opinion there are many evidences upon our satellite of the action of vegetation, either past or present. This, of course, is not the place for a discussion of that evidence; it is, however, the place to record the most highly qualified opinion at present obtainable, and to remind ourselves of the certainty that when the moon was first borne--or born--from the earth, life cannot possibly have been evolved, since the conditions of temperature alone, to name one factor, were such as life could not sustain, no liquid water being extant. There is some reason to suppose, then, that, whatever the present case may be, life was at one time spontaneously evolved upon the moon.
The second piece of astronomical evidence relevant to our inquiry is afforded by the planet Mars. This, of course, is a much controverted question, which cannot receive any discussion here. It suffices to note that Professor Lowell, who is admittedly the greatest living authority on Mars, has observed and photographed, not merely to his own satisfaction, but to that of an ever increasing number of astronomers, signs of vegetation upon Mars. I will say nothing here as to the existence of intelligent beings there. That fascinating and momentous question, upon which there will doubtless be difference of opinion for some time to come, does not now concern us. It is of quite sufficient significance for our present purpose if the existence of merely vegetable life, and no more, upon the planet Mars can be demonstrated, and there are now very few astronomers indeed who question this demonstration, however chary they may be of going any further. I submit that the question of the beginning of life upon the earth should not be considered without reference to the evidence which suggests the spontaneous origin of life upon the moon, and to the practically positive demonstration of the present existence, with seasonal alternations, as on our own earth, of vegetable life in the watered areas of Mars.
[Sidenote: The Earth’s Crumbling “Foundations”]
These considerations were entirely unknown to the great controversialists of a generation ago; but there is another order of facts, entirely unimagined by them, which are now demonstrable and admitted. For them, or for most of them, the ancient conception of matter which we trace to Plato was substantially true; nay, more. The recent work of the physicists and chemists had endowed that ancient conception of matter as gross and inert and dead with a new concreteness and vividness. One of the greatest physicists of the age, James Clerk-Maxwell, in his famous address to the British Association, spoke of atoms as the “foundation stones of the visible universe, which have existed since the creation unbroken and unworn.” The accepted conception of an atom was that of a passive thing; it had its own inherent shape and properties, which were impressed upon it at its creation. It had “the stamp of the manufactured article,” as Sir John Herschell said, and throughout its endless history it responded to and behaved under the influence of external forces in due accordance with its shape and size. But it was unchangeable, inert and brute, the sport of its surroundings, like the mote in the sun-beam.
[Sidenote: Immeasurable Ocean of Energy]
But to-day we stand amazed at such conceptions. We have learnt that within the atoms of matter there is a fund of energy so incalculably vast that the sum total of all the energies previously recognised, and now to be styled extra-atomic, is as nothing compared with it. This is a change indeed, that all the energies hitherto known to us should be merely the overflow trickling from the immeasurable ocean of the intra-atomic energy, the very existence of which has been formally and repeatedly denied by practically all thinkers from Plato down to our own time. Matter is not gross and inert, brute and dead. The atom, the so-called unchangeable foundation stone, is, on the contrary, itself an organism, the theatre of Titanic forces about which we at present know practically nothing except that they certainly exist, and are powerful beyond all our previous conceptions. The atom is no atom, but a microcosm; it is no more the unit of inorganic matter than the cell is really the unit of living matter.
Now it is surely evident on consideration, though the significance of the change has been ignored, that the whole discussion of the spontaneous origin or evolution of life in matter takes an entirely new shape when our old and widely erroneous conception of matter is abandoned, and a true one is substituted. Life is a marvellous and characteristic demonstration of energy. When the origin of this energy in matter was formerly discussed, we were told that the constituent parts of matter contain no energy at all, but now we know that a quite overwhelming proportion of the sum total of universal energy is to be found there, and nowhere else. This is one of the most revolutionary advances in the whole history of thought, and its full significance has yet to be recognised.
There must also be added an essential to any future discussion of this question, the extraordinary achievement of synthetic chemistry, of which Professor Berthelot was the grand master. As long ago as 1828 it was shown that there was at least one exception to the doctrine of the vitalists, that chemical compounds characteristic of living matter cannot be built up except by the living organism. To-day chemistry has succeeded in building up alcohols, starches, sugars, and even the forerunners of the proteids themselves, from the inorganic elements in the laboratory, under the action of non-vital forces. This fact could not be reckoned with a generation ago.
[Sidenote: Can Chemistry Build Up Life?]
We are now entitled to state very briefly the sequence of events which may reasonably be imagined as culminating in the origin of life upon the earth for the first time. Whatever we may hold as to the present, we have to recognise that the origin of life for the first time constituted a fact utterly different in certain essentials from any origin of life that may be expected to be occurring to-day. The capital fact is that in the beginning there was no organic matter to serve as food material. If ever there was a case in which it is the first step that costs, it is here. Nothing can be easier than to imagine the spontaneous origin of life in organic matter to-day, favoured with sun and water and air. The case is far different when a primary origin in inorganic matter has to be conceived. But of some things we are certain. We are certain, for instance, that so long as the earth’s surface temperature was above that of boiling water, no life was possible. It was not until the gaseous water in the atmosphere became liquefied by the lowering of the earth’s temperature that the production of life became possible. The first seas were seas of boiling water, or rather water infinitesimally below the boiling point, and we may reasonably suppose, with Buffon, that the Polar seas, being the first to cool, must have provided the first “nest” for life upon the earth. I assume, of course, that this essay will be read in conjunction with that of Professor Sollas upon the formation of the earth [page 79], and that of Dr. Wallace upon the exquisite adaptation between life and the earth to-day [page 91].
[Sidenote: The Study of Ferments]
But how were those complex organic bodies formed, especially those vastly complex proteids with which all life whatsoever, as we know it, is invariably associated? Apart from the laboratories of the synthetic chemists of to-day, these compounds are always the products of pre-existing life, and yet without them there could be no pre-existing life.
[Sidenote: Mystery of the Cell]
[Sidenote: Is the Cell a Product of Evolution?]
It is my belief that this most difficult question, which quite baffles us, will seem simple and straightforward in another generation, when science has devoted itself on a large scale to a study now in its very infancy--I mean the study of those curious bodies which chemists call ferments. The properties of ferments are shared both by the familiar ferments, such as trypsin and pepsin, and also by certain inorganic substances, such as the metal platinum. Now, though pepsin is a product of living cells, platinum is certainly not. Altogether apart from the living world there are substances which have powers of fermentation; and ferments do not act exclusively, as is erroneously supposed, in breaking down complex compounds, but also build them up from their constituents. The powers of a ferment, moreover, are, so far as we know, inexhaustible. All life whatever is exercised by ferments, and it is true that life, chemically considered, is “a series of fermentations.” Now, there is quite recent evidence already which seems to show that certain ferments, acting in suitable material, have the power of reproducing themselves--that is to say, of converting that material into their like. These facts are highly suggestive, and it is difficult to refrain from suggesting that the gap between living and lifeless matter, which seemed so absolute to our ancestors, and which even to us, who have a new conception of matter, seems wide enough, may yet be bridged by the ferments. We are far too apt, I think, to assume that when we can see no intermediate stage there were no intermediate stages, and thus to make difficulties for ourselves. We declare that life began as a single cell, which was the starting-point of organic evolution. I myself believe rather that the cell constitutes the acme of a vast epoch of evolution, which may yet be reproduced in brief in the laboratory. Denying or declining to think of this, the biologist who knows the amazing complexity and intricacy of the architecture of the cell may well decline to believe that such a thing could spring with a single jump from inorganic matter. We preach and go on preaching that Nature does nothing by jumps, and in the same breath we declare that life began as a simple cell. In another hundred years we may begin to realise that a cell in its own measure and on its own scale is an organism, as complex and mature a product of evolution as a society, or, for the matter of that, as the atom of modern chemistry!
But the reader will legitimately declare that so long as the spontaneous generation of life to-day in the most favourable circumstances is a proved impossibility, he cannot be expected to accept the doctrine of its spontaneous origin in the past. There are signs, however, that the biologists are now beginning to listen to Dr. Charlton Bastian, the sole survivor from the great controversy of the ’seventies, whose book, “The Evolution of Life,” was published only a few months ago. Against Pasteur and Tyndall and Huxley, Dr. Bastian maintained that their experiments, asserted to be conclusive, were not conclusive--the facts observed were certainly facts, but the deductions were unwarrantable. The experiments only proved the impossibility under the experimental conditions. The difference is the difference between proving what you set out to prove, and begging the whole question. First establish conditions under which spontaneous generation is impossible, then demonstrate its non-occurrence under those conditions, and thence infer that it is impossible under any conditions.
[Sidenote: The Creed of the Future]
The student is right in declining to believe in the spontaneous beginning of life upon the earth so long as the possibility of spontaneous generation to-day is denied, but there are not a few who think that the most conservative attitude that can be adopted is one of suspended judgment.
The present philosophic tendency is undoubtedly in the direction of a return to the ancient conception that matter is not without its own degree of life, and that the distinction between the organic and the inorganic is a distinction of degree and not radical. Nature does not admit of being sorted into any of our puny categories. As the facts accumulate they point more and more definitely towards the opinion that hylozoism, or the doctrine of potential life in all matter, will be part of the scientific creed of the future.
Controversies as to the origin of life, judged in the light of this great conception, seem to become trivial if not puerile. Knowing, as we now do, that Plato’s conception of matter was as false as it possibly could be, and having had revealed to us by radio-activity the omnipresence within the very atoms of matter, of forces incessant and stupendous, we find the doctrine of vitalism, however stated, to be wholly meaningless; we find that the gap between the living and the lifeless is by no means abysmal or impassable.
[Sidenote: How Long Has Life Existed?]
And the definition of life as self-movement seems to become almost comical, for on that definition surely the whole physical universe, the only perpetual motion machine we know of, is itself alive. A discussion of this question can at the utmost only be suggestive. Very few positive assertions have been made, nor can their number be added to, in reference to a question which is bound to be asked: How long has life existed on the earth? The study of radium and its presence in the earth’s crust alone suffices to abolish altogether the old estimates, and new ones cannot yet be substituted. Only it is certain that the past history of planetary life may be far longer than any previous estimate has indicated. It now seems that the earth is not only not self-cooling, but actually self-heating, and if on the older assumption Lord Kelvin could talk of a hundred million years since, so to speak, water first became wet, and life, as we know it, possible, who shall say of how long periods we may speculate now? Meanwhile, the glass-eyed stare vacantly around them and declare that the progress of science means the destruction of the spirit of wonder and reverence. To them we reply in the words of the Earth Spirit in Goethe’s “Faust”:
“At the whirring loom of Time unawed, I weave the living garment of God.”
C. W. SALEEBY
All the world--at any rate, all that part of the world which is acquainted with the facts--is now agreed that man is a product of evolution, and that his remote ancestors were of different bodily make and shape, and of different mental type and calibre, from their late descendants. No study of human kind can be comprehensive that does not include a survey of the mode by which the faculties that have given man the mastery of the earth were evolved.
[Sidenote: We Know the Present by the Past]
A history of his evolution, based, like a political history, on episodes, cannot, of course, be written. But man is a bundle of parts and capabilities. By comparing the civilised being with the savage and the savage with lower animals, we are able to trace, in many important particulars at least, his natural history with a degree of certainty to which, I think, no political history can aspire. As our comprehension of adult man is helped by a knowledge of the development of the child, so our understanding of our species is aided by a study of its past. Armed with some clear conceptions of what man was, and is, we shall be the better fitted to investigate social and political change, and to perceive how it happens that while some nations have inherited the earth and the fruits thereof, others have stagnated or fallen into decay.
[Sidenote: How Man Learns by Experience]
At a certain stage in his development the caterpillar builds himself a cocoon. His dwelling is a wonderful structure, but from our human point of view the remarkable thing is that he does not learn to build it. He may never have seen a cocoon before, and he constructs only one in his life. Yet his work is perfect, or at least very excellent, and it is as good in its beginnings as in its endings. Evidently he owes nothing to experience, but is impelled and guided throughout by a faculty which we term instinct. An instinct may be defined as an innate, inherited impulse, an inclination to do a certain definite act, the instinctive act, on receipt of a certain definite stimulus or incitement to action. In the case of the caterpillar the stimulus appears to be the sight at the proper time of a suitable spot in which to build a cocoon. Since this particular impulse does not appear at the beginning of conscious life, it is termed a deferred instinct. Man, on the other hand, cannot build his house unless he first learns how to build. He depends, not on instinct, but on experience. The faculty by means of which experience is stored in the mind is memory. The faculty by means of which we use stored experience to guide present or future conduct is intelligence. When the contents of memory are very vast, and the processes of thought by which they are utilised comparatively difficult and complex, intelligence is termed reason. Intelligence and reason depend, therefore, on memory, on ability to learn, on capacity to profit by experience. Memory is not the whole of intelligence, but it is the basis of it. Without memory there could be feeling and emotion, but no thought, for the materials of thought would be lacking.
[Sidenote: Instinct in Place of Memory]
[Sidenote: The Basis of Rational Action]
We always measure the intelligence of an animal by its power of profiting by experience. Thus, a cat is more intelligent than a rabbit because it can learn more; a dog, for the same reason, is still more intelligent. A purely instinctive animal, one that has no memory, can have no conception of its past, and therefore no idea of its future. It lives wholly in the immediate present; feeling, but not thinking. It acts entirely on inclination, not on reflection. It makes provision for the future, not with any notion of providing, but simply because it has an impulse to a certain course of action, the performance of which gives it pleasure of the kind a child derives from playing or eating, and with the ultimate result of which it is no more consciously concerned than a child. If a caterpillar sheltered in a hole with the idea, founded on past experience, of avoiding danger, his action would be intelligent. If, appealing to a memory in which a great number of complex experiences were stored, he took thought and designed himself a shelter in which provision was made for all sorts of remembered dangers, his action would be rational. But if, making no appeal to the past nor taking thought for the future, he builds only because impelled by an innate impulse, then, no matter how elaborate the edifice he rears, his action is instinctive.
Animals low in the scale of life--for example, most insects--appear incapable of learning. But often they are wonderfully equipped by instinct. The details of the behaviour of a small beetle, as quoted from Professor Lloyd Morgan, may not have been quite correctly ascertained, but they are sufficiently accurate for our purpose.
A certain beetle (Sitaris) lays its eggs at the entrance of the galleries excavated by a kind of bee (Anthophora), each gallery leading to a cell. The young larvæ are hatched as active little insects, with six legs, two long antennæ, and four eyes, very different from the larvæ of other beetles. They emerge from the egg in the autumn, and remain in a sluggish condition till the spring. At that time (in April) the drones of the bee emerge from the pupæ, and as they pass out through the gallery the Sitaris larvæ fasten upon them. There they remain till the nuptial flight of the Anthophora, when the larva passes from the male to the female bee. Then again they wait their chance. The moment the bee lays an egg, the Sitaris larva springs upon it. Even while the poor mother is carefully fastening up her cell, her mortal enemy is beginning to devour her offspring, for the egg of the Anthophora serves not only as a raft, but as a repast. The honey, which is enough for either, would be too little for both, and the Sitaris, therefore, at its first meal, relieves itself from its only rival. After eight days the egg is consumed, and on the empty shell the Sitaris undergoes its first transformation, and makes its appearance in a very different form.... It changes into a white, fleshy grub, so organised as to float on the surface of the honey, with the mouth beneath and the spiracles above the surface.... In this state it remains until the honey is consumed, and, after some further metamorphoses, develops into a perfect beetle in August.
[Sidenote: Wonderful Instinct of the Beetle]
The beetle has sense organs; therefore she feels. But we have no reason to suppose that she remembers or thinks. Memory would be of little use to her; therefore parsimonious Nature bestows little or none. Cast adrift in a hostile world, she must come into existence ready armed by instinct for the battle of life. She has no time to learn, and during the rapid and strange changes in her career has little opportunity of acquiring knowledge that could beneficially guide her future conduct. Since memory and its corollary reflection are most developed in the highest animals, and are imperceptible in the lower, they are clearly later and higher products of evolution than instinct.
[Sidenote: Man’s Helplessness at Birth]
Family life is a product of memory, for the mate and offspring are re-cognised; therefore it always implies some degree of intelligence. The young are watched and protected, and taught by the higher animals. Opportunities are thus afforded of learning about the world, and more particularly of acquiring the traditions, the stored experiences, of the race. With the opportunity to profit by experience comes the ability to profit by it, and with the latter a gradual decay of instinct. Intelligence is substituted, more or less, for unthinking impulse. All the instincts are not lost, but in the higher animals we find no such elaborate innate impulses as in the lower. “Sitaris” is able to fend for herself from the first; but just in proportion as animals are highly placed in the scale of life, so they are helpless at the beginnings of consciousness, but correspondingly capable later. A young pig can run as soon as it is born, but the acquirements of the most learned pig are small compared to that of a dog, which, though more helpless than the pig at birth, is so teachable that he becomes the companion of man. Our domestic animals are all teachable, otherwise we could not tame them.
Of living beings man is by far the most helpless at birth. He cannot even seek the breast. In him instinct is at its minimum. For him more than any other animal prolonged and elaborate tuition is necessary; but so vast is his memory, and so great his power of utilising its stored experience, that in later life he is beyond comparison the most capable of the inhabitants of the earth. Compare what even a dull man knows, including the words of a language and its inflections and articulations, with what is acquired by the cleverest dog, and the immensity of the difference is at once apparent. We may take a solitary frog and rear him from the egg in an aquarium. If, subsequently, we remove him to a pond, he will take his place with his fellows at once. He has little, if anything, to learn. Instinctively he knows his food, and how to seek it; his enemies and rivals, and how to escape or fight them; his mate, and how to deal with her; and she knows how to dispose of her eggs. But how forlorn and helpless would be a man reared from infancy in a dark cell out of sight and sound of his kind, and then turned into a world where his experienced fellows struggle for existence!
[Sidenote: Fear is the Result of Experience]
Traditional knowledge--knowledge, that is, imparted by one generation to the next--is common enough amongst the higher of the lower animals, and forms no inconsiderable part of their mental equipment. Thus we may see the hen teaching her chickens how to seek food, and the cat instructing her kitten how to ambush mice. Birds and mammals inhabiting desert islands have none of that fear of man which in our country they acquire from dire experience. We have a saying, “as wild as a hawk”; but Darwin relates how he almost pushed a hawk from its perch with his gun in the Galapagos Islands. Round our coasts the sea-birds are exceedingly shy; in a harbor they feed from the hand. Formerly the Arctic seals, impelled by fear of bears, inhabited the outer margin of the floes; at the present day they have retreated from the more dangerous neighbourhood of man to the landward edge. Antarctic seals, harried by the great carnivora of the ocean, are watchful in the water; on land or on the surface of the ice, where till lately they met no danger, they may be slaughtered like sheep in a shambles. They are capable of profiting by experience; but they are slow to learn, and can acquire but little. Judged by our human standard, they are very stupid. The means of escape adopted by Arctic seals, and the means of capturing them, the ships and guns adopted by man, furnish a measure of the intellectual difference.
[Sidenote: Slavery in the World of Insects]
When animals are social, and so have the opportunity of learning, not only from their parents, but from other members of the species, the power of making useful mental acquirements is correspondingly great. It reaches a remarkable degree of development even amongst insects, some species of which live together in great communities. Young ants, for example, are tended with anxious care. It is said that they are led about the nest and instructed by older individuals. They are reported to be playful. Most significant of all is the fact that some species have the habit of capturing slaves belonging to other species, which they take as pupæ, never as adult ants, and to whom, as they develop, they teach their duties. The slaves are neuter individuals, and have no offspring, the supply being maintained by fresh captures. It follows that the slaves must learn their work, and therefore that their performance of it is not instinctive, but intelligent.
It is a fair inference that many of the so-called instincts of ants are really acquired habits, bits of knowledge and ways of thinking and acting which are handed down from one generation to the next, not by actual inheritance, but traditionally and educationally, just as children receive from us language, or religion, or a trade. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the power of making mental acquirements has evolved to a greater degree in the favourable environment of the ant-nest than among any other species except man.
[Sidenote: Man’s Essential Instincts]
The instincts of man, though comparatively few and simple, are yet essential to his existence. He has the instinct of hunger and the instinctive recognition of food as food, the instincts to sleep periodically, to rest when tired, and to sport when rested, the instincts of curiosity and imitativeness, and the deferred instincts of sexual and parental love, and perhaps one or two others. All these innate impulses he shares with the lower animals, but those which impel him to store and use his vaster memory are more developed in him than in any other type. Thus the instinct of sport urges him, not only to develop his limbs, but, through experience, to acquire dexterity and much besides. The little girl turns naturally to her doll, which she handles as she will her baby. The play of a boy as naturally involves contests, which foreshadow the grimmer battles of adult life. As he grows older the character of his sport changes. More and more it becomes an appeal to the wits, an appeal to wider experience and a means of adding to it.
[Sidenote: A Child’s Play Fits it for the Future]
The higher amongst the lower animals also have their sports, which, in every instance, are adapted to fit the members of the species for the future business of life. Compare, for example, the ambush and pounce of the kitten, the ardent chase and overthrow of the puppy, and the climbing proclivities of the kid. As a general rule, in proportion as an animal is capable of becoming intelligent, and as long as it is so capable, it is inclined to sport. A cat loses the desire early in life, a man retains it to the end. A child’s play, therefore, is no indication of mere frivolity. It is the outward and visible sign of an eager and splendidly directed mental activity. Curiosity also prompts the child to store its memory. Imitativeness impels him to acquire those mental traits which enabled his progenitors to survive in their world. Parental love prompts to the care and instruction of offspring. Very illuminating and beautiful is the instinctive delight of some dull and careworn mother in babyish play with her infant, and her joy when it first “takes notice,” and in its earliest beginnings of speech and locomotion.
Every animal species is fitted by its structures and their associated faculties to its particular place in Nature. In some cases it holds its own largely through the evolution of some one structure or group of structures. Thus, the bat is especially distinguished by the great development of its fingers and of the web between them, and the elephant by its trunk. The principal distinguishing physical peculiarity of man is the enormous relative size in him of that upper part of the vertebrate brain which is termed the cerebrum, and, we have every reason to believe, constitutes the organ of memory and thought.
[Sidenote: Evolution of Man’s Powers]
Associated in a special way with his great brain are his organs of speech and manipulation. These three structures, the brain, the vocal apparatus, and the hand, undoubtedly underwent concurrent evolution by the constant survival, during a period of intense competition, of those individuals who were naturally the best capable of receiving and storing experience, of using it for the intelligent manipulation of objects, and of communicating it to their fellows and descendants through the medium of speech. Even the highest of the lower animals are able to learn from one another only by example or through such very elementary verbal signs as calls, growls, or cries of alarm, which express no more than simple emotions.
Their traditional knowledge, therefore, is as nothing compared with that of man, who by means of articulated speech communicates not only information concerning sense impressions and emotions, but complex items of knowledge and processes of thought which have been garnered, elaborated, and systematised during tens of thousands of years by millions of predecessors. Without speech, or some such method of communicating abstruse information, his great brain would be useless. But knowledge and powers of thought are of no avail unless they can be translated into action; and for this the hands are necessary. To set free the fore limbs, which had hitherto been organs of locomotion, for their new function of manipulation, man became a biped, and assumed the erect posture--by no conscious effort, however, but solely by the survival of the fittest in each generation.
[Sidenote: Man Paves His Way to Greatness]
Savage man, then, differs from the lower animals in that he has a larger brain, a more capacious memory, and greater powers of utilising and communicating its contents. Modern man differs from ancient man because he is the heir of longer experience. Civilised man differs from the savage chiefly in that he has invented and more or less perfected certain artificial aids to speech, written symbols by means of which he is able to store in an available form knowledge immensely more abstruse and voluminous than would otherwise be possible. His books are artificial memories and vehicles of communication of unlimited capacity and unerring accuracy. Moreover, by means of these symbols he is able, as in the mathematics, to perform feats of thinking quite beyond the powers of his unaided mind; just as by means of machinery and other mechanical contrivances he is able to perform physical feats beyond the unaided powers of his body.
To memory, then, is due the advance of the savage beyond the lower animal; to tradition, the child of memory, the advance of modern man beyond ancient man; to tradition stored in books the advance of civilised men beyond the savage. To written symbols are due also man’s vast powers for future advance. The brute, the mammoth, the mastodon, the whale, the elephant, and the tiger, became ever more and more helpless in the presence of a knowledge and an ingenuity that gathered with the rolling years, and, though accumulated for ages, were yet relatively new things in this enormously old world.
Low animals, in proportion as they lack memory, move in a narrow, instinctive groove. Their mental traits are all inherited, and therefore each individual follows exactly in the footsteps of its predecessor. Since they cannot learn, they cannot adapt themselves to circumstances. Removed from the ancestral environment they perish. Cast in a rigid, inexpansive mould, every individual resembles every other of the same species, as much mentally as physically.
[Sidenote: Man can Revert to Savagery]
It is different with man. He is preeminently the educable, the reflective, the adaptive animal. Since the experiences of no two men are quite similar, they differ in knowledge, ideas, and aspirations, and, therefore, none are very closely alike mentally. The child does not follow exactly in the footsteps of the parent. So great is human adaptability that, though the mind of the savage differs immensely in all except instinct and power of learning from that of the civilised man, yet, were the child of the latter trained from birth by the former, he could not be other than a savage.
On the other hand, utter savages--for example, the Maories of New Zealand--have passed in a single generation from barbarism to civilisation. The average individual amongst us may be trained to fill the rôle of a beggar or a king, a scientist or a monk, a thief or a legislator. He is able to dwell in the Tropics or in the Arctic, in the town or in the wild. Memory, knowledge, intelligence, adaptability, are all links in a single chain of efficiency.
[Sidenote: Dawn of Human Life]
Memory is of two sorts, conscious and unconscious. The conscious memory contains experiences which can be recollected, such as the words of a language or the sights we have seen. The unconscious memory contains impressions which cannot be recalled to mind, but which are none the less important. Thus, we learn to use our limbs, a process which involves a precise but quite unconscious adjustment of the actions of numerous nerves and muscles, the very names and existences of which are known only to the anatomist. So, also, in youth we unconsciously imitate our fellows, adopting in great measure their mental tones and attitudes without knowing how or when we were influenced. Much, too, that was once capable of being recalled is added to that hidden store, and, though apparently lost, remains potent for good or evil. Our minds are like floating icebergs, of which the visible part is but a fraction of the whole, and are moved by deep currents in a seemingly unaccountable way. At birth the mind of a child, unlike that of a beetle, is practically blank. Sights and sounds and the other feelings convey no meanings to it. But soon the messages sent by the sensation are understood. In a few weeks the child evolves order out of chaos, and comprehends to a wonderful degree the world around it. It learns to move its muscles in a purposeful way, and in a year or two is able to walk and speak a language, and do a vast deal more besides. In these early years, the period of man’s greatest mental activity, are made his most valuable and indispensable acquirements. But as he becomes more and more completely equipped for the battle of life, his powers of adding to the store slowly decline. In adult life the gains are balanced by the losses. In old age the losses exceed the gains. Compare the perfection with which the young acquire the manners of society, and every accent, inflection, and intonation of a language, with the imperfections displayed when learning is undertaken later.
[Sidenote: Habits are Imitation Instincts]
We learn to do new things, acquire new knowledge, and think new thoughts with toil. But practice brings facility. In the end we perform with ease that which was acquired with difficulty. We cannot, however, unlearn as we learnt, by an act of will. The facility lingers, and, as a consequence, our actions and thoughts, our mental attitudes, our whole outlook on life becomes more or less automatic and stereotyped. In other words, our acquirements come at last to resemble instincts, and are often so misnamed, as when a boy who has learned to dodge is said to avoid a blow instinctively. A being from another planet who for the first time saw a man walking or cycling could not distinguish the nature of these acquirements from such instinctive movements as the running or flying of an insect. The patriotism of a Spartan or a Japanese differs from that of a bee only in its mode of origin. In brief, the low animal is a creature of instincts, the man is a creature of habits, which are nothing other than imitation instincts.
[Sidenote: Mankind’s Substitutes for Instinct]
A principal function, then, of our faculty of making mental acquirements, of our conscious and unconscious memories, is to supply us with those automatic ways of thinking and acting which are our substitutes for instincts. Our conscious memories supply us with our stereotyped mental attitudes--desires, beliefs, aspirations, habitual way of thinking, and so forth. Our unconscious memories supply our stereotyped ways of acting--the automatic ways of acting we have just considered. It is a principal business of our lives to acquire them; but, though a great advantage is thus gained, one almost as great is lost. We act and think more quickly in familiar situations, but in proportion as we grow older we lose our splendid human capacity for learning. Beyond the verge of our imitation instincts spreads a domain, very wide in the infant, but narrowing as we pass towards old age, which is the real realm of the active intellect. Here, where thoughts and actions are not yet stereotyped, memory gathers fresh harvests, imagination plays, and reason ponders. Here man is a rational being in the strict sense of the word.
[Sidenote: Mind and Memory]
A little thought renders it evident that a feeble-minded person, an idiot, or an imbecile, is always one with a defective memory. He is unable to profit like the normal individual from experience. The truth that the higher faculties are more often absent in the feeble-minded than the lower is due entirely to the fact that they can be acquired only by people whose receptive powers are well developed. In effect and in fact the feeble-minded person is an instance of reversion to a prehuman mental state. Judged by the human standard, every monkey is an idiot. But the reversion is not complete, for, though the imbecile loses some part of his power of profiting by experience, he regains no part of the lost power of being guided by instinct. Therefore he is correspondingly helpless as compared with a lower animal.
Owing to the constitution of the human mind, some decay of the faculty of profiting by experience accompanies advancing age. But it need seldom be so great as it usually is, and never so great as it often is. Certain mental attitudes, certain systems of education, certain environments, leave the mind of the man almost as open as that of a little child; others inflict on it premature senility. An Aristotle or a Darwin learns to the last year of his long life; a Mohammedan or a Tibetan ecclesiastic is old before he has ceased to be young. Convinced that pestilence is due directly to the wrath of God, he scorns the notion that sanitation can be right or useful; believing that the earth is flat, no evidence will convince him that it is round; holding his sacred religion with a steadfast faith, he will murder the heretic rather than think out his propositions.
[Sidenote: How the Minds of Men Differ]
But habits of stupidity are not confined to particular regions of thought. Becoming almost as incapable of mental change as a beetle, a man may undergo an arrest of mental development which differs from that of the idiot only because it occurs later in life, is less complete, and is acquired, not innate. In his ordinary surroundings he appears a normal person; but placed among people of more open mind, his brute-like inability to learn suggests sharply the resemblance to the feeble-minded child. Let us sum up. Man has conquered the earth because he is pre-eminently the educable, the adaptive animal. His educability--indeed, his whole thinking capacity--depends on his memory. He has few instincts, a fact which increases his mental ductility; but one of the most important of his instincts is imitativeness, which impels him to copy not only such obvious things as the speech of his predecessors, but their mental attitudes as well. In this way not only the actual knowledge and beliefs but also the habits of thought of one generation are handed on to the next. Apart from a few instincts which are more active in the child than in the adult, and two or three others whose appearance is deferred till later life, the whole mental difference between the child and the adult lies in the fact that the former has a great memory in the sense that it is very capable of storing experience, whereas the latter has a great memory in the sense that it has already stored much experience. As parent to child, so one racial generation hands on its acquirements to the next, but with greater certainty; for the parent is not the only influence in the life of the child, who imitates many other people, sometimes more closely than the parent; whereas, since few individuals travel during youth, the young are seldom influenced by others than by members of their own race. Except in times of great change, therefore, racial generations resemble one another even more closely than parents and children.
Like individuals, races differ in their mental characteristics. The English have one set of characters, the Japanese another, and the Russians a third. The problem of the extent to which these characters are inborn or acquired is very important to the student of history. Accordingly as we believe they are the one or the other we are driven to accept one or other of two very different readings of the past.
[Sidenote: Influences in a Child’s Life]
Are races, then, brave or cowardly, energetic or slothful, enlightened or savage, and so forth, by nature or by training? Are the qualities that have enabled some races to flourish, while others are decadent, transmitted as instincts or handed on, as knowledge is? The reader has now materials of a kind not usually found in historical works on which to found a judgment. He must bear in mind that, while an American infant reared by cannibals would retain the bodily characteristics of his race mentally, he could not be other than a savage. He must remember also that some races have altered their mental characteristics very rapidly. Thus, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, immediately after the long Dark Ages, the British and several other European races suddenly became intellectually active and socially progressive. The Japanese supply a more modern, the Greeks and Romans more ancient, instances. The latter quite as suddenly sank into abysmal degradation. Innate mental characters, such as the instincts, usually change so slowly that not merely historical but geological time elapses before the alteration is perceptible. Again, the reader must note that, while the opinion that racial traits are inborn is nearly universal, most men act as if they knew them to be acquired; for nearly all men are careful in training their children, especially with respect to those traits that contribute to the formation of character.
[Sidenote: Great Facts to Remember]
Doubtless, races of men differ innately in mind as they do in body, but these differences can occur only within narrow limits. The instincts of all races are, of course, very similar, for all the instincts are essential to the preservation of life. But races may differ in strength of instinct, and more especially in powers of memory. Thus it is possible, or probable, that the English, for example, are more capable of profiting by experience than Australian blacks. Certainly, their brains are larger. On the other hand, the brain grows under the stimulus of use, and therefore the larger size of the English brain may be due to more arduous labour.
[Sidenote: The Real Value of History]
Lastly, the reader must ask himself the question: What mental effects have centuries of freedom or slavery, or of civilisation, or of barbarism, on races? Do they produce innate changes, or do they merely render certain acquirements so nearly universal that their perpetuation by imitation is insured? If he supposes that the changes are innate, he must ask himself the additional question whether they arose through the transmission of parental acquirements to offspring, or through the actual and constant destruction in certain environments of certain definite types of individuals who were thus prevented from leaving offspring and so perpetuating their like. The former hypothesis is now generally repudiated by science. The latter may be true, but as yet has not been supported by evidence; or at any rate is supported only by such evidence as that which Mill and Buckle denounced. In either case, though history may furnish him with intellectual occupation, it will supply few lessons of practical value. If, on the other hand, he has perceived the greatness of the part played in the human mind by acquirement, if he has noted that man is man, a thinking and rational being, the conqueror of the earth, only because he is the most impressionable and therefore the most adaptable of living types, the reader will learn from the racial see-saw of the past what kinds of mental training have conduced to success and happiness and what to ruin, and so perhaps he may find himself in a position to help the fortunes of his people and his children. The real value of history, as in the last analysis of all experience, lies in its educational applications.
G. ARCHDALL REID
THE WORLD BEFORE HISTORY
By Professor Johannes Ranke
THE WONDERFUL STORY OF DRIFT MAN
[Sidenote: Nature’s Great Book of History]
The history of the world is the history of the human mind. The oldest documents affording us knowledge of it lie buried in those most mighty and comprehensive historical archives, the geological strata of our planet. Natural philosophy has learned to read these stained, crumpled, and much-torn pages that record the habitation of the earth by living beings; but only a few sections of this book of the universe have yet been perused, and these appear but fragmentary in comparison with the whole task. The passages that relate to the human race are small in number and often even ambiguous, and it is only the last pages that can give an account of it.
The oldest undisputed traces of the presence of man on the earth that have hitherto been discovered are met with in the strata of the Drift Epoch, and it is only during the last generation that the existence of “Drift Man” has been palæontologically proved beyond dispute. The late Sir J. Prestwick believed, however--and his results have been confirmed by later discoveries--in the existence of evidence of the presence of man in Western Europe before the present river system of our land was established, long before the age of the “Drift” relics. The evidence consists of rudely shaped pieces of flint, apparently artificially chipped along one or more edges. These supposed implements are termed “Eoliths.” They were first discovered by Mr. Benjamin Harrison in the high-level plateau, probably of the Upper Pliocene Age, in Kent, and their significance is now widely accepted.
Up to the middle of last century research appeared to have established as a positive fact that man could not be traced back to the older geological strata; remains of man were said to be found only in the newest stratum of the earth’s formation--in the alluvial, or “recent” stratum. The bones of man were accordingly claimed to be sure guides to the geological formations of the present time, as the bones of the mammoth and cave-bear were to the strata of the Drift. Where traces of man were found it was considered as proved by natural science that the particular stratum in which they occurred was to be allotted to the most recent system, which we see forming and being transformed under our eyes at the present day.
[Sidenote: The Theory of Natural Catastrophes]
While it was declared that man belonged to the alluvial stratum, it was at the same time stated, according to the doctrine of Cuvier, which had the weight of a dogma, that man could not have belonged to an older geological stratum or era, and therefore not even to the next older one, the Drift. The beginning and the end of geological eras are marked by mighty transformations which have caused a local interruption in the formation of the strata of the earth’s surface. In many cases we can point to volcanic eruptions as the chief causes, but more especially to a change in the distribution of land and water. Cuvier had conceived these changes involving the transformation to have been violent terrestrial revolutions, the collapse of all existing things, in which all living beings belonging to the past epoch must have been annihilated. It appeared impossible that a living thing could have survived this hypothetical battle of the elements, and passed from an older epoch into the next one; and the new epoch was supposed to have received plants and animals by re-creation. All this had to be applied to man also; he was supposed to have come into existence only in the alluvial period. Not without consideration for the Mosaic account of the Creation, which, like the creation legends of numerous peoples scattered far and wide over all the continents of the earth, tells of a great deluge at the beginning of the present age, the Pleistocene Epoch of the earth’s formation preceding the present period had been termed the Flood Epoch, or Diluvium. In its stratifications it was thought that the effects of great deluges could largely be recognised; but the human eye could not have beheld these, for, according to the catastrophe theory, it appeared out of the question that man could have been “witness of the Flood.”
[Sidenote: What Actually Happened]
Here modern research in the primeval history or palæontology of mankind begins, starting from the complete transformation of the doctrine of the geological epochs brought about by Lyell and his school. Proofs of terrestrial revolutions, as local phenomena and epoch marks, are doubtless to be found, imposing enough to make the views of the older school appear intelligible; but, generally speaking, a complete interruption of the existing conditions did not take place between the periods. Everything tends to prove that even in the earlier eras the transformation of the earth’s surface went on in practically the same way as we see it going on before our eyes to-day in a degree that is slight only to appearance. The effects of volcanic action; the rising and sinking of continents and islands, and the alteration in the distribution of sea and land caused thereby; the inroads of the sea and its work in the destruction of coasts; the formation of deltas and the overflowing of rivers; the action of glaciers and torrents in the mountains, and so forth, are constantly working, more or less, at the transformation of the earth’s surface.
[Sidenote: Nature’s Unbroken Chain]
As we see these newest alluvial deposits being formed, so in principle have the strata of the earlier eras also been formed, and their miles of thickness prove, not the violence of extreme and sudden catastrophes, but only the length of time that was necessary to remove such mighty masses here and pile them up there. It was not sudden general revolutions of great violence, but the slowly working forces, small only to appearance, well known from our present-day surroundings, which destroy in one place and build up again in another with the material obtained from the destruction--it was these which were the causes of the gradual transformation of the earth in all periods of its history comparable to the present. According to this new conception of geological processes, a general destruction of plants and animals at the end of eras, and a new creation at the beginning of the following ones, was no longer a postulate of science as it had been. The living creatures of the earliest eras could now be claimed as ancestors of those living to-day; the chain seems nowhere completely broken. The ancestors of the human race were also to be sought in the strata of the earlier geological periods.
Among the forces which we find attended by a transformation of the fauna and flora of the earth’s eras, the influences of climatic changes in particular are clearly and surely shown. In that primeval period in which the coal group was formed the climate in widely different parts of the earth was comparatively equable, little divided into zones, and of a moist warmth; this is proved by the really gigantic masses of plant growth implied by the formation of many coal strata, in which the remains of a luxuriant cryptogamic flora are everywhere embedded. In Greenland, in the strata belonging to the chalk period, and even in the deposits of the Tertiary Period, which immediately precedes the Drift Era, the remains of higher dicotyledonous plants of tropical character are found. The occurrence of palæozoic coral reefs in high latitudes also goes to prove that the temperature of the sea water there was higher at that time: in fact, that a tropical climate existed in the farthest north--an extreme contrast to the present ice-sheet on its land and the icebergs of its seas.
In Central Europe the climatic conditions can have been only slightly different. During the middle Tertiary Period palms grew in Switzerland; and even at the end of the Tertiary Period, as it was slowly passing into the Drift Era, the climate in Central Europe was still warmer than now, being much like that of Northern Italy, and its protected west coast the Riviera. There was also a rich flora, partly evergreen, and a fauna adapted to such mild surroundings. Even in the oldest (Preglacial) strata, and again in the middle (Interglacial) strata of the Central European drift, there was still an abundant plant-growth requiring a temperate climate, at any rate not more severe than Central Europe possesses at the present day. Our chief forest trees grew even then--the pine, fir, larch, and yew, and also the oak, maple, birch, hazel, etc. On the other hand, Northern and Alpine forms are absent among the plants. The same holds good of the animal world, which was certainly much farther removed than the plant world from the conditions prevailing now. The gigantic forms--the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus--appear particularly strange to us, as also the large beasts of prey--the hyena, lion, etc. But besides these, and the giant deer with its powerful antlers, and two large bovine species--the bison and the urus--there were also the majority of the present wild animals of Central and Northern Europe that were originally natives--as the horse, stag, roe, wild boar, and beaver, with the smaller rodents and insectivora, and the wolf, fox, lynx, and bears, of which last the cave-bear was far larger than the present brown bear, and even than the Polar and grizzly bears.
We have sure proofs that through a decrease in the yearly temperature a glacial period set in over Europe, North Asia, and North America, burying vast areas under a sheet of ice, of the effect and extent of which Northern Greenland, with its ground-relief veiled in inland ice, can give us an idea.
The immediate consequence of this total climatic change was an essential change in the fauna. Forms that were not suited to the deteriorated climate, that could neither stand it nor adapt themselves to it, were first compelled to retire, and then were exterminated. This fate befell the hippopotamuses, and also one of the two elephant species, Elephas antiquus, with its dwarf breeds in Sicily and Malta, probably thus developed by this retreat; then the rhinoceros-like Elasmotherium, a species of beaver; the Trogontherium, and the powerful cat Machairodus or Trucifelis, which still lived in England, France, and Liguria during the Drift Period. Other animals, like the lion and hyena, withdrew to more southerly regions, not affected by the increasing cold and more remote from its effects.
[Sidenote: The Older Drift Animals]
On the other hand, according to Von Zittel’s description, an immigration of cold-loving land animals took place, which at the present day live either in the Far North or on the wild Asiatic steppes, or in the high mountain ranges. These new immigrants mixed with the surviving forms of the older drift fauna. The latter lived, as we have seen, by no means in a warm climate, but only in a temperate “northerly” one, even in the warmer periods of the epoch. So we can understand that many of this older animal community were well able to adapt themselves to colder climatic conditions, and among them two of the large Drift pachydermata, the elephant and rhinoceros, whose kin we now find only in the warmest climes. But a thick woolly coat made these two Drift animals well fitted to defy a raw climate--namely, the woolly-haired mammoth, Elephas primigenius, one of the two Drift species of elephants of Europe, and the woolly-haired rhinoceros, Rhinoceros antiquitatis. A second species of rhinoceros, Rhinoceros merckii, was also preserved, and maintained its region of distribution. The horse was now more largely distributed, and inhabited the plains in herds; but, above all, the reindeer immigrated along with other animals that now belong only to Far Northern and Arctic regions, and pastured in large herds at the edges of the glaciers. With the reindeer, although less frequent, was the musk-ox of the Far North, besides many other cold-loving species, such as the lemming, snow-mouse, glutton, ermine, and Arctic fox. Many of the animal forms that were very frequent then, in the Drift Period, appear now in Central Europe only as Alpine dwellers, living on the borders of eternal snow, such as the ibex, chamois, marmot, and Alpine hare.
[Sidenote: The Animal Invasion of Europe]
[Sidenote: The Change of the Ice Age Climate]
Of special importance for our main question is the great invasion of Europe by Central Asiatic animals; immigrants direct from the Asiatic steppes pushed westward “as in a migration of nations,” among them the wild ass, saiga antelope, bobac, Asiatic porcupine, zizel, jumping mouse, whistling hare, and musk shrew-mouse. According as the glaciers and inland ice grew or shrank, the animals of the glacial period advanced more or less far to the North or retired more to the South, extending or reducing their range of distribution. The Glacial Period was no invariable climatic phenomenon. It is perfectly certain that a first Glacial Period with a low yearly temperature, under the influence of which the ice-masses, with their moraines, advanced a long way from the North and from the high mountains, so that in Germany, for instance, only a comparatively narrow strip remained free and habitable for higher forms of life between the two opposing rivers of ice--was succeeded by at least one period of warmer climate, and that certainly not a short one. The mean yearly temperature had increased so much that the ice-masses melted to a considerable extent, and had to retire far to the North and into the high valleys of the Alps. In this warmer Interglacial Period, as it is called, the Drift animals advanced far to the North, especially the mammoth, which, with the exception of the greater part of Scandinavia and Finland (districts which remained covered with ice during the Interglacial Period), is distributed throughout the drift strata of the whole of Europe and North Africa, and as far as Lake Baikal and the Caspian Sea in Northern Asia. Even the older Drift fauna, so far as it had not yet died out or retired, returned to its old habitats, so that the Interglacial fauna of Central Europe appear very similar to the Preglacial fauna. A long-sustained decrease of temperature led once more to the growth of the ice, which in this second Glacial Period almost reconquered the territory it had won at first.
In consequence of these oscillations in the climatic conditions of the Drift Era as a whole, we have to distinguish the Preglacial Era and the Interglacial Era, as warmer sub-periods of the Drift, from the real Glacial Periods. The latter appear as a first, or earlier, and a second, or later Glacial Period, as remains of which the zone of the older moraines and the zone of the later ones clearly mark the limits of the former glaciation.
[Sidenote: Breaking up of the Earth]
It was this second deterioration of the climate, with the fresh advances made by the glaciers and masses of inland ice, which definitely did away with the older Drift fauna that was not equal to the sudden climatic change. Nor did the woolly-haired rhinoceros, the Rhinoceros merckii, and the cave-bear survive the climax of the new Glacial Period. Even the woolly-haired mammoth succumbed. It and the woolly-haired rhinoceros, accompanied by the musk-ox and bison, had made their way into the Far North of Asia. But while the two last species bore the inclemencies of the climate, the rhinoceroses and elephants met their end here. And yet they had long preserved their lives on the borders of eternal ice. Whole carcases, both of the woolly-haired and Merckian rhinoceroses, and also of the woolly-haired mammoth, the bison, and the musk-ox, with skin and hair and well-preserved soft parts, have been discovered in the ice and frozen ground between the Yenisei and Lena, and on the New Siberian Islands at the mouth of the Lena. The carcases of the mammoth and rhinoceros found imbedded in the ice were covered with a coat of thick woolly hair and reddish-brown bristles ten inches long; about thirty pounds of hair from such a mammoth were placed in the St. Petersburg Natural History Museum. A mane hung from the animal’s neck almost to its knees, and on its head was soft hair a yard long. The animals were therefore in this respect well equipped for enduring a cold climate. As regards their food they were also adapted to a cold climate, traces of coniferæ and willows--that is, “Northern plants”--having been found in the hollows of the molar teeth of mammoths and rhinoceroses. The mammoth proves to have had greater resisting power, and to have been more fit for further migrations, than the rhinoceros. The latter’s range of distribution extended over the whole of Northern and Temperate Europe, China and Central Asia, and Northern Asia and Siberia. But, as we have seen, the mammoth penetrated not only into North Africa, but, what is of the highest importance for the proper understanding of the settling of the New World, even into North America.
[Sidenote: Companions of the Mammoth]
[Sidenote: Mammoth’s Arrival in Europe]
The connection which in earlier geological periods had united Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America in the greatest homogeneous zoogeographical kingdom, the Arctogæa, was broken during the Tertiary and Drift Periods, so that several zoogeographical provinces were formed. The connection with North America was the first to be broken, so that even in the last two divisions of the Tertiary Period, the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, the Old and the New Worlds stood in the relation of independent zoogeographical provinces to one another. Now, it is of the greatest importance to note that during the Drift Period North America again received some Northern immigrants from the Old World, according to Von Zittel “probably viâ Eastern Asia.” Consequently, during the Drift Period communication existed, at least temporarily, between Asia and North America in the region of Bering Strait, sufficient to allow the mammoth and some companions to migrate from the one continent to the other. In Kotzebue Sound mammoth remains are found in the “ground-ice formation,” together with those of the horse, elk, reindeer, musk-ox and bison. Mammoth remains are also known to have been found in the Bering Islands, St. George in the Pribylov group, and Unalaska, one of the Aleutian Islands. In that period the mammoth arrived in the New World as a colonist driven from the Old. It spread widely over British North America, Alaska, and Canada; it has also been found in Kentucky. A relatively recent union of the circumpolar regions of the Northern Hemisphere--of Europe, Asia, and North America--is also proved by the occurrence of animals that we recognise as companions of the mammoth, but which, surviving the Glacial Period, are still distributed over the whole region, such as the reindeer, elk, and bison. The absence in Asia of several animals specially characteristic of the European Drift (the hippopotamus, ibex, chamois, fallow-dear, wildcat, and cave-bear) explains also their absence in the North American Drift fauna. It is particularly strange that the cave-bear did not reach Northern Asia. It is otherwise the most frequent beast of prey of the Drift Period, and hundreds of its carcases often lie buried in the caves and clefts it once inhabited. In Southern Russia numerous remains of it are found, whereas in the English caves it is rarer, the cave-hyena predominating here. Apart from the exceptions just mentioned, J. F. Brandt considers North Asia and the high Northern latitudes to be the region in which the European, North Asiatic, and North American land fauna had concentrated during the Tertiary and Drift Periods, and whence their migrations and advances took place according as it grew older. As the northern fauna spread over more southern latitudes during the Drift Period, they took possession of the habitats of the species there belonging to the Tertiary Period, drove them back into tropical and subtropical regions, and formed the real stock of the Drift fauna, as described by Von Zittel in his “Palæozoology.”
One thing is certain--namely, that the northern borders of Siberia were not the real home of the mammoth and its companions; the original habitat of these animals points to the far interior of Asia, particularly to the wild table-lands, where they so far steeled themselves in enduring the climate that in the course of the Glacial Period half the world became accessible to them. As far as is known to-day, the mammoth arrived in Europe earlier than on the northern borders of Asia, where, protected by climatic conditions, its remains are most numerous and best preserved. The number of these gigantic animals must have been very considerable in this Far Northern region for a time, judging from the abundance of bones found there. In Central Europe only a few places are known--such as Kannstatt, Predmost in Moravia, etc.--where the mammoth is found with similar frequency. The mammoth attained its widest distribution in the Interglacial Period. In that period it crossed the Alps, and arrived on the other side, in North Asia, at the border of the “stone-ice” masses of inland ice that were still preserved from the first Glacial Period. The vegetation there was richer then than it is to-day; now only the vegetation of the tundra can exist. Animals found coniferæ, willows, and alders in sufficient quantity to enable them to keep in herds. All the same, we have not to imagine the climate on the borders of the ice to have been “genial,” for from that period originate the mammoth carcases that are found frozen entire in crevasses of the ice-fields. When the new period of cold--the second Glacial Period--began, these Far Northern regions must have become unsuitable for the mammoth owing to the want of food. Von Toll, who has examined the fossil ice-beds and, their relation to the mammoth carcases particularly on New Siberian Islands, says:
The mammoths and their contemporaries lived where their remains are found; they died out gradually in consequence of physical geographical changes in the region they inhabited, and through no catastrophe; their carcases were deposited during low temperatures, partly on the river-terraces, and partly on the banks of lakes or on glaciers (inland ice), and covered with mud; like the ice-masses that formed the foundation of their graves, their mummies were preserved to the present day, thanks to the persistent or increasing cold.
The woolly-haired mammoth did not survive the second Glacial Period anywhere; in the post-Glacial Period its traces have disappeared.
The Drift series of strata are nowhere so clearly exemplified as in the New Siberian Islands, where the Drift stone-ice still forms very extensive high “ice-cliffs,” always covered with a layer of loam, sand, and peat, and having precipices often of great height--in one place seventy-two feet.
Embedded in these cliffs of stone-ice have been found the mammoth carcases, which formerly sank into crevices in the ice. These crevices are partly filled up with snow, which has turned into “firn” and finally into ice, but partly also with loam or sand, which are merged above immediately into the strata overlying the stone-ice. In the year 1860 Bojavski, the mammoth-hunter, found a mammoth, with all its soft parts preserved, sticking upright in a crevice in the ice filled with loam; in 1863 it was thrown down, together with the coast-wall that sheltered it, and washed away by the sea.
The Tunguse Schumachow had been more fortunate as early as 1799. During his boating expeditions along the coast, on the look-out for mammoth-tusks, he observed one day, between blocks of ice, a shapeless block which was not at all like the masses of driftwood that are generally found there. In the following year the block had melted a little, but it was only at the end of the third summer that the whole side and one of the tusks of a mammoth appeared plainly out of the ice; the animal, however, still remained sunk in the ice-masses. At last, towards the end of the fifth year, the ice between the ground and the mammoth melted more quickly than the rest, the base began to slope, and the enormous mass, impelled by its own weight, glided down on to the sand of the coast. Here Adams found the carcase in 1806, or as much as the dogs and wild animals had left of it. The whole skeleton, with a portion of the flesh, skin, and hair, has since formed one of the chief ornaments of the collection in the Academy at St. Petersburg. According to Von Toll, who personally visited the site of Bojavski’s discovery, the following profile presented itself there: first the tundra stratum; then an alternation of thin strata of loam and ice; under these a peat-like layer of grass, leaves, and other vegetation, that had been washed together; then a fine layer of sand, with remains of Salix, etc., and finally stone-ice. At another place, in Gulf Anabar, in 73° north latitude, Von Toll also found the ground-moraine under a fossil ice-bed, which appears to prove his theory of a Drift region of inland ice, of which the stone-ice beds of New Siberia and Eschscholtz Bay are remains.
Of these strata the frozen loam deposits over the stone-ice, containing the willow and the alder, are doubtless Interglacial. Some of the remains of the alder are in such wonderful preservation that there are still leaves and whole clusters of catkins on the branches.
The land-mass to which the present New Siberian Islands belong was only dismembered at the end of the Interglacial Period, when colder sea-currents procured an entrance, and the accumulation of snow-masses diminished simultaneously with the sinking of the land, whereas the cold increased. The flora died off, says Von Toll, and the animal world was deprived of the possibility of roaming freely over vast areas. Only one representative of the great Drift fauna, the musk-ox, has been able to preserve its life to the present day on the larger remnants of its former vast home, such as Greenland and Grinnell Land.
[Sidenote: Remains of the Ice Age]
As we have said, the geological and climatic conditions in all regions of the earth affected by the Glacial Period were closely similar to those just described. In other places the Drift stone-ice has long disappeared, but the ground-moraines of the former inland ice-masses, and the surface-moraines (terminal and lateral) of the former gigantic glaciers, constitute its unobliterated traces. On the moraines of the earlier Glacial Period we find the strata of the Interglacial Period deposited, and on the later moraines of the second (last) Glacial Period lie the remains of the post-Glacial Period, in the course of which a continual increase in the yearly temperature--probably only a few degrees of the thermometer--caused the glaciers to melt and retreat, and opened the way for the return of plants and animals to what had been deserts of snow and ice. The place formerly occupied by the Interglacial and Glacial fauna is then taken by the post-Glacial fauna, which proves considerably different.
A number of the most characteristic species of the former sections of the Drift Period are already absent in the earliest post-Glacial deposits; the fauna approaches nearer and nearer in its composition to that of the present day. The inland ice-masses and gigantic glaciers began to melt away, and gradually retired to the present limits of the glaciation that forms the remains of the Glacial Period of the Drift. The animal forms of the beginning of the post-Glacial Period are still living, and the plants characterising this final stage of the Drift Period are still growing on the borders of the ice at the present day. In the post-Glacial Period a few Northern forms--such as the reindeer, lemming, ringed lemming, glutton, zizel, whistling hare, and jumping mouse--still retained for a time their habitats in Central Europe. Part of the Drift fauna--as the horse, wild ass, saiga antelope, and Asiatic porcupine--concentrated again in the Asiatic steppes, from which they had formerly won their territory of the Drift Period; the specific Glacial forms--the reindeer and his above-mentioned companions--followed the retreating ice-masses into the Far North, and even into Polar regions. Another part--the specially Alpine forms, such as the ibex, chamois, marmot, and Alpine hare--migrated with the Alpine glaciers into the high valleys of the Alps, where they could continue the life they had led in the lowlands during the Glacial Period. The mammoth, woolly-haired rhinoceros, and cave-bear are extinct.
The present-day mammalian fauna of Europe and North Asia accordingly bears a comparatively young character; during the Drift, and especially in consequence of the Glacial Period, it underwent the most considerable transformations.
[Sidenote: Coming of Man upon the Scene]
It is in the middle of this great drama of a gigantic animal world struggling and fighting for its existence with the superior powers of Nature, during the Interglacial period of the Drift, that man suddenly appears upon the scene in Europe like a deus ex machina.
Whence he came we do not know.
Did he make his entrance into Europe in company with the Drift fauna that immigrated from Central Asia, or have we to seek his original home in the New World?
THE APPEARANCE OF MAN ON THE EARTH
[Sidenote: The Mystery of a Human Skull]
The remains of the Drift fauna are usually found mixed up and washed together in caves and rock-crevices. From the investigation of the caves in Thuringia, Franconia, and elsewhere practically proceeded the first knowledge of the Drift fauna of Central Europe. Here, right among the bones of primeval animals, were also found bones and skulls of man. The strata in which they were discovered appeared undisturbed; that they came into the old burial-places of the Drift fauna subsequently--perhaps by an intentional burial of relatively recent times--was thought to be out of the question. The discovery that became most famous was Esper’s, in one of the richest caves of “Franconian Switzerland,” the Gaillenreuth cave. There, in 1774, Esper found a man’s lower jaw and shoulder-blade at a perfectly untouched spot protected by a stone projection in the cave wall, in the same loam as bones of the cave-bear and other Drift animals. Later, a human skull with some rude potsherds of clay came to light in another place. Esper argued thus:
As the human bones (lower jaw and shoulder-blade) lay among the skeletons of animals, of which the Gaillenreuth caves are full, and as they were found in what is in all probability the original stratum, I presume, and I think not without sufficient reason, that these human limbs are of equal age with the other animal fossils.
The Cuvier catastrophe theory could not allow this inference; according to that theory it was a “scientific postulate” that man could not have appeared on the earth until the alluvial period, and therefore after the Drift fauna had become extinct. Therefore, in spite of appearances, the human bones must have been more recent; and it was indeed absolutely proved that the skull that Esper had found in the cave with the rude clay potsherds originated from a burial in the floor of the cave. As this was full of remains of Drift animals, the corpse, which had been covered with the earth that had been thrown up in digging the grave, was necessarily surrounded by these remains, and even appeared embedded in them.
[Sidenote: The Story of the Caves]
It was ascertained that in very early times, but yet long after the Drift Period, the dwellers near by had had a predilection for using the caves as burial-places, so that the fact of human bones coming together with bones of Drift animals in the floor of the same cave is easily explained. Moreover, it was found that from the earliest times down to the present day the caves had been used by hunters, herdsmen, and others as places of shelter in bad weather, as cooking-places, and sometimes even--especially in very early times--as regular dwelling-places for longer periods, so that refuse of all kinds, and often of all ages and forms of civilisation that the land has seen from the Drift Period down to modern times, must have got into the floors of the caves. If these were damp and soft, the remains of every century were trodden in and got to lie deeper and deeper, so that, for instance, the fragments of a cast-iron saucepan were actually found right among the bones of regular Drift animals in a cave in Upper Franconia.
[Sidenote: The Caves do not Prove Drift Man]
The discoveries of human remains in caves appeared discredited by this, and to be of no value as proofs of the co-existence of man with the Drift fauna. And indeed this position must practically be still taken at the present day: all cave-finds are to be judged with the greatest caution. They in themselves would never have been sufficient to establish the existence of Drift Man, although, according to the general change in scientific thought that led to the overthrow of Cuvier’s theory, Drift Man is now just as much a postulate of science as was formerly the case for the opposite assumption.
[Sidenote: Finding the First Drift Man]
The first sure proofs were adduced in France by Boucher de Perthes, in the Drift beds of the Somme valley, near Abbeville, at the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century. Fully recognising the inadequacy of proof given by cave-finds, he had sought for the relics of man in the undisturbed Drift beds of gravel and coarse sand that contains the bones of Drift animals, which by their covering and depth precluded all suspicion of having been subsequently dug over. And he was successful. He had argued in exactly the same manner as Esper had formerly done, but with better right. In the stratified Drift formations every period is sharply defined by the layers of differently coloured and differently composed strata horizontally overlying one another. Here the proofs begin. They are irrefutable if it is shown that the relics of man have been there since the deposit. Being no less immovable than this stratum in which they lie, as they came with it, they were likewise preserved with it; and as they have contributed to its formation, they existed before it.
[Sidenote: The Overthrow of Cuvier’s Famous Theory]
That is the line of thought according to which Boucher de Perthes was able, in 1839, to lay before the leading experts in Paris--at their head Cuvier himself--his discoveries proving the former existence of Drift man. But his demonstrations were not then sufficient to break the old ban of prejudices that were apparently founded on such good scientific bases; his proofs of the presence of man in the Somme valley at the time of the Drift, contemporaneously with the extinct Drift animals, were ridiculed. It was twenty years before these long-neglected discoveries in the Somme valley concerning the early history of man were recognised by the scientific world. This was only made possible by Lyell, whose authority as a geologist had risen above Cuvier’s, placing the whole weight of it on Boucher’s side, after having personally travelled over the Somme valley three times in the year 1859, and having himself examined all the chief places where relics of Drift Man had been discovered. According to Lyell’s description, the Somme valley lies in a district of white chalk, which forms elevations of several hundred feet in height. If we ascend to this height we find ourselves on an extensive tableland, showing only moderate elevations and depressions, and covered uninterruptedly for miles with loam and brick earth about five feet thick and quite devoid of fossils. Here and there on the chalk may be noticed outlying patches of Tertiary sand and clay, the remains of a once extensive formation, the denudation of which has chiefly furnished the Drift gravel material in which the relics of man and the bones of extinct animals lie buried. The Drift alluvial deposit of the Somme valley exhibits nothing extraordinary in its stratification or outward appearance, nor in its composition or organic contents. The stratum in which the bones of the Drift fauna are found intermingled with the relics of man is partly a marine and partly a fluviatile deposit. The human relics in particular are mostly buried deep in the gravel; almost everywhere one has to pass down through a mass of overlying loam with land shells, or a fine sand with fresh-water molluscs, before coming to beds of gravel, in which the relics of Drift Man are found.
[Sidenote: Animals of the Ice Age]
Everything shows that the relics of man are here in a secondary situs, deposited in the same way as the bones of extinct animals and the whole geological material in which everything is embedded. That is the reason why the finds cannot be more exactly dated. They doubtless belong to the general drift, but whether to the Postglacial Period, or the warmer Interglacial Period, cannot be decided. The fauna admits of no absolute limitation, owing to its being mixed from both periods. The mammalia most frequently found in the strata in question are the mammoth, Siberian rhinoceros, horse, reindeer, ure-ox, giant fallow-deer, cave-lion, and cave-hyena. In very similar Drift deposits of the Somme near Amiens traces of man were found beside the bones of the hippopotamus and the elephant.
These animals were chiefly prevalent in France and Germany in the Preglacial and Interglacial Periods of the Drift. Part of the animal remains found near Abbeville, particularly those of the cave-lion and cave-hyena, also point to the warmer Interglacial Period; on the other hand, the mammoth, Siberian rhinoceros, and especially the reindeer, appear to indicate with all certainty the second Glacial and Postglacial Periods. The bones of the older Drift animals may have been washed out of other primary situs; the reindeer had certainly already taken possession of those parts of France when the relics of man were embedded.
In spite of the most eager search for similar relic-beds affording sure evidence of Drift Man, only a very few have as yet been discovered that can be placed by the side of those in the Somme valley. Two are in Germany, and are the more valuable as a more exact date can be given to them within the Drift Period. One is near Taubach (Weimar), the other at the source of the Schussen. The one at Taubach belongs to the Interglacial Period, that at the source of the Schussen to the Postglacial Period. The former lies on the moraines of the first Glacial Period, which was followed by the Interglacial Period; the latter on the moraines of the second Glacial Period, which slowly passed into the Postglacial Period.
[Sidenote: The Climate of the Ice Age]
The Drift relic-bed in the calc-tufa near Taubach lies, as we have said, over the remains of the first Glacial Period, and according to Penck, one of the best authorities on the Drift, belongs to the warmer intermediate epoch between the two great periods of glaciation. The proofs given by the plant and animal remains agree entirely with the proofs given by the conditions of stratification. In the rich fauna found there, animals indicating a cold climate are entirely absent, and a comparison of the whole of the finds proves that at the time when man was present there no kind of arctic conditions can have prevailed. There is no reindeer, no lemming. The roe, stag, wolf, brown bear, beaver, wild boar, and aurochs were at that time inhabitants of these regions, and the only inference they allow is that of a temperate climate. The mollusc fauna, in which also all Glacial forms are absent, also leads to the same conclusion; all that occur are familiar to us from those of the present day in the same district. The fauna would really appear quite modern were it not that a very ancient stamp is imparted to it by several extinct types. With the modern animals enumerated are associated the cave-lion, cave-hyena, ure-elephant, and Merckian rhinoceros, characterising the whole deposit as a distinctly Drift one, which is still further proved stratigraphically by the covering of “loess.” The Taubach relic-bed is a typical illustration of the climatic and biological conditions of the warmer Interglacial Period; the regions of Central Europe, which had been covered with masses of ice in the first Glacial Period, had, after the ice melted, become once more accessible to the banished plants and animals of the Preglacial Period, until they were annihilated, or at least driven definitely from their old habitats by the second Glacial Period. The celebrated relic-bed at the source of the Schussen, near Schussenried, at a little distance from Ulm, brings us--in strong contrast to Taubach--into quite glacial surroundings. It was on the glacier-moraines of the last great glaciation, and belongs, therefore, to that period which must still be reckoned as part of the Drift--the Postglacial Period, which gradually passed into the warmer present period. Under the tufa and peat at the source of the Schussen we find the type of a purely northern climate, with exclusively northern flora and fauna; everything corresponds to climatic conditions such as prevail nowadays on the borders of eternal snow and ice, or begin at 70° north latitude.
[Sidenote: Flora and Fauna of the Ice Age]
Schimper, one of the best authorities on mosses at the present day, found among the plant-remains under the tufa at the source of the Schussen only mosses of northern or high Alpine forms. Among them was a moss brought from Lapland by Wahlenberg, which, according to Schimper, occurs in Norway near the chalets on the Dovrefjeld, on the borders of eternal snow, and also in Greenland, Labrador, and Canada, and on the highest summits of the Tyrolese Alps and the Sudetic Mountains. It has a special preference for the pools in which the water of the snow and glaciers flows off with its fine sand. There were also found mosses which have now emigrated to cold regions, to Greenland and the Alps. The most numerous animals were the reindeer, and yellow and Arctic foxes, as distinctly Arctic forms; and there were also the brown bear and wolf, a small ox, the hare, the large-headed wild horse--which always occurs in the Drift as the companion of the reindeer--and, lastly, the whistling swan, which now breeds in Spitzbergen or Lapland. There is an absence of all the present animal forms of Upper Swabia, as well as of the extinct Drift animals, either of which would indicate a warmer climate.
More decided climatic or biological contrasts than those afforded by the relic-beds at Taubach and the source of the Schussen could not be imagined; here we have with certainty two perfectly different periods before us, but both belonging to the general Drift Era.
Although almost all the other places where Drift Man has been found exhibit peculiarities, Taubach and the source of the Schussen seem the best representatives of the two chief types in Europe. Places giving better proof have not yet come to light anywhere in the Old World.
[Sidenote: Evidence from South America]
At first sight the palæontological strata of South America, in which the presence of man has been proved by Ameghino, appear to give a very different picture. The animal forms occurring here contemporaneously with man deviate to such an extent from those familiar to us in the Drift of the Old World that it required the keen eye and the complete grasp of the whole palæontological material of the world that characterise Von Zittel to recognise and establish the connections here, while the discoverer himself thought that he must date his discoveries of man back to the Tertiary Period. The strata in which the earliest traces of man as yet appear to be proved in South America are the extensive “loess-like” loam deposits of the so-called “pampas” formation in Argentina and Uruguay, with their almost incomparable wealth of animal remains, particularly conspicuous among which are gigantic representatives of edentates that now occur only in small species in South America: Glyptodontia (with the gigantic Glyptodon reticulatum) and dasypoda; also of the gravigrada, the giant sloth (Megatherium americanum). The toxodontia were also large animals, now extinct. But besides the specifically South American forms, numerous “North American immigrants” also appear in the pampas formation. It was only at the close of the Tertiary Period that the southern and northern halves of America grew together into one continent, and the faunæ of North and South America, so characteristically different, then began to intermingle with one another. The South American autochthons migrate northward; on the other hand, North American types--as the horse, deer, tapir, mastodon, Felis, Canis, etc.--use the newly-opened passage to extend their range of distribution. The northern animal forms are very conspicuous among the animal world of South America, hitherto cut off from North America and characterised by the above-mentioned wonderful and, in part, gigantic edentates, marsupials, platyrhine apes, etc. Of the great elephantine animals of North America only the mastodon crossed over to South America. In the middle and latest Tertiary formations the genus mastodon is widely distributed over Europe, North Africa, and South Asia. In North America the oldest species of the mastodon appear in the Middle Tertiary (Upper Miocene), but the most species are found in the latest Tertiary (Pliocene) and the Drift (Pleistocene); in South America the mastodon is limited to the time of the pampas formation. Its tusks are long and straight, or slightly curved upward; its lower jaw also possesses two tusks, which project in a straight direction, but are considerably less than the upper tusks in size. From the results of Ameghino’s investigations man appears to have come to South America with these northern immigrants, especially with the mastodon. In Ameghino’s lists of the animals of the pampas formation Von Zittel describes man, like the animal forms enumerated above, as an immigrant from North America, and as a northern type.
According to Von Zittel’s statements there is no longer any doubt that the pampas formation, and with it early man, of South America, is to be assigned to the Drift Era; he sums up the case in these words:
In South Asia and South America the Tertiary Period is followed by Drift faunæ, which in the main are composed of species still existing at the present day, but yet show somewhat closer relations to their Tertiary predecessors.
THE LIFE OF MAN IN THE STONE AGE
[Sidenote: Man a Witness of the Flood]
The oldest remains affording us knowledge of man are not parts of his body--not the skeleton from which, in the case of primeval animals, we have learned to reconstruct their frame--but evidences of the human mind. Until the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes turned the scale, search had been made in vain among the bones of the fossil fauna for remains of the skeleton of fossil man of undoubtedly the same age; it was not bones, but tools, by which the Abbeville antiquary proved that man had been a “witness of the Flood” in Europe; tools which taught irrefutably that the mental powers of fossil man of the Drift were similar in kind to, if possibly less in degree than, those of living members of mankind. The Drift tools prove that, even in that early epoch to which we have learned from Boucher to trace him back, man was distinctively man.
Boucher de Perthes was an expert archæologist, and he knew that in Europe, in a very early period of civilisation, men had made their tools and weapons of stone, as many tribes and races in a backward state of civilisation--for example in South America, the South Sea Islands, and many other places--do at the present day. These stone implements are practically indestructible, and from ancient times manifold superstitions have attached to the curious articles that the peasant turns up out of the earth in ploughing. Such stone weapons were called lightning-stones by the Romans, as they are by country-folk at the present day. Scientific archæology occupied itself with them at an early date. In 1778 Buffon declared the so-called lightning-stones, or thunder-stones, to be the oldest art-productions of primeval man, and as early as 1734, Mahudel and Mercati had pronounced them to be the weapons of antediluvian man. Such views determined the line of thought in Boucher’s researches. From the very beginning he sought, in the undisturbed Drift beds of his home, not so much for the bones of Drift Man as for his tools, which he suspected to be of the form of the lightning-stones, although he knew that, so far as was hitherto known, these belonged to a very much later epoch--that is, specially to the Alluvial or “Recent” Period.
His expectations were crowned with success. Deep below the mass of overlying loam and sand, right in the strata of gravel and coarse sand, he found stone tools, which without the slightest doubt had been worked by the hand of man for definite and easily recognisable purposes as implements and weapons. Although to a certain extent ruder, they are practically the same forms as the tools, weapons, and implements of stone that we see in use among so-called “savages” of the present day. It is the tool artificially prepared for a certain purpose that raises man above the animal world to-day, as it did in the time of the Drift.
[Sidenote: Drift Man’s Three Kinds of Tools]
[Sidenote: The Chief Forms of Tools]
Upon his first visit to the relic-beds near Abbeville in the spring of 1859, Lyell had obtained seventy specimens of these stone tools from the chief of them. The tools were all of flint, which occurs in abundance in the chalk of the district, and is still obtained and worked for technical purposes at the present day. The worked stones that Boucher found were termed flint or silex tools, according to the material of which they were made. They occurred in the particular beds, as Lyell expressed it, in wonderful quantities. The famous geologist distinguished three chief forms. The first is the spear-head form, and varies in length from six to eight inches. The second is the oval form, not unlike many stone implements and weapons that are still used as axes and tomahawks at the present day--for instance, by the aborigines of Australia. The only difference is that the edge of the Australian stone axes, like that of the European implements of later periods of civilisation known as thunderbolts or lightning-stones, is mostly produced by grinding, whereas on the stone axes from the drift of the Somme valley it has always been obtained by simply chipping the stone, and by repeated, skilfully directed blows. According to Tylor the stone implements of the old Tasmanians were entirely of Drift form and make, all without traces of grinding, being simply angular stones whose cutting-edge had been sharpened by being worked with a second stone. Some of these stone implements of Drift Man may have been simply used in the hand when the natural form of the stone offered a convenient end, but the majority were certainly fastened in a handle in some way or other, to serve as weapons--spear-heads or daggers--both for war and the chase. Lyell’s second chief form would have been used as an axe for such purposes as digging up roots, felling trees, and hollowing out canoes, or to cut holes in the ice for fishing and for getting drinking water in the winter. In the hand of the hunter and warrior the stone axe also became a weapon. As the third form of stone implements Lyell distinguished knife-shaped flakes, some pointed, others of oval form or trimmed evenly at one end, obviously intended partly as knives and arrow-heads, and partly as scrapers for technical purposes.
Although there are many variations between the first two chief forms, yet the typical difference indicating the different purpose of their use is always easily recognised in well-finished examples. A large number of very rude specimens have also been found, of which many may have been thrown away as spoiled in the making, and others may have been only rubbish produced in the working. Evans has practically proved that it is possible to produce such stone implements in their remarkable agreement of form without the use of metal hammers. He made a stone hammer by fastening a flint in a wooden handle, and worked another piece of flint with this until it had assumed the shape of the axe form--the second, oval form--of the Drift implements.
[Sidenote: Lyell’s Find in the Somme Valley]
Lyell draws attention to the fact that, in spite of the relatively great frequency of stone implements, it would be a great mistake to rely on finding a single specimen, even if one occupied himself for weeks together in examining the Somme valley. Only a few lay on the surface, the rest not coming to light until after removing enormous masses of sand, loam, and gravel. As we may presume with Lyell that the larger number of the Drift stone implements of Abbeville and Amiens were brought into their position by the action of the river, this sufficiently explains why so many were found at great depths below the surface; for they must naturally have been buried in the gravel with the other stones in places where the stream had still sufficient force or rapidity to wash stones away. They can, therefore, not be found in deposits from still water, in fine sediment and overflow mud.
Bones of Drift Man are absent from the deposits of the Somme valley, in spite of the wonderful abundance of stone implements. The “lower jaw from Moulin-Quignon, near Abbeville,” had been fraudulently placed there by workmen. But proof of the existence of man is undeniably assured by the objects, so unpretentious in themselves, that have been recognised as the work of his hands.
When once the recognition of Drift Man, founded on the authority of Lyell, was achieved, search for further relic-beds was made in England and France with success. Yet scarcely one of the newly discovered stations was to be compared to those of the Somme valley as regards purity of stratification and conditions of discovery. The relics of the “earliest Stone Age” or “Palæolithic Period,” as the period of Drift Man was called, frequently came from caves and grottos, whose primary conclusiveness Boucher had rightly doubted.
Under these circumstances it was of the greatest importance that in Germany Drift Man was discovered in two places, where not only was the geological stratification just as clear as at Abbeville and Amiens, but where also the relics of Drift Man were found, not in a secondary situs, as they were then, but in a primary one. In addition to this the two German relic-beds may be safely assigned to the last two great divisions of the Drift Period, to the warmer Interglacial Period, and to the cold Glacial Period proper, with its Postglacial Period; and their climatic conditions were made clear from the remains of plants and animals found in them.
From the occurrence, in the deposits of the Somme, of reindeer that contain the stone implements of Drift Man, we can not, as we saw, exactly settle in what part of the Drift Era man lived there, whether in the Interglacial Period, to which numerous animal remains found there doubtless belong, or not until the “Reindeer” Period, as the last Glacial and early Postglacial Periods were called, when the reindeer was most largely distributed over France and Central Europe. One is inclined to date man’s habitation of the Somme valley back to the Interglacial Period; but it is certain that the relic-bed near Taubach is the first, and, as far as I can see, the only one hitherto, that has given sure proof of Interglacial Man in Europe. There the oldest vestiges of man in Europe were found that have yet been absolutely proved. We have not hitherto succeeded in Europe in tracing man farther back than the Interglacial Period. Relics of him are hitherto as absent in the older Drift as they are in the Tertiary.
The Taubach relic-bed also furnished no bones of Drift Man among all the parts of skeletons of Drift animals that we have mentioned. Here, too, as in the Somme valley, the proof of the presence of man is based on the works of his hand and mind. Here, too, stone implements and stone weapons are the chief things to be mentioned. But whereas, in the chalk district of France, flints of every size were to be had in the greatest abundance for the preparation of weapons and tools, corresponding stones are not exactly wanting at the two standard German places, though they occur in limited number and size. It is due to this that the larger forms of flint implements, which are most in evidence in the Somme valley, are absent at Taubach. On the other hand, smaller “knives and flakes”--Lyell’s third form of Drift flint implements--occur here with comparative frequency and variety of form. Next to the usual lancet-shaped knife, worked flint flakes, of triangular prismatic form, with sharp corners, are most numerous at Taubach, and scrapers, chisels, awls, and the chipping-stones with which the stone implements were produced may also be distinguished among other things. The material for the implements was supplied by the older Drift débris of the valley--namely, flint, flinty slate, and quartz porphyry.
Besides the stone implements which alone were observed in the Somme valley, still further important relics were found here in their primary situs. Above all, numerous finds of charcoal and burnt bones prove that the Drift Men of Taubach not only knew how to kindle fire, but were also accustomed to roast the flesh of the animals they killed in the chase. Stones and pieces of shell limestone also occur which have become reddish and hard from the action of heat. These are to be regarded as the floors and side-walls of the fireplaces on which the food was then and there prepared. The animal bones, especially those that were taken up from around the fireplace, appear in most cases to be remains of meals. This is shown at once by the fact that bones of young representatives of the large beasts of the chase--such as the rhinoceros, elephant, and bear--are very frequent as compared with the rare occurrence of full-grown animals.
[Sidenote: Hunters of the Stone Age]
[Sidenote: How Drift Man Killed the Great Animals]
It appears that in the hunting and capture of animals the young ones were most easily killed, and therefore served chiefly as food. Whenever a large animal was killed, it was probably cut up on the spot by the fortunate hunters, who consumed at once part of its flesh; the trunk was then left at the scene of the killing, while the head, neck, and fore and hind legs, on which was the most muscular flesh, and which were at the same time easier to carry away, were taken to the settlement. This may explain why, among the many large bones of the rhinoceros that have hitherto been found, the ribs and the dorsal and lumbar vertebræ are almost entirely absent. Some of the bones of the beasts of the chase bear the unmistakable traces of man. They are broken in the manner characteristic of “savages” of all ages and climes--for the sake of the marrow, one of the greatest dainties of men living chiefly on animal fare. The broken-off heads of the metatarsal bones of the bison still show particularly clearly the method of breaking. They are broken off transversely exactly where the marrow canal ends, and on all these bones there is a roundish depression, or hole, at the same place--namely, in the middle of their front or back surface, and just where the end of the marrow canal is, therefore about in the centre of the break of the broken-off piece. The hole is a “blow-mark” of one inch in diameter, evidently driven in by force from without, as several well-preserved specimens still show the edges and splinters of bone pressed inward. These splinters and all the breaks are old, and have on the surface the same greasy coating, full of the sand in which they lay, as the bones themselves. The instrument used for breaking the bones in this way might very well have been the lower jaw of a bear with its large canine tooth, as Oscar Fraas has ascertained to have been the case in other places where Drift Man has been found. Such lower jaws were found at Taubach, and the nature and size of the hole and its edges agree with this assumption. The long bones of the elephant and rhinoceros were whole. Drift Man did not succeed in breaking these huge pieces, and where such bones are found broken they are accidental fractures. On the other hand, almost all bones of the bear and bison are intentionally split--in almost all cases transversely, and seldom lengthways.
[Sidenote: Drift Man at his Meals]
In the Somme valley we have only the flint implements--which, although rude, are very regularly and uniformly made for different recognisable purposes--to tell us of the life and state of Drift Man; but the finds at Taubach afford us a rather closer insight into the conditions of his life and culture. What we had suspected from the first finds is confirmed here. During the Interglacial Period we see near Taubach, on the old watercourse of the Ilm, which had there at that time become dammed up into a kind of pond, a human settlement. This was occupied for a long period, as is proved by the large number of bones, evidently remains of meals, and by the quantity of charcoal. Immediately on the bank were the fireplaces--rude hearths built of the stones obtained without trouble in the neighbourhood. Here the flesh of the beasts of the chase, the bison and the bear, and also the elephant and rhinoceros, was broiled in a crude manner in the hot ashes, as is still done by savages on the level of the Fuegians and primitive tribes of Central Brazil at the present day. For this no utensils are required, a sharpened rod or thin pointed stick being sufficient for turning and taking out the pieces of meat. The ashes that the gravy causes to adhere supply the place of salt and other seasoning. The meat was cut up with the stone knives, and many traces of cuts on the bones may also be attributable to these instruments. For cutting out larger portions a powerful and very suitable instrument was at hand, in the lower jaw of the bear, with its strong canine tooth, which also served for breaking bones to obtain the marrow. In spite of the apparent meanness of the weapons, remains of which we have found, the Drift Men of Taubach were yet able, as their kitchen refuse proves, not only to kill the bison and bear, but also the gigantic elephant and rhinoceros, both young and full grown.
[Sidenote: Drift Man after the Hunt]
This shows man to have been then, as he is to-day, master even of the gigantic animal forms which so far surpass him in mechanical strength. It is the mind of man that shows itself superior to the most powerful brute force, even where we meet him for the first time. From the finds in the Somme valley it appears that Drift Man already possessed spear, dagger, and axe, besides the knife, as weapons. There the blades were of stone. The relatively small blades of the Taubach stone implements are, it is true, of the same character as the stone implements of Abbeville and Amiens, but they are chiefly, as we have said, merely knife-like articles, very suitable as blades for knives, scrapers, and daggers, and as arrow-heads, but not strong enough as hunting-weapons for such big game. The hunt must, therefore, have been more a matter of capture in pits and traps, as practised at the present day where similar large types of animals are hunted by tribes armed only with defective weapons. The kitchen refuse also proves that the settlement by the Ilm pond, near Taubach, was a permanent one, to which the hunters returned after their expeditions, bringing their game and trophies so far as they were easily transportable. But there is no trace of domestic animals. They could not have completely disappeared, any more than remains of clay vessels, which are still less destructible than bones, and in this respect may be compared to stone implements. There was no trace of potsherds either.
[Sidenote: The Best “Find” of the Ice Age]
The finds in the Somme valley and near Taubach are of incalculable importance as sure, indisputable proofs of Drift Man in Europe; but as regards the wealth of information to be derived from them respecting man’s psychical condition in that first period in which we can prove his existence, they are far and away surpassed by the find at the source of the Schussen, which Oscar Fraas, the celebrated geologist, has personally inventoried and described. Fraas has rightly given to his description of this find of Glacial Man--the most important and best examined hitherto--the title “Contributions to the History of Civilisation During the Glacial Period.”
The geognostic stratification of the relic-bed on one of the farthest advanced moraines of the Upper Swabian plateau proves that it belongs to the Glacial Period, and that this had already pushed its glacier-moraines to the farthest limit ever reached. In point of time the finds are, therefore, to be placed at the end of the Glacial Period, as it was passing into the Postglacial Period; everything still points to Far Northern conditions of life. The finds at the source of the Schussen are thus decidedly more recent, geologically, than those made at Taubach. They are a typical, or, better, the typical example of the so-called “Reindeer Period” of the end of the Drift.
From Fraas’s description there seems to be no doubt whatever that the relic-bed, with its remains of civilisation, was perfectly undisturbed, and its palæontological contents plainly show its great geological age. It was perfectly protected by Nature. On the top lies peat, the same that covers the lowlands of the whole neighbourhood for miles, and forms the extensive moorlands of Upper Swabia, on which no other formations are to be seen than the gravel drift-walls thrown up by glaciers of the Drift Period. Under the peat lies a layer of calc-tufa, four to five feet thick, a fresh-water formation from the water-courses that now unite with the source of the Schussen. Under this protecting cover of tufa were the remains of the Glacial Period and Glacial Man. The tufa covered a bed of moss of a dark brown colour, inclining to green, the moss still splendidly preserved. Under this bed of moss was the glacier drift. The moss was dripping full of and intermingled with moist sand. In it were the relics of Glacial Man--all lying in heaps as fresh and firm as if they had been only recently collected. A sticky, dark-brown mud filled the moss and sand and the smallest hollow spaces of antlers and bones, and emitted a musty smell.
Glacial Man had used the place as a refuse-pit. Among the bones and splinters of bone of animals that had been slaughtered and consumed by man, among ashes and charred remains, among smoke-stained hearthstones and the traces of fire, there lay here, one upon the other, numerous knives, arrow-heads, and lance-heads of flint, and the most varied kinds of hand-made articles of reindeer horn. All this was in a shallow pit about seven hundred square yards in extent, and only four to five feet deep in the purest glacier drift, clearly showing that the excellent preservation of the bones and bone implements was solely due to the water having remained in the moss and sand. The bank of moss was like a saturated sponge; it closed up its contents hermetically from the air, and preserved in its ever-damp bosom what had been entrusted to it thousands of years before.
Under the peat and tufa at the source of the Schussen we find only the type of a purely Northern climate, with Northern flora and Northern fauna. There are no remains of domestic animals--not even of the dog, nor any bones of the stag, roe, chamois, or ibex. Everything corresponds to a Northern climate, such as begins to-day at 70° north latitude. We see Upper Swabia traversed by moraines and melting glaciers, whose waters wash the glacier-sand into moss-grown pools. We find a Greenland moss covering the wet sands in thick banks; between the moraines of the glaciers we have to imagine wide green pastures, rich enough to support herds of reindeer, which roved about there as they do in Greenland, or on the forest borders of Norway and Siberia, at the present day. Here, also, are the regions of the carnivora dangerous to the reindeer--the glutton and the wolf, and, in the second rank, the bear and Arctic fox.
[Sidenote: History in a Rubbish Heap]
According to Fraas, it is on this scene that man of the Glacial Period appears; in all probability, a hunter, invited by the presence of the reindeer to spend some time--probably only the better portion of the year--on the borders of ice and snow. It is true that the relic-bed that tells of his life and doings is only a refuse-pit, which contains nothing good in the way of art productions, but only broken or spoiled articles and refuse from the manufacture of implements. The bulk of the material consists of kitchen refuse, such as, besides charcoal and ashes, opened marrow-bones and broken skulls of game. Not one of the bones found here shows a trace of any other instrument than a stone. It was on a stone that the bone was laid, and it was with a stone that the blow was struck. Such breaking-stones came to light in large numbers. They were merely field stones collected on the spot, particular preference being given to finely rolled quartz boulders of about the size of a man’s fist. Others were rather rudely formed into the shape of a club, with a kind of handle, such as is produced half accidentally and half intentionally in splitting large pieces. Larger stones were also found--gneiss slabs, from one to two feet square, slaty Alpine limes, and rough blocks of one stone or another, which had probably represented slaughtering-blocks, or done duty as hearthstones, as on many of them traces of fire were visible. Where these stones had stood near the fire they were scaled, and all were more or less blackened by charcoal. Smaller pieces of slate and slabs of sandstone blackened by fire may have supplied the place of clay pottery in many respects; for, with all the blackened stones, not a fragment of a clay vessel was found in the layers of charcoal and ashes of the relic-bed.
[Sidenote: Making Drift Man’s Tools]
The flint implements are of the form familiar to us from Taubach and the Somme valley, being simply chipped, not ground or polished. At the source of the Schussen, also, only comparatively small pieces of the precious raw material were found for the manufacture of stone implements. So that here, too, as at Taubach, Lyell’s third form, the knife or flake, was practically the only one represented. They fall into two groups--pointed lancet-shaped knives and blunt saw-shaped stones. The former served as knife-blades and dagger-blades, and lance-heads and arrow-heads; the latter represented the blades of the tools required for working reindeer horn. The larger implements are between one and a quarter and one and a half inches broad and three to three and a half inches long; but the majority of them are far smaller, being about one and a half inches long and only three-eighths of an inch broad. The various flint blades appear to have been used in handles and hafts of reindeer horn. Numerous pieces occur which can only be explained as such handles, either ready or in course of manufacture.
Moreover, owing to the want of larger flints, numerous weapons, instruments, and implements were carved from reindeer horn and bone for use in the chase and in daily life. Fraas has ascertained exactly the technical process employed in producing articles of reindeer horn, and we see with wonder how the Glacial men of Swabia handled their defective carving-knives and saws on the very principle of modern technics. They are principally weapons--for example, long pointed bone daggers, otherwise mostly punchers, awls, plaiting-needles (of wood), and arrow-heads with notched grooves. These may possibly be poison-grooves; other transverse grooves may have served partly for fastening the arrow-head by means of some thread-like binding material, probably twisted from reindeer sinews, as is done by the Reindeer Lapps at the present day; other scratches occur as ornaments.
[Sidenote: The Skilled Workman of the Drift]
The forms of the bone implements show generally a decided sense of symmetry and a certain taste. For instance, a dagger, with a perforated knob for suspension, and a large carefully-carved fish-hook. Groove-like or hollow spoon-shaped pieces of horn were explained by Fraas to be cooking and eating utensils; probably they also served for certain technical purposes--as for dressing skins for clothing and tents, like the stone scrapers found in the Somme valley. A doubly perforated piece of a young reindeer’s antler appears to be an arrow-stretching apparatus, like those generally finely ornamented, used by the Esquimaux for the same purpose. A branch of a reindeer’s antlers, with deep notches filed in, is declared by the discoverer to be a “tally.” The notches are partly simple strokes filed in to the depth of a twelfth of an inch, and partly two main strokes connected by finer ones. “The strokes,” says Fraas, “are plainly numerical signs--a kind of note, probably, of reindeer or bears killed, or some other memento.” Among the objects found were also pieces of red paint of the size of a nut--clearly fabrications of clayey ironstone, ground and washed, and probably mixed with reindeer fat and kneaded into a paste. The paint crumbled between the fingers, felt greasy, and coloured the skin an intense red. It may have been used in the first instance for painting the body. The Glacial men at the source of the Schussen were, according to the results of these finds, fishermen and hunters, without dogs or domestic animals and without any knowledge of agriculture and pottery. But they understood how to kindle fire, which they used for cooking their food. They knew how to kill the wild reindeer, bear, and other animals of the district they hunted over; their arrows hit the swan, and their fish-hooks drew fish from the deep. They were artists in the chipping of flint into tools and weapons; with the former they worked reindeer horn in the most skilful manner. Traces of binding material indicate the use of threads, probably prepared from reindeer sinews; the plaiting-needle may have been employed for making fishing-lines. Threads and finely-pointed pricking instruments indicate the art of sewing; clothing probably consisted of the skins of the animals killed.
To this material concerning Drift Man, scientifically vouched for, coming from Drift strata that have certainly never been disturbed, other countries have hitherto made no equal contributions really enlarging our view. Yet the numerous places where palæolithic--that is, only rudely chipped--implements of flint, such as were doubtless used by Drift Man, have been found must not remain unmentioned here. We know of them in Northern, Central, and Southern France, in the South of England, in the loess at Thiede, near Brunswick, and in Lower Austria, Moravia, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, and Russia.
It is of special importance to note that similar flint tools have also been found along with extinct land mammalia in the stratified drift of the Nerbudda valley, in South India, as the supposition more than suggests itself that Drift Man came to our continent with the Drift fauna that immigrated from Asia. The possibility that man also got from North Asia to North America with the mammoth during the Drift Period can no longer be dismissed after the results of palæontological research. It explains at once the close connection between the build of the American and the great Asiatic (Mongolian) races.
Stone implements of palæolithic form have been found in Drift strata in North America, and the same applies also, as we have seen, to South America. The best finds there were those made by Ameghino in the pampas formation of Argentina. Here marrow-bones, split, worked, and burnt, and jaws of the stag, glyptodon, mastodon, and toxodon have been repeatedly found along with flint tools of palæolithic stamp; and Santiago Roth, who took part in these researches, supposes that fossil man in South America occasionally used the coats of mail of the gigantic armadillos as dwellings. But the civilisation of South American man is doubtless identical with that of European fossil man--tools and weapons of the stone types familiar in Europe, the working of bones, the use of fire for cooking, and animal food, with the consequent special fondness for fat and marrow.
PRIMITIVE MAN IN THE PAST & THE PRESENT
To the picture of Drift Man that has been drawn for us by the discoveries of human activity in deposits of uniform character and sharply defined age, the much richer but far less reliable finds in the bone caves add scarcely any entirely new touches. Von Zittel says:
The evidence of the caves is unfortunately shaken by the uncertainty that, as a rule, prevails with regard to the manner in which their contents were washed into them or otherwise introduced, and also with regard to the beginning and duration of their occupation; moreover, later inhabitants have frequently mixed up their relics with the heritage of previous occupants.
[Sidenote: First Dwellers in Caves]
This doubt strikes us particularly forcibly as regards man’s co-existence with the extinct animals of the earlier periods of the Drift, the Preglacial and Interglacial Periods. On the other hand, the habitation of the caves by man during the Reindeer Period appears in many cases to be perfectly established, and, according to Von Zittel, the oldest human dwellings in caves, rock-niches, and river-plains in Europe belong for the most part to the Reindeer Period--that is, the second Glacial and, in particular, the Postglacial Period.
In the caves there is also no domestic animal, and no pottery or trace of potsherds, in the best-defined strata where Drift Man has been found. In the Hohlefels cave, in the Ach valley in Swabia, a new utensil was found in the form of a cup for drinking purposes or for drawing water, made out of the back part of a reindeer’s skull. Also a new tool in the form of a fine sewing-needle with eye, from the long bone of a swan, such as have also been found in the caves of the Périgord. Teeth of the wild horse and lower jaws of the wildcat, which are found in the caves, perforated for suspending either as ornaments or amulets, are also hitherto unknown, it appears, in the stratified Drift. As both animals are at a later period connected with the deity and with witchcraft, one could imagine that similar primitive religious ideas existed among the old cave-dwellers. In the stratum of the Reindeer Period at the Schweizerbild, near Schaffhausen, Nüesch found a musical instrument, “a reindeer whistle,” and shells pierced for use as ornaments.
[Sidenote: Drift Man’s Working Materials]
The finds in the French cave districts prove that man was able to develop certain higher refinements of life, even during the Drift in the real flint districts--where a very suitable material was at man’s disposal in the flint that lay about everywhere or was easily dug up; which was worked with comparative ease into much more perfect and efficient weapons and implements than those supplied by the wilder stretches of moor and fen of Germany, with their scarcity of flint.
If we compare the small, often tiny, knives and flint flakes from the German places with the powerful axes and lance-heads of those regions, it is self-evident how much more laborious life must have been for the man who used the former. What labour he must have expended in carving weapons and implements out of bone and horn, while flint supplied the others with much better and more lasting ones with less expenditure of time and trouble! In this light a wealth of flint was a civilising factor of that period which is not to be under-estimated. In the flint districts not only are the stone implements better worked, answering in a higher degree the purpose of the weapon and the tool, but delight in ornament and decoration is also more prominent.
[Sidenote: The Life in the Caves]
[Sidenote: Drift Man as Artist]
Life in the caves and grottos and under the rock shelters in the neighbourhood of rivers was by no means quite wretched. The remains left in the caves by their former inhabitants give almost as clear an idea of the life of man in those primeval times as the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii do of the manners and customs of the Italians in the first century of the Christian era. The floors of these caves in which men formerly lived appear to consist entirely of broken bones of animals killed in the chase, intermixed with rude implements and weapons of bone and unpolished stone, and also charcoal and large burnt stones, indicating the position of fireplaces. Flints and chips without number, rough masses of stone, awls, lance-heads, hammers, and saws of flint and chert lie in motley confusion beside bone needles, carved reindeer antlers, arrow-heads and harpoons, and pointed pieces of horn and bone; in addition to which are also the broken bones of the animals that served as food, such as reindeer, bison, horse, ibex, saiga antelope, and musk-ox. The reindeer supplied by far the greater part of the food, and must at that time have lived in Central France in large herds and in a wild state, all trace of the dog being absent.
[Sidenote: Pictures from the Drift World]
Among these abundant remains of culture archæologists were surprised to find real objects of art from the hand of Drift Man, proving that thinking about his surroundings had developed into the ability to reproduce what he saw in drawing and modelling. The first objects of this kind were found in the caves of the Périgord. They are, on the one hand, drawings scratched on stones, reindeer bones, or pieces of horn, mostly very naïve, but sometimes really lifelike, chiefly representing animals, but also men; on the other hand imitations plastically carved out of pieces of reindeer horn, bones, or teeth. Such engravings also occurred on pieces of ivory, and plastic representations in this material have been preserved. On a cylindrical piece of reindeer horn from the cave excavations in the Dordogne is the representation of a fish, and on the shovel-piece of a reindeer’s horn are the head and breast of an animal resembling the ibex. Illustrations of horses give faithful reproductions of the flowing mane, unkempt tail, and disproportionately large head of the large-headed wild horse of the Drift. The most important among these representations are such as endeavour to reproduce an historical event. An illustration of this kind represents a group consisting of two horses’ heads and an apparently naked male figure; the latter bears a long staff or spear in his right hand, and stands beside a tree, which is bent down almost in coils in order to accommodate itself to the limited space, and whose boughs, indicated by parallel lines, show it to be a pine or fir. Connected with the tree is a system of vertical and horizontal lines, apparently representing a kind of hurdlework. On the other side of the same cylindrical piece are two bisons’ heads. Doubtless this picture tells a tale; it is picture-writing in exactly the same sense as that of the North American Indians. Our picture already shows the transition to abbreviated picture-writing, as, instead of the whole animals--horses and bisons--only the heads are given. The message-sticks of the Australians bear certain resemblances; Bastian has rightly described them as the beginnings of writing.
If we have interpreted them aright, the finds that have been made, with the tally from the source of the Schussen and the message-stick from the caves of the Dordogne, place the art of counting, the beginnings of writing, the first artistic impulses, and other elements of primitive culture right back in the Drift period.
[Sidenote: The Emerging of the Human Mind]
“None of the animals whose remains lie in the Drift strata,” says Oscar Fraas, “were tamed for the service of man.” On the contrary, man stood in hostile relation to all of them and only knew how to kill them, in order to support himself with their flesh and blood and the marrow of their bones. It was not so much his physical strength which helped man in his fight for existence, for with few exceptions the animals he killed were infinitely superior to him in strength; indeed it is not easy, even with the help of powder and lead, to kill the elephant, rhinoceros, grizzly bear, and bison, or to hunt down the swift horse and reindeer. It was a question of finding out, with his mental superiority, the beast’s unguarded moments, and of surprising it or bringing it down in pits and snares. All the more wonderful does the savage of the European Drift Period appear to us, “for we see that he belongs to the first who exercised the human mind in the hard battle of life, and thereby laid the foundation of all later developments in the sense of progress in culture.” And yet, in the midst of this poor life, a sense of the little pleasures and refinements of existence already began to develop, as proved by the elegantly carved and decorated weapons and implements, and there were even growing a sense of the beauty of Nature and the power of copying it. The bone needles with eyes and the fine awls are evidences of the art of sewing, and the numerous scrapers of flint and bone teach us that Drift Man knew how to dress skins for clothing purposes, and did it according to the method still used among the Esquimaux and most northern Indians at the present day. Spinning does not seem to have been known. On the other hand Drift Man knew how to twist cords, impressions and indentations of which are conspicuous on the bone and horn implements; on which also thread-marks were imitated as a primitive ornament. Pottery was unknown to Drift Man. Indeed, even to-day the production of pottery is not a commonly felt want of mankind. The leather bottle, made of the skin of some small animal stripped off whole without a seam, turned inside out as it were, takes the place of the majority of the larger vessels; on the other hand, liquids can also be kept for some time in a tightly-made wicker basket.
The art of plaiting was known to Drift Man. This is shown by the ornaments on weapons and implements, the plaiting-needle from the find at the source of the Schussen, and the hurdlework represented on the message-stick mentioned above, which may be either a hurdle made of boughs and branches or a summer dwelling house. To these acquirements, based chiefly on an acquaintance with serviceable weapons and implements, is added the art of representing natural objects by drawing and carving. This results in the attempt to retain historical momenta in the form of abridged illustrations for the purpose of communicating them to others--incipient picture-writing. The tally shows the method of representing numbers--generally only one stroke each, but also two strokes connected by a line to form a higher unit. Of the art of building not a trace is left to us apart from the laying together of rough stones for fireplaces; nor have tombs of that period of ancient times been discovered.
The civilisation of Drift Man and his whole manner of life do not confront the present human race as something strange, but fit perfectly into the picture exhibited by mankind at the present day. Drift Man nowhere steps out of this frame. If a European traveller were nowadays to come upon a body of Drift men on the borders of eternal ice, towards the north or south pole of our globe, nothing would appear extraordinary and without analogy to him; indeed it would be possible for him to come to an understanding with them by means of picture-writing, and to do business with them by means of the tally.
The manner of life led by man beyond the borders of higher civilisation, especially under extreme climatic conditions, depends almost exclusively on his outward surroundings and the possibility of obtaining food. The Esquimaux, who, like Drift Man of Central Europe in former times, live on the borders of eternal ice with the Drift animals that emigrated thither,--the reindeer, musk-ox, bear, Arctic fox, etc.--are restricted, like him, to hunting and fishing, and to a diet consisting almost entirely of flesh and fat; corn-growing and the keeping of herds of domestic animals being self-prohibitive. Their kitchen refuse exactly resembles that from the Drift. Before their acquaintance with the civilisation of modern Europe they used stone and bone besides driftwood for making their weapons and implements, as they still do to a certain extent at the present day, either from preference or from superstitious ideas. Their binding material consisted of threads twisted from reindeer sinews, with which they sewed their clothes and fastened their harpoons and arrows, the latter resembling in form those of Drift Man. They knew no more than he the arts of spinning and weaving, their clothes being made from the skins of the animals they hunted; pots were unknown and unnecessary to them.
It has often been thought that we should have a definite criterion of the period if it could be proved that fresh mammoth ivory was employed at the particular time for making implements and weapons, or ornaments, carvings, and drawings. There can be no doubt that when Drift Man succeeded in killing a mammoth he used the tusks for his purposes. But on the borders of eternal ice, where alone we could now expect to find a frozen Drift Man, no conclusion could be drawn from objects of mammoth ivory being in the possession of a corpse to determine the great age of the latter. For the many mammoth tusks which have been found and used from time immemorial in North Siberia, on the New Siberian Islands, and in other places, are absolutely fresh, and are even employed in the arts of civilised countries in exactly the same way as fresh ivory. Under the name of “mammoth ivory” the fossil tusks dug up by ivory-seekers, or mammoth-hunters, form an important article of commerce.
The same conditions as many parts of Northern Siberia still exhibit at the present day prevailed over the whole of Central Europe at the end of the Glacial Period and the beginning of the Postglacial Period. Here man lived on frozen ground on the borders of ice-fields with the reindeer and its companions, as he does to-day in Northern Asia, and here, too--as he does there to-day--he must have found the woolly-haired mammoth preserved by the cold in the ice and frozen ground. The Drift reindeer-men of Central Europe presumably searched for mammoth tusks just as much as the present reindeer-men in North Asia. The great field of mammoth carrion at Predmost was, therefore, a very powerful attraction, not only for the beasts of prey--chief among them wolves--but also for man.
[Sidenote: Drift Man Compared with Modern Man]
In France especially many primitive works of art of the “Ivory Epoch” have been found, and even the nude figure of woman is not wanting; but no proof is given that these carvings belong to the time when the mammoth still lived. Much sensation has been caused by an engraving on a piece of mammoth ivory representing a hairy mammoth with its mane and strongly-curved tusks. This illustration has been taken as unexceptionable proof that the artist of the Drift Period who did it saw and portrayed the mammoth alive. But could the mammoth hunter Schumachow--the Tunguse who, in 1799, discovered, in the ice of the peninsula of Tumys Bykow at the mouth of the Lena, the mammoth now erected in the collection at the St. Petersburg Academy [see page 123]--have pictured the animal otherwise when it was freshly melted out of the ice? And the Madelaine cave in the Périgord, where the piece of ivory with the picture of the mammoth was found, certainly belongs to the Reindeer Period. Had we not independent proofs that Drift Man lived in Central Europe--for instance, at Taubach--with the great extinct pachydermata, neither the finds in the “loess” near Predmost, nor the articles of ivory, nor the illustration of the mammoth itself, could prove it. They furnish absolute proof of the existence of Drift Man only back to the Reindeer Period. To decide whether a corpse frozen in the stone-ice belonged to a Drift Man, the examination of the corpse itself, its skull, bones, and soft parts, would no more suffice than clothing, implements, and ornament. For at least so much is confidently asserted by many palæontologists, that all the skulls and bones hitherto known to have been ascribed to Drift Man by the most eminent palæontologists, geologists, and anthropologists, cannot be distinguished from those of men of the present day. Von Zittel, the foremost scholar in the field of palæontology in Germany, says:
The only remains of Drift Man of reliable age are a skull from Olmo, near Chiana, in Tuscany; a skull from Egisheim, in Alsace; a lower jaw from the Naulette cave near Furfooz, in Belgium; and a fragment of jaw from the Schipka cave in Moravia. This material is not sufficient for determining race, but all human remains of reliable age from the drift of Europe, and all the skulls found in caves, agree in size, form, and capacity with Homo sapiens, and are well formed throughout. In no way do they fill the gap between man and ape.
“On the other hand,” writes Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, “a large majority of modern anatomists and palæontologists accept the antiquity of such skulls as the Neanderthal specimen, and agree that these point to the existence of a human race inferior to any now existing. This race comprised powerfully-built individuals, with low foreheads, prominent, bony ridges above the eyes, and retreating chins. The radius and ulna were unusually divergent, so that the forearms must have been heavy and clumsy. The thigh-bones were bent and the shin-bones short, so that the race must have been bow-legged and clumsy in gait.”
[Sidenote: A Type Between Man and Ape?]
“The intermediate position of these primitive types has received extraordinary confirmation by the discovery of what may truly be called the link, no longer missing, between man and the apes. In 1894, Dr. Eugene Dubois discovered in the Island of Java in a bed of volcanic ashes containing the remains of Pliocene animals the roof of a small skull, two grinding-teeth, and a diseased femur. These remains indicate an animal which, when erect, stood not less than 5 ft. 6 in. high. The teeth and thigh-bones were very human, and the skull, although very human, had prominent eyebrow ridges like those of the Neanderthal type, and a capacity of about 1,000 cubic centimetres--that is to say, much greater than that of the largest living apes, and falling short by about 100 cubic centimetres of the largest skull capacities of existing normal human beings. This creature, regarded at first by some anatomists as a degenerate man, by others as a high ape, has now been definitely accepted as a new type of being, intermediate between man and the apes and designated as Pithecanthropus erectus.” There is no doubt that Asia, Europe, North Africa, and North America, so far as their ice-covering allowed of their being inhabited, form one continuous region for the distribution of Palæolithic Man, in which all discoveries give similar results. In this vast region the lowest and oldest prehistoric stratum that serves as the basis of historical civilisation is the homogeneous Palæolithic stratum. In the Drift Period, Palæolithic Man penetrated into South America, as into a new region, with northern Drift animals. In Central and South Africa and Australia, Palæolithic Man does not yet seem to be known. All the more important is it that in Tasmania Palæolithic conditions of civilisation existed until the middle of the last century.
[Sidenote: Backward Races of Europe]
The palæontology of man has hitherto obtained good geological information of the oldest Palæolithic culture-stratum of the Drift in only a few parts of the earth, and only in Tasmania does this oldest stratum appear to have cropped out free, and still uncovered by other culture strata, down to our own times. Otherwise it is everywhere overlaid by a second, later culture-stratum of much greater thickness, which, although opened up in almost innumerable places, is not spread over the whole earth as is the Palæolithic stratum. As opposed to the earliest Stone Age of the Drift, which we have come to know as the Palæolithic Period, this has been called the Later Stone Age or Neolithic Period.
The Neolithic Period is also ignorant of the working of metals; for weapons and implements, stone is the exclusive hard material of which the blades are made. But geologically and palæontologically the two culture-strata are widely and sharply separated.
As regards Europe, and a large part of the other continents, the second stratum of the culture of the human race still lies at prehistoric depth. But in other extensive parts of the earth the stratum of Neolithic culture was not covered by other culture-strata until far into the period of written history. Even a large part of Europe was still inhabited by history-less tribes of the later Stone Age at the time when the old civilised lands of Asia and of Africa, and the coasts of the Mediterranean, had everywhere--on the basis of the same Neolithic elements, with the increasing use of metals--already risen to that higher stage of civilisation which, with the historical written records of Egypt and Babylonia, forms the basis of our present chronology.
When these civilised nations came into direct contact with the more remote nations of the Old World, they found them, as we have said, still, to a certain extent, at the Neolithic stage of civilisation, just as, when Europeans settled in America, the great majority of the aborigines had not yet passed the Neolithic stage, at which, indeed, the lowest primitive tribes of Central Brazil still remain. Australia, and a large part of the island world of the South Sea, had not yet risen above the Neolithic stage (Tasmania, probably, not even above the Palæolithic) when they were discovered. There the Stone Age, to a certain extent, comes down to modern times; likewise in the far north of Asia, in Greenland, in the most northern parts of America, and at the south point of the New Continent among the Fuegians.
The men of the later Stone Age are the ancestors of the civilised men of to-day. Classical antiquity among Greeks and Romans had still a consciousness of this, at least partly; it was not entirely forgotten that the oldest weapons of men did not consist of metal, but of stone, and even inferior material. The worked stones which the people then, as now, designated as weapons of the deity, as lightning-stones or thunderbolts, were recognised by keener-sighted men as weapons of primeval inhabitants of the land.
[Sidenote: What the Kitchen Middens Tell Us]
The “kitchen middens” on the Danish coasts mark places of more or less permanent settlement, consisting of more or less numerous individual dwellings. From these middens a rich inventory of finds has been made, affording a glimpse of the life and doings of those ancient times. The heaps consist principally of thousands upon thousands of opened shells of oysters, cockles, and other shellfish still eaten at the present day, mingled with the bones of the roe, stag, aurochs, wild boar, beaver, seal, etc. Bones of fishes and birds were also made out, among the latter being the bones of the wild swan and of the now extinct great auk, and, what is specially important in determining the geological age of these remains, large numbers of the bones of the capercailzie. Domestic animals are absent with the exception of the dog, whose bones, however, are broken, burnt, gnawed in the same way as those of the beasts of the chase. Everything proves that on the sites of these middens there formerly lived a race of fishers and hunters, whose chief food consisted of shellfish, the shells of which accumulated in mounds around their dwellings. Proofs of agriculture and cattle-rearing there are none; the dog alone was frequently bred not only as a companion in the chase, but also for its flesh.
The state of civilisation of the old Danish shellfish-eaters was not quite a low one in spite of its primitive colouring, and in essential points was superior to that of Palæolithic Man. Not only had they tamed a really domestic animal, the dog, but they made and used clay vessels for cooking and storing purposes. The cooking was done on fireplaces. They could work deer-horn and bone well. Of the former hammer-axes with round holes were made, and of animal bones arrow-heads, awls, and needles, with the points carefully smoothed. Small bone combs appeared to have served not so much for toilet purposes as for dividing animal sinews for making threads, or for dressing the threads in weaving.
[Sidenote: Drift Man and His Adversaries]
In the way of ornaments there were perforated animal teeth. The fish remains found in the middens belong to the plaice, cod, herring, and eel. To catch these deep-sea fish the fishermen must have gone out to sea, which implies the possession of boats of some kind. Nor was only small game hunted, but also large game. Ninety per cent. of the animal bones occurring in the shell-mounds consist of those of large animals, especially the deer, roe, and wild boar. Even such dangerous adversaries as the aurochs, bear, wolf, and lynx were killed, likewise the beaver, wildcat, seal, otter, marten, and fox. The very numerous fragments of clay vessels belong partly to large pot-like vessels without handles and with pointed or flat bottoms, and partly to small oval bowls with round bottoms. All vessels were made with the free hand of coarse clay, into which small fragments of granitic stone were kneaded; as ornament they have in a few cases incisions or impressions, mostly made with the finger itself on the upper edge.
The great importance of the Danish middens in the general history of mankind is due to the fact that their age is geologically established, so that they can serve as a starting-point for chronology. It is to Japetus Steenstrup that the early history of our race owes this chronological fixing of an initial date.
[Sidenote: The First Elements of Civilisation]
The earliest inhabitants of the North of Europe during the Stone Age, as recorded by these kitchen-middens of the Danish period, were scarcely superior to Palæolithic Man in civilisation, judging from outward appearances. But a closer investigation taught us that, in spite of the poverty of their remains, a higher development of civilisation is unmistakable. And this superiority of the Neolithic over the Palæolithic Epoch becomes far more evident if we take as our standard of comparison, not the poor fisher population, who probably first reached the Danish shores as pioneers, but the Neolithic civilisation that had been fully developed in sunnier lands and followed closely upon these trappers or squatters. Next to hunting and fishing, cattle-breeding and agriculture are noticeable as the first elements of Neolithic civilisation, and in connection with them the preparation of flour and cooking; and as technical arts, chiefly carving and the fine working of stone, of which weapons and the most various kinds of tools were made; with the latter wood, bone, deer-horn, etc., could be worked. The blades are no longer sharpened merely by chipping, but by grinding, and are made in various technically perfect forms. Special importance was attached to providing them with suitable handles, for fixing which the stone implement or weapon was either provided with a hole, or, as in America especially, with notches or grooves.
[Sidenote: The Mental Life of Ancient Days]
In addition to these, there are the primitive arts of man--the ceramic art, spinning, and weaving. In the former, especially, an appreciation of artistic form and decoration by ornament is developed. The ornament becomes a kind of symbolical written language, the eventual deciphering of which appears possible in view of the latest discoveries concerning the ornamental symbolism of the primitive races of the present day. Discoveries of dwellings prove an advanced knowledge of primitive architecture; entrenchments and tumuli acquaint us with the principles of their earthworks; and the giant chambers, built of colossal blocks of stone piled upon one another, prove that the builders of those times were not far behind the much-admired Egyptian builders in transporting and piling masses of stone. The burials, whose ceremonies are revealed by opened graves, afford a glimpse of the mental life of that period. From the skulls and skeletons that have been taken from the Neolithic graves, science has been able to reconstruct the physical frame of Neolithic Man, which has in no way to fear comparison with that of modern man. Of the ornaments of the Stone Age the most important and characteristic are perforated teeth of dogs, wolves, horses, oxen, bears, boars, and smaller beasts of prey. How much in favour such ornaments were is proved by the fact that even imitations or counterfeits of them were worn. Numerous articles of ornament, carved from bone and deer-horn, were universal: ornamental plates and spherical, basket-shaped, square, shuttle-like, or chisel-shaped beads were made of these materials and formed into chains.
In the Swiss lake-dwellings of the Stone Age have been found skilfully carved ear-drops, needles with eyes, neat little combs of boxwood, and hairpins, some with heads and others with pierced side protuberances. Remains of textile fabrics, even finely twilled tissue, and also leather, were yielded by the excavations of the lake-dwellings of that period, so that we have to imagine the inhabitants adorned with clothes of various kinds.
[Sidenote: Man’s First and Oldest Animal Friend]
What raises man of the later Stone Age so far above Palæolithic Man is the possession of domestic animals and the knowledge of agriculture. As domestic animals of the later Stone Age we have proof of the dog, cow, horse, sheep, goat, and pig. Among the animals that have attached themselves to man as domestic, the first and oldest is undoubtedly the dog. It is found distributed over the whole earth, being absent from only a few small islands. Among many races the dog was, and is still, the only domestic animal in the proper sense of the word. This applies to all Esquimau tribes, to the majority of the Indians of North and South America, and to the continent of Australia.
We have no certain proofs that Palæolithic Man possessed the dog as a domestic animal. In the Somme valley, at Taubach, and at the source of the Schussen, bones of the domestic dog are absent. And yet, among Drift fauna in caves remains of dogs have been repeatedly met with, which have been claimed to be the direct ancestors of the domestic dog. The dog’s attachment to man may have taken place at different times in different parts. Man and dog immigrate to South America with the foreign Northern fauna simultaneously--in a geological sense--during the Drift. In Australia, man and dog (dingo), as the most intimate animal beings, are opposed to an animal world that is otherwise anomalous and, to the Old World, quite antiquated; probably man and dog also came to Australia together. We know of fossil remains of the dingo from the Drift, but no reliable finds have yet proved the presence of man during that period.
[Sidenote: The Dog in the Stone Age]
In the later Stone Age the dog already occurs as the companion of man wherever it occurs in historic times. In Europe its remains have been found in the Danish kitchen-middens, in the northern Neolithic finds, in the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, in innumerable caves of the Neolithic Period, in the terramare of Upper Italy, etc. It was partly a comparatively small breed, according to Rütimeyer similar to the “wachtelhund” (setter) in size and build. Rütimeyer calls this breed the lake-dwelling dog, after the lake-dwellings, one of the chief places where it has been found. Like all breeds of animals of primitive domestication, the dog at this period, according to Nehring, is small--stunted, as it were. With the progress of civilisation the dog also grows larger.
[Sidenote: Great Value of the Dog to Man]
In the later prehistoric epochs, beginning with the so-called “Bronze” Period, we find throughout almost the whole of Europe a rather larger and more powerful breed with a more pointed snout--the Bronze dog--whose nearest relative seems to be the sheep-dog. At the present day the domestic dog is mostly employed for guarding settlements and herds and for hunting. In the Arctic regions the Esquimaux also use their dogs, which are like the sheep-dog, for personal protection and hunting; they do particularly good service against the musk-ox, while the wild reindeer is too fast for them. But the Esquimau dog is chiefly used for drawing the sledge, and, where the sledge cannot be used, as a beast of burden, since it is able to carry fairly heavy loads. In China and elsewhere, as formerly in the old civilised countries of South America, the dog is still fattened and killed for meat. So that the domestic dog serves every possible purpose to which domestic animals can be put, except, it seems, for milking, although this would not be out of the question either. The dog was also eaten by man in the later Stone Age, as is proved by the finds in his kitchen refuse. The reindeer is now restricted to the Polar regions of the Northern Hemisphere--Scandinavia, North Asia, and North America, whereas in the Palæolithic Period it was very numerous throughout Russia, Siberia, and temperate Europe down to the Alps and Pyrenees. It does not seem ever to have been definitely proved that the reindeer existed in the Neolithic Period of Central and Northern Europe, although according to Von Zittel it lived in Scotland down to the eleventh century and in the Hercynian forest until the time of Cæsar. The earliest definite information we appear to have of the tamed reindeer, which at the present day is a herd animal with the Lapps in Europe, and with the Samoyedes and Reindeer Tunguses in Asia, is found in Ælian, who speaks of the Scythians having tame deer.
Oxen at present exist nowhere in the wild state, while the tame ox is distributed as a domestic animal over the whole earth, and has formed the most various breeds. In the European Drift a wild ox, the urus, distinguished by its size and the size of its horns, was widely distributed, and it still lived during the later Stone Age with the domestic ox. In the later prehistoric ages, and even in historic times, the urus still occurs as a beast of the forest.
[Sidenote: The Taming of the Wild Horse]
In the later Stone Age the horse, too, is no longer merely a beast of the chase, but occurs also in the tame state. During the Drift the horse lived in herds all over Europe, North Asia, and North Africa. From this Drift horse comes the domestic horse now found all over the earth. Even the wild horses of the Drift exhibit such considerable differences from one another that, according to Nehring’s studies, these are to be regarded as the beginning of the formation of local breeds. The taming and domestication of the wild horse of the Drift, which began in the Stone Age, led to the domestic horse being split up later into numerous breeds. The old wild horse was comparatively small, with a large head; a similar form is still found here and there on the extensive barren moors of South Germany in the moss-horse, or, as the common people call it, the moss-cat. At the present day the genus of the domestic horse falls, like the ox, into two chief breeds--a smaller and more graceful Oriental breed, and a more powerful and somewhat larger Western breed with the facial bones more strongly developed. The horse of the later Stone Age of Europe exhibits only comparatively slight differences from the wild horse; it is generally a small, half-pony-like form with a large head, evidently also a stunted product of primitive breeding under comparatively unfavourable conditions. Two species extant in the Stone Age still live wild on the steppes of Central Asia at the present day; one of them also occurs as a fossil in the European Drift, although only rarely. That the ass occurred in the European Drift is probable, but not proved. It has not yet been found in the Neolithic Period of Europe.
[Sidenote: Did the Horse come from Asia?]
A survey of the palæontology of the domestic animals shows that they come from wild Drift species which--at any rate, as regards the ox, horse, and dog--are now extinct, so that these most important domestic animals now exist only in the tame state. Some of the domestic animals came from Asia, and, according to Von Zittel, were imported into Europe from there; this applies to the peat-ox and the domestic goat and pig. The Asiatic origin of the domestic horse and sheep is probable, but not proved; the sheep is found wild in South Europe as well as in Asia. The tarpan, a breed of horse very similar to the wild horse, lives in herds independent of man on the steppes of Central Asia. This has been indicated as being probably the parent breed of the domestic horse, and the origin of the latter has accordingly also been traced to Asia.
One thing is certain: a considerable number of animal forms that co-exist with man in Europe at the present day--for instance, almost all the forms of our poultry and the fine kinds of pigs and sheep--have originally come from Asia. Our investigations show a similar state of things even in the Neolithic Period.
In the North of Europe, which has furnished us with our standard information regarding the Neolithic culture-stratum, the certain proofs that have hitherto been found of agriculture and the cultivation of useful plants having been practised at that time (to which civilisation owes no less than to the breeding of useful tame animals) consist not so much of plant remains themselves as of stone hand-mills and spinning and weaving implements, which indicate the cultivation of corn and flax.
[Sidenote: History in the Lake Dwellings]
Our chief knowledge of Neolithic agriculture and plant culture has been furnished by the lake-dwellings, especially those of Switzerland, which have preserved the picture of the Neolithic civilisation of Central Europe, sketched for us, as it were, in the North, in its finest lines. So far we can prove the cultivation of the following useful plants in the later Stone Age; their remains were chiefly found, as we have said, well preserved in the Stone Age lake-dwellings of Switzerland, which have been described in classical manner by Oswald Heer. Of cereal grasses Heer determined, in the rich Stone Age lake-dwellings of Wangen, on Lake Constance, and Robenhausen, in Lake Pfäffikon, three sorts of wheat and two varieties of barley--the six-rowed and two-rowed. Flax was also grown by Neolithic Man. This was, it seems, a rather different variety from our present flax, being narrow-leaved, and still occurs wild, or probably merely uncultivated, in Macedonia and Thracia. Flax has also been found growing wild in Northern India, on the Altai Mountains, and at the foot of the Caucasus.
The common wheat occurring in the lake-dwellings of the Stone Age is a small-grained but mealy variety; but the so-called Egyptian wheat with large grains also occurs.
[Sidenote: Gardening in the Stone Age]
Traces of regular gardening and vegetable culture are altogether wanting. Some finds, however, seem to indicate primitive arboriculture, apples and pears having been found dried in slices in the lake-dwellings of the Stone Age; there even appears to be an improved kind of apple besides the wild-growing crab. But although they are chiefly wild unimproved fruit-trees of whose fruit remains have been found, we can imagine that these fruit-trees were planted near the settlements, and the great nutritious and health-giving properties of the fruit, as a supplement to a meat fare, must have been all the more appreciated owing to the lack of green vegetables. The various wild cherries, plums, and sloes were eaten, as also raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Beechnut and hazelnut appear as wild food-plants.
The original home of the most important cereals--wheat, spelt, and barley--is not known with absolute certainty; probably they came from Central Asia, where they are said to be found wild in the region of the Euphrates. The real millet came from India; peas and the other primeval leguminous plants of Europe, such as lentils and beans, came likewise from the East, partly from India. So that, apart from flax, which probably has a more northern home, the regular cultivated plants of the Stone Age of Central Europe--cereal grasses, millet, and lentils--indicate Asia as their original home. We have therefore a state of things similar to that observed in the case of the domestic animals.
[Sidenote: Beginning of the Potter’s Art]
The potter’s art was probably entirely unknown to Palæolithic Man, for in none of the pure Drift finds have fragments of clay vessels been found. So where clay vessels or fragments of them occur, they appear as the proof of a post-Drift period. On the other hand, pottery was quite general in the Neolithic Age of Europe. Still, the need of clay vessels is not general among all races of the earth even at the present day; up to modern times there were, and still are, races and tribes without pots. From their practices it is evident that the European Stone men of the Drift could also manage to prepare their food, chiefly meat, by fire without cooking vessels. The Fuegians lay the piece of meat to be roasted on the glowing embers of a dying wood fire, and turn it with a pointed forked branch so as to keep it from burning. Meat thus prepared is very tasty, as it retains all the juice and only gets a rind on the top, and the ashes that adhere to it serve as seasoning in lieu of salt. On a coal fire not only can fish be grilled, stuck on wooden rods, but whole sheep can be roasted on wooden spits, precisely as people have the dainty of roast mutton in the East. To these may be added a large number of other methods of roasting, and even boiling, without earthen or metal vessels, which are partly vouched for by ethnography and partly by archæology, and some of which, like the so-called “stone-boiling,” are still practised at the present day.
[Sidenote: No Perfect Pottery in the Stone Age]
Although, according to this, pottery is not an absolute necessary of life for man, yet it is certain that even those poorly equipped pioneers who first settled in Denmark in the Pine Period, in spite of their having an almost or quite exclusive meat fare, had clay pottery in general use for preparing their food, and probably also for storing their provisions. As we have already shown, the remains that have been preserved in the kitchen-middens are the oldest that have been found in Denmark. Simple and rude as the numerous potsherds that occur may appear, they are of the highest importance on account of the proof of their great age. Unfortunately, as we have already seen, not a single perfect vessel has come to light. The fragments are very thick, of rough clay with bits of granite worked in, and are all made by hand without the use of the potter’s wheel. The pieces partly indicate large vessels, some with flat bottoms, and others with the special characteristic of pointed bottoms, so that the vessel could not be stood up as it was. Smaller bowls, frequently of an oval form, also occurred with rounded bottoms, so that they also could not stand by themselves. It is very important to note that on these fragments of pottery we find only extraordinarily scanty and exceedingly simple ornamental decorations, consisting merely of incisions, or impressions made with the fingers, on the upper edge.
We shall see how far this oldest pottery of the Stone Age is distinguished by its want of decoration from that of the fully-developed Stone Age. But it is very important to notice that this rudest mode of making clay vessels, which we here see forming the beginning of a whole series that rises to the highest pitch of artistic perfection, remained in vogue not only during the whole Stone Age, but even in much later times.
[Sidenote: Stone Age Potter’s Handwork]
It is true that in the fully developed neolithic Stone Age of Europe the clay pottery is also all made by hand, without the potter’s wheel, the oldest and rudest forms still occurring everywhere, as we have said; but besides these a great variety is exhibited in the size, form, and mode of production of the pottery. The clay is often finer, and even quite finely worked and smoothed, and the vessels have thin sides and are burnt right through. The thick fragments are generally only burnt outside, frequently only on one side, and so much that the clay has acquired a bright red colour, whereas the inside, although hard, has remained only a greyish black. We have numerous perfectly preserved vessels of the later Neolithic Age. They are frequently distinguished by an artistic finish and beauty of form, and on their surfaces we find ornaments incised or imprinted, but rarely moulded on them, which, although the style is only geometrical, cannot be denied a keen sense of beauty and symmetry. The clay vessels also show the beginning of coloured decoration. The incised strokes, dots, etc., are often filled out with white substance (chalk or plaster), which brings the patterns out into bold ornamental relief from the black or red ground of the surface.
After that it is no wonder that pottery advanced to the real coloured painting of the vessels during the Neolithic Period, at least in some places.
[Sidenote: Growth of Artistic Taste]
On these vessels the handle now appears, in its simplest form as a wart-like or flatter projection from the side of the vessel, pierced either vertically or horizontally with a narrow opening just large enough to admit of a cord being passed through. Other handles, just like those in use at the present day, are bowed out broad, wide, and high for holding with the hand. These generally begin quite at the top, at the rim of the vessel, and are continued from there down to its belly, whereas the first-mentioned are placed lower, frequently around the greatest circumference of the vessel.
There is no doubt whatever that in the main these clay vessels were made on the spot where we find their remains at the present day. This easily explains the local peculiarity that we recognise in various finds, by which certain groups may be defined as more or less connected with one another. Different styles may be clearly distinguished by place and group. But, this notwithstanding, wherever we meet with neolithic ceramics, they cannot conceal their homogeneous character. In spite of all peculiarities this general uniform style of the ceramics of the Stone Age, which we can easily distinguish and determine even under its various disguises, goes over the whole of Europe.
[Sidenote: The Proofs of Man’s Mental Development]
In finds that lie nearer to the old Asiatic centres of civilisation and to the coasts of the Mediterranean--as, for instance, at Butmir--the vessels are in part better worked, and the ornaments are richer and more elegant, and the spirals more frequent and more regular, and are sometimes moulded on, and sometimes, as we have mentioned, even painted in colour. But the general character remains unmistakably Neolithic, and may be found not only on the European coasts of the Mediterranean and the islands of the Ægean Sea, but in certain respects also in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The oldest Trojan pottery also exhibits unmistakable points of agreement with it.
Not only the stone weapons and implements, but, as far as we can see, even the remains of the oldest ceramics, show that uniform development of the culture of the Neolithic Period which proves a like course of mental development in mankind.
THE HOME LIFE OF PRIMITIVE FOLK
[Sidenote: What the Lake Dwellings Tell]
A picture, of unequalled clearness of delineation, of the general conditions of the life and culture of Central European Man during the Neolithic Period, was given, according to the results of the celebrated researches of Ferdinand Keller and his school of Swiss archæologists, by the lake-dwellings in the Alpine lowlands. Whereas in cave districts the caves and grottos often served the men of the later Stone Age as temporary and even as permanent winter dwellings, in the watery valleys of Switzerland the Neolithic population built its huts on foundations of piles in lakes and bogs. In that period we have to imagine the Alpine lowlands still extensively covered with woods and full of wild beasts; at that time the huts standing on piles in the water must have afforded their inhabitants a security such as scarcely any other place could have given. The first founders and inhabitants of settlements of pile-dwellings in Switzerland belong to the pure Stone Period. In spite of their lake-dwellings the old Neolithic men of Switzerland appear to have possessed almost all the important domestic animals, but they also knew and practised agriculture. They lived by cattle-rearing, agriculture, hunting, and fishing, and on wild fruit and all that the plant world freely offered in the way of eatables. Their clothing consisted partly of skins, but partly also of stuffs, the majority of which seem to have been prepared from flax.
[Sidenote: Beginnings of a Social Order]
The endeavour of the settlers to live together in lasting homes protected from surprises, and in large numbers, is an unmistakable proof that they were aware of the advantages of a settled mode of life, and that we have not to imagine the inhabitants of the pile-dwellings as nomadic herdsmen, and still less as a regular race of hunters and fishermen. The permanent concentration of a large number of individuals at the same point, and of hundreds of families in neighbouring inlets of the lakes, could not have taken place if there had not been through all the seasons a regular supply of provisions derived principally from cattle-rearing and agriculture, and if there had not existed the elements of social order. Even the establishment of the lake-settlement itself is not possible for the individual man; a large community must have here worked with a common plan and purpose. Herodotus describes a pile-village in Lake Prosias, in Thracia, which was inhabited by Pæones, who defended it successfully against the Persian general Megabazos. The scaffold on which the huts were built stood on high piles in the middle of the lake; it was connected with the bank only by a single, easily removable bridge. Herodotus says:
The piles on which the scaffolds rest were erected in olden times by the citizens in a body; the enlargement of the lake-settlement took place later, according as it was necessitated by the formation of new families.
[Sidenote: The Lake Dweller At Home]
According to the large number of lake-dwellings of the Stone Age in the Alpine lowlands, and according to the large quantity of products of primitive industry that have been found there, centuries must have elapsed between the moment when the first settlers rammed in the piles on which to build their dwellings and the end of the Stone Period.
The huts of the settlements of the Stone Age were partly round and partly quadrangular, and, like the pile-hut discovered by Frank near Schussenried, were divided into two compartments--one for the cattle, and the other, with a hearth built of stones, for the dwelling of man. The floor of the hut was made of round timber with a mud foundation, and perhaps also with a mud flooring; in Frank’s hut the walls were formed of split tree-trunks, standing vertically with the split sides turned inward, firmly put together between corner posts. The round huts had walls of roughly intertwined branches, covered with clay inside and out; of this clay-plaster numerous pieces have been preserved, hardened by fire, with the marks of the branches. The pile huts of the lakes were connected with the water by block or rung ladders. Victor Cross found such a ladder in one of the oldest stations; it consisted of a long oak pole provided at fairly regular intervals with holes in which the rungs were inserted.
[Sidenote: First Traces of Textiles]
[Sidenote: In a Stone Age Kitchen]
Of special importance in estimating the degree of civilisation attained by the lake-dwellers of the Stone Age are the remains of spinning and weaving implements and of webs and textile fabrics, plaited work, etc. Flax has been found wound on the implements made of ribs, that we mentioned above as flax combs; we have also mentioned the fixing of blades with flax, or threads made of it, and the numerous wide and narrow nets made of threads. For spinning the thread, spindles were used just like those of the present day, a spindle-stick of wood being fastened into a spinning-whorl made of stone, deer-horn, or clay. The distaff was probably not yet known; a loom has not yet been found, either; but numerous weaver’s weights, which served for spinning the threads, have been. Excellent webs, some of them twilled, were produced, of which we have many fragments. Remains of mats and baskets prove that those were manufactured from the materials still employed at the present day. Corn was baked into a kind of bread consisting of coarsely ground grains. The millstones that were used for grinding the corn are found in large numbers. They are rather worn, hollowed slabs of stone, and smaller flat stones rounded on the top, with which the grains of corn were crushed on the larger slabs. Some of the kitchen utensils we find already much improved. Large and small pots for storing purposes, earthen cooking pots, and dishes, and large wooden spoons and twirling-sticks--the latter probably for churning--have been preserved. Vessels like strainers served for making cheese; they are pots in whose sides and bottoms a number of small holes were made for pouring off the whey from the cheese.
Here, in the fully developed Neolithic Period we find the early inhabitants of Switzerland to be a settled agricultural and farming population. Although hunting and fishing still furnished an important part of their food, so that in some places even more deer bones have been found among the cooking remains than bones of the ox, yet the milk, cheese, and butter of the cows, sheep, and goats, the flesh of these and of the hog, and bread and fruit, already formed the basis of their subsistence.
[Sidenote: Man Learning the Art of Living]
The results of cave research are almost as rich and varied as the results yielded by the study of the lake-dwellings in their bearing on the Neolithic stratum. Where there is a Drift stratum in the cave-earth the confusion of Palæolithic and Neolithic objects can, as we have said, scarcely be avoided. But there are numerous grottos and small caves in which the Neolithic stratum is the oldest, so that mistakes are out of the question. In a large number of such places in the cave district of the Franconian-Bavarian Jura the conditions under which finds have been made in the Neolithic stratum have proved almost as pure and unmixed as in the lake-dwellings.
The cave-dwellers of the later Stone Age in the Franconian Jura were, like the Swiss lake-dwellers of the Stone Age, mainly a pastoral race. They possessed all the important domestic animals that the latter possessed--dog, cow, horse, sheep, goat, pig--and likewise practised agriculture, or, at any rate, flax-growing; at the same time hunting and fishing formed a considerable part of their means of subsistence. So that, not only on artificial pile-works on the shores of lakes, but also on the banks of South German rivers, there formerly lived a race which, although still mainly restricted to hunting and fishing, and using no metal, but exclusively stone and bone tools, already practised cattle-breeding and primitive agriculture, and was able to increase the means of existence afforded it by Nature by the first technical arts--by the chipping and grinding of stone instruments, bone carving, and, above all, pottery-making, tanning, and the arts of sowing, weaving and plaiting.
[Sidenote: Beginning of Weaving and Knitting]
Of most importance, as showing the state of civilisation of the Neolithic rock-dwellers, are the numerous articles carved from bone that must be looked upon as instruments for weaving and net-knitting. For the latter purpose there were large, finely-smoothed bone crochet-needles, some of them carved from the rib of a large ruminant. The handle-end is smoothed by use, and the end with the hook is rounded from the same cause. The end is frequently perforated, so that it might be hung up. Still more numerous were shuttles of various forms.
According to the numerous finds of perforated clay weaver’s weights, the loom, like that of the lake-dwellers, must have been like the ancient implement that, according to Montelius, was in use on the Faröe Islands a comparatively short time ago. Spinning-whorls are very numerous, being partly flat, round discs of bone pierced in the centre, and partly thick bone rings or large beads of bone and deer-horn and flat burr-pieces of deer-antlers.
It was formerly thought that the Neolithic Europeans did not possess the arts of engraving and carving animals and human figures which the Palæolithic Men had understood in such conspicuous manner. The progress of research has now produced more and more proof that in the later Stone Age the arts of carving and engraving had not died out. We have the celebrated amber carvings of the later Stone Age from the Kurisches Haff, near Schwarzort, some of which probably served a religious purpose; those of ivory, bone, stalactite, etc., from the caves of France and the Polish Jura; the figures from Butmir, and other evidences.
[Sidenote: Fortified Settlements in Stone Age]
In Italy, in Lombardy, and Emilia, another group of settlements of the Stone Age has been found, which again exhibit the civilization and all other signs of the later Stone Age, and in many respects more closely resemble the lake-dwellings than do the cave-dwellings. These are the “terramare,” whose inhabitants, however, had already to some extent advanced to the use of bronze. A sharp division of strata into habitation of the pure Stone Age and habitation of the Metal Age has not yet been made. The huts stood on pile-work on dry land, the piles being six to ten feet high; the whole settlement was fortified with trench and rampart, generally with palisades, and was of an oblong or oval plan. Besides many natural and artificial caves in Italy the dwelling-pits, which may formerly have borne the superstructure of a hut, also belong to the pure Stone Age.
[Sidenote: Strange Homes of Early Man]
Such dwelling-pits of the Stone Age seem to have been distributed all over Europe. Burnt wall-plaster with impressions of interwoven twigs, has frequently been found near or in the pits, doubtless indicating hut-building. In Mecklenburg, where the dwelling-pits were first carefully examined by Liesch, they have a circular outline of ten to fifteen yards, and are five to six and a half feet deep. At the bottom of the pit lie burnt and blackened stones, hearthstones, charcoal, potsherds, broken bones of animals, and a few stone implements, the latter being mostly found in larger numbers in the vicinity of the dwellings. The same circular dwelling-pits of the Stone Age are found in France. Smaller hearth-pits were recently found in very large numbers in the Spessart, in Bavaria, with hundreds of stone hatchets and perforated axe-hammers, some of the former being very finely made of jadeite.
[Sidenote: America before History]
During the Neolithic Period dwellings were frequently made on heights, and it seems that even at that time they were to a certain extent walled round and fortified. Such settlements are numerous all over Southern and Central Germany, in Austria-Hungary, especially in the coast-country, and in Italy and France. Many of these stations belong purely to the Stone Age; indeed, the majority were inhabited already during the Stone Age, and furnish the typical Neolithic relics familiar from the foregoing. On the other hand, they continue to be inhabited even in the later metal periods, and in some cases right down to modern times. The rock near Clausen, in the Eisack valley, in the Tyrol, on which the large Säben monastery now stands, was a mediæval castle, and during the times of the Romans a fortified settlement called Sobona stood there; and when excavations were made in 1895, for adding new buildings to the monastery, a well-ground stone hatchet of the later Stone Age came to light. On many hills in Central Germany are found traces of the ancient presence of men who lived on them or assembled on them for sacrificial feasts; the earth is coloured black by charred remains and organic influences, and this “black earth on heights and hills” contains frequently, as we have said, the traces of Neolithic men. In Italy, many finds on such heights--for instance, those made on the small castle-hill near Imola--seem to exhibit that stage of the Stone Age that is missing in the terramare, and that precedes the beginning of the Metal Age of the terramare, but corresponds to it in every essential except in the possession of metal.
But the view that is opened up is still wider. The prehistoric times of the New World also exhibit a Neolithic stage, corresponding to that of Europe, as the basis of the further development of the ancient civilised lands of America. And where a higher civilisation did not develop autochthonously in America, European discoverers found the Neolithic civilisation still in active existence, as they did in the whole Australian world. Accordingly in these vast regions, which have never risen above the Stone Age of themselves, the same stage of civilisation which in the old civilised lands belongs to a grey, immemorial, prehistoric period, here stands in the broad light of historic times. The study of modern tribes in an age of stone throws many a ray of light on the conditions of the prehistoric Stone Age; and this study, on the other hand, shows us that the primitive conditions of civilisation of those tribes stand for a general stage of transition in the development of all mankind.
[Sidenote: The Foundations of Society]
The lake-dwelling stations, and the land settlements resembling them, prove of themselves how far the culture of the early inhabitants of Europe was advanced even in that ancient period which was formerly imagined to be scarcely raised above half-animal conditions. Such structures could not be erected unless men combined into large social communities, which is indeed indicated by the very fact of the number of dwellings that were crowded into a comparatively small space. For the first ramming-in of the pile-works a large number of men working together on a common plan was absolutely necessary. The same applies to the construction of the artificial islands, protected by pile-works and partly resting on piles, termed “crannoges” by Irish archæologists, and to the Italian villages called “terramare,” which likewise once rested on piles and were protected by ditches. From the extent of the pile-works we are able to estimate the number of the former inhabitants of the settlements supported by them. Quite as clear an idea of the number of the former inhabitants is also given by the early circumvallations on the tops of hills and shoulders of rock, which were likewise made and inhabited during the Stone Age.
The co-operation of a large number of men for a common purpose is also shown in the often huge stone structures to which, on account of the size of the stones employed in their construction, the name “megalithic” structures, or gigantic stone structures, has been given. In Northern Europe they, too, belong to the Stone Age proper. The majority of these gigantic structures were originally tombs; the principle on which they are built is often repeated even in far less imposing tombs.
The stone blocks of which these gigantic structures are piled now often lie bare. Large stones placed crosswise, which represent, as it were, the side-walls of a room, support a roof of one or several “covering-stones” of occasionally colossal size. For the erection of these in their present position without the technical resources at the disposal of modern builders, human strength appears inadequate; in popular opinion only giants could have made such structures. Some of the stones are really so large, and the covering-stones especially so enormous, that these buildings have defied destruction, for thousands of years, by their very weight.
In the time of their construction these giants’ graves were mostly buried under mounds. They were the inner structures of large tumuli, in which the reverence of the men of the Stone Age once buried its heroes. One of the finest “giant’s chambers” is probably that near Öm, in the neighbourhood of Roskilde, in Denmark. The building material consists merely of erratic stone blocks of enormous size. The rough blocks were mostly set up by the side of one another, without any further working, so as to support one another as far as possible; at the same time all of them, as Sophus Müller observes, are slightly inclined inward, so that they are kept more firmly in position by their own weight. The stones thus erected, forming the parallel side-walls of the whole structure, stand so far apart that a huge erratic block, reaching from one wall to the other, could be placed on them as a roof. The distance between the side-walls of the giant’s chambers attains a maximum of eight to nine feet; the covering-stones placed on them are some ten to eleven feet long. The pressure of the covering-stones from above helps considerably to hold the whole structure together. In order to distribute the pressure of the covering-stones regularly, smaller stones were carefully inserted under the wall-stones where they had to stand on the ground. How exactly these proportions of weight were judged is proved by the fact that these structures of heavy and irregular stones, resting on their natural, differently shaped sides and edges, have held together until the present day. The inner walls of the chambers were made as carefully as possible. Where, as on the outside, the rough and irregular form of the stone block projects, either the naturally smooth side was turned inward or the roughness was chipped off.
These are the beginnings of a real architecture, seen also in the regular wedging with small stones of the spaces left between the wall-stones and covering-stones and between the wall-stones themselves. These small stones were frequently built in, in regular wall-like layers. Sandstone was often used for the purpose, being more easily split into regular pieces, which gave this masonry a still more pleasing appearance. The number of stone blocks used for the wall-sides varies according to the size of the giant’s chambers, as does also the number of covering-stones. For smaller chambers, with six to nine wall-stones, two or three covering-stones were required. But far larger stone chambers occur, as many as seventeen wall-stones having been counted. Such large chambers require a whole row of covering-stones beside one another. The door-opening often shows a special regard for architectonics. The two door-post stones are rather lower than the other wall-stones; on them a stone was laid horizontally, which kept them apart and distributed the pressure of the covering-stone equally on both posts.
Very often there was also a stone as a threshold. Leading to the door is a low passage, made in similar manner to the chamber, but of far smaller stones. The passage is only high enough to allow one to creep through, whereas the chamber itself is about as high as a man, so that one could stand upright in most of them. Larger stone chambers are rarely without this passage, and from it such grave-structures have been named “passage-graves.” Besides the building-in of small stones, the holes still remaining between the stones were also coated over on the outside with mud to keep the rain-water from soaking in; mud was also frequently used for making a rough plaster floor for the chamber if the natural floor could not be made level enough. On the floor is frequently found a compact layer of small flints, or a regular pavement of flat stones, often rough-hewn, or roundish stones fitting one another as nearly as possible, which were then probably also covered with a thick layer of mud.
So that in these giant’s chambers we have real buildings, which imply high technical accomplishments and have preserved for us the usual form of the dwellings of those early times. In what manner the huge covering-stones were placed on the side-walls of the giant’s chambers is a problem still unsolved. Doubtless many hands were occupied on such structures; and the history of building teaches us that with the proper use of human strength--as, for instance, in ancient Egypt--great weights can be raised and placed in position with very simple tools--round pieces of wood as rollers, ropes, and handspikes.