Read Ebook: Chambers's journal of popular literature science and art fifth series no. 131 vol. III July 3 1886 by Various

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Release date: October 8, 2023

Original publication: Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1853

PREHISTORIC MAN.

The early history of man in every country is shrouded in considerable mystery and uncertainty. Of our own history, we have fairly full and accurate knowledge as far back as the days of the Saxon kings; but beyond that period, the light of history gradually fades into tradition. In seeking to follow the earlier history, even the light of tradition soon fails us, and we are left in complete darkness. The history of some other countries reaches further into the gloom of the past. But even Greece and Egypt have their dim dawn of history, beyond which the voice of massive ancient Sphinx and temple-ruins of the one are silent, and the beautiful myths of the other have no further record. When, however, tradition fails us, we have not by any means reached the farthest point in the history of the race. At that point, geology comes to our assistance with revelations of men of the rudest stage of life living in prehistoric ages under circumstances of great interest. It is to this early age of which geology speaks, that we here turn attention.

The peat-mosses of Denmark supply important data for the early history of man in that country. In these peats are imbedded many relics of a people who dwelt in that region long before the present race had migrated thither. These relics consist chiefly of curiously formed implements and weapons in stone and bronze--hammer, arrow, and spear heads, hatchets and knives, &c. Now, peat is formed slowly. It is the result of the annual growth and decay of numerous marsh-plants--each year's mass of dead rushes, reeds, and grasses being overgrown by the vegetation of the succeeding year. The formation takes place in marshy hollows; and in process of time, consolidates and sinks into the soft soil on which it rests. The growth of each year, however, adds only a very thin stratum to the formation, and when this is pressed by the strata of subsequent years, it sinks into still smaller compass. The Danish peats attain a thickness of about thirty feet, and they must therefore have been a very considerable time under formation. Imbedded in peat are often found the trunks of trees; indeed, in some instances part of a forest growing in the hollow in which peat was being formed, has been choked by the rank growth of marsh-plants, and the soil becoming too moist for the favourable growth of the trees, they, robbed of their strength from these two causes, have fallen a prey to storms, and become overgrown with peat. Thus single trees or clusters of trees, or even whole forests, may be part of a peat-moss.

In these Danish peats occur, at different depths, the remains of three kinds of trees. At or near the surface, the remains are of beech-trees; farther down we find remnants of oaks; and still lower and near the bottom of the moss, are discovered remains of the Scotch fir. This gives us a provisional chronology. At the present time, firs and oaks are not found in the country; but beeches attain a perfect growth in very large numbers. During the time of the Roman empire, Denmark was famous for its growth of beeches; in all probability, all through the historic period the characteristic tree-growth of this locality has been beeches. It is certain that oaks have never been predominant in Denmark during any period of the historic epoch. The prehistoric period of man's life upon the globe is divided into three divisions--the Stone age, the Bronze age, and the Iron age. These distinctions are based upon the character of the tools and weapons that he used. Lucretius hit on what was in reality these divisions when he said:

Man's earliest arms were fingers, teeth, and nails, And stones, and fragments from the branching woods; Then copper next; and last, as later traced, The tyrant iron.

As time moved on, and the events in the public and private life of that antique colony came and went, a change gradually came over the land and people. The Scotch firs, from some cause or other, passed away, and in their place grew stalwart oaks. The people developed in many ways, so that they were now able to carry on rude mining operations, and, by alloying tin with copper, produce bronze, of which henceforth they made their implements. All the relics associated in the peats with oaks are of bronze. It is interesting to remember that the 'more modern' ancients procured their tin chiefly from the mines of Cornwall, and it may have been that the people of this Bronze age found their way in their rude canoes to the coasts of Cornwall, or, at anyrate, obtained their tin from other tribes who had done business with the earliest of the Cornish miners.

In process of time, another change occurred. The conditions favourable to the growth of the oak ceased to exist, and in place of the defunct emblems of strength and durability, came a growth of fine beech-trees, which has continued, as we have seen, to beautify the country down to the present time. The people, too, improved in their knowledge of the arts, and were now able to manufacture their various articles out of the more refractory iron.

In peats of the Bronze age, scarcely any human bones have been discovered, though they occur in peats of the Iron and Stone ages, and the other relics of man are about equal in all the three epochs. Scientists seem to agree in referring this to the probability that the people of this epoch always burned their dead. It is certain that cremation is a very ancient custom, and this theory, it is to be presumed, accounts for us not finding human remains in the deposits of this period.

This period has been named by French geologists the Reindeer age, because the remains of that animal occur in very great profusion in these French caves. As a proof of the existence of man at a time when the reindeer and several other animals, now confined to far higher latitudes, roamed as far towards the equator as the south of France, perhaps farther, it is to be noticed that not only are his implements found side by side with the remains of the reindeer in such a manner as to show that they were deposited at the same time, but many of the antlers of that animal are cut and rudely carved, bearing ample evidence of the work of a more or less intelligent race of men. On one of the bones found in a cave of the Reindeer age, the outlines of the great mammoth have been rudely carved by some ingenious hand, long since laid to rest; and the long curved tusks and shaggy coat of wool are easily recognisable. M. Laret thinks that this places beyond all doubt that the early inhabitants of these caves must have seen, at least, a few specimens of this species of elephant roaming through these regions. The presence of the mammoth, one of the mammals of the Tertiary epoch, long ages ago quite extinct, known to have been clothed with a warm coat of shaggy hair and wool, is evidence at once of the great antiquity of the age in whose broken monuments we are able to read fragments of a witching history, and of the prevalence of a far more severe climate at that period than that which the southern countries of Europe enjoy now. It is evident that in this period we approach a time when the winters of the whole of Europe were much longer and more severe, and accompanied by a short, almost imperceptible summer; in fact, that we are in the midst of lingering evidences of a severe climate that the great Glacier age left behind it for a long time after our valleys were emptied of their snow and our waters cleared of ice.

It is difficult to form any approximate idea of the vast antiquity of these Palaeolithic gravels. Since they were laid down, and these early prehistoric men lived in these localities, the rivers over vast tracts of country have slowly cut their way through, in some instances, over a hundred feet of hard rock, and spread the sediment around their mouths or over the bottom of the sea. What a vast amount of time it must have required to scoop out the valleys of a country to a depth of a hundred feet! And it is to be remembered that all through the historic period, to a very large extent, no change has taken place in the relative position of these rivers and valleys. We quote Sir Charles Lyell again, who says: 'Nearly all the known Pleistocene quadrupeds have now been found accompanying flint knives or hatchets in such a way as to imply their coexistence with man; and we have thus the concurrent testimony of several classes of geological facts to the vast antiquity of the human race. The disappearance of a large variety of species of wild animals from every part of a wide continent must have required a vast period of time for its accomplishment; yet this took place while man existed on the earth, and was completed before that early period when the Danish shell-mounds were formed. The deepening and widening of valleys implies an amount of change of which that which has occurred during the historical period forms scarcely a perceptible part. Ages must have been required to change the climate of wide regions to such an extent as completely to alter the geographical distribution of many mammalia, as well as land and fresh-water shells. The three or four thousand years of the historical period do not furnish us with any appreciable measure for calculating the number of centuries which would suffice for such a series of changes, which are by no means of a local character, but have operated over a considerable part of Europe.'

In these gravels we gather all that is at present known of that earliest period on which history sheds no light. This period probably reaches back into the closing acts of the physical drama of the great Glacial age, when the valleys and plains of the northern hemisphere, down to the fortieth parallel of latitude, were groaning beneath the burden of grinding glaciers and untold depths of snow; while the rivers were mostly covered with thick ice, and the seas were full of icebergs floating, with infinite collisions, to the southward, or covered with hummocked, snow-covered icefloe, as the arctic seas are to-day. Amid scenes like these, these earliest pioneers of the races of men struggled through their first experiences of the rough world. Could these scenes, through the touch of some magic wand, be reconstructed, and made to pass in dioramic form before our eyes, how interesting they would be! How closely we should listen to their stories of that far-gone age, could the men who lived while these gravels were being formed, spring to life again and tell us what they saw, and knew, and felt! What problems might thus be satisfactorily solved! But such cannot be: the past has successfully buried its dead, and what we know of its history must be through the tortuous course of induction.

But these men were most probably hunters; their business was to live. And no trapper of modern American fame could want higher or, to us, more interesting game. Across the snow-clad plains roamed herds of the gigantic mammoth in search of food; wild savage boars kept cover under the brushwood of the forests; and packs of hungry wolves, on the scent of prey, filled the clear frosty air with their dismal cry, as their modern representatives in Russia and other countries do to-day. The magnificent Irish deer--not then extinct, and than which no deer of modern age has antlers half so large, or has half so noble an appearance--galloped with bounding, graceful step across the plains of Ireland. Bears hibernated through the greater part of the severe, almost endless winter; and when the climate became suitable, cunning beavers followed their life's work by the side of broad shallow rivers that drained continents, part of which are now no more. As the climate became warmer when the age of boulder-drift was past, ferocious tigers prowled around man's rude hut in search of sweet morsels--veritable ancestors of modern 'man-eaters'--and in the vicinity of the rivers, the huge hippopotamus and scale-covered crocodile sought their livelihood. Among this variety of animal life, and in the excitement of a hunter's existence, during the latter part of the great Glacial age, lived these Palaeolithic men, clothing themselves from the bitter cold with the warm furs of the animals their superior intelligence enabled them to trap, or that came within reach of their curiously flint-barbed arrows, and living almost entirely on the game they were able to 'bag.'

IN ALL SHADES.

BY GRANT ALLEN,

Next day was Tuesday; and to Louis Delgado and his friends at least, the days were now well worth counting; for was not the hour of the Lord's deliverance fixed for eight o'clock on Wednesday evening?

Nora, too, had some reason to count the days for her own purposes, for on Tuesday night they were to have a big dinner-party--the biggest undertaken at Orange Grove since Nora had first returned to her father's house in the capacity of hostess. Mr Dupuy, while still uncertain about Harry Noel's precise colour, had thought it well--giving him the benefit of the doubt--to invite all the neighbouring planters to meet the distinguished member of the English aristocracy: it reminded him, he said, of those bygone days when Port-of-Spain was crowded with carriages, and Trinidad was still one of the brightest jewels in the British crown .

The veranda of the house--it fronted on the back garden at Orange Grove--is always the pleasantest place in which to sit during the heat of the day in a West Indian household. The air comes so delightfully fresh through the open spaces of the creeper-covered trellis-work, and the humming-birds buzz about so merrily among the crimson passion-flowers under your very eyes, and the banana bushes whisper so gently before the delicate fanning of the cool sea-breezes in the leafy courtyard, that you lie back dreamily in your folding-chair and half believe yourself, for once in your life, in the poet's Paradise. On such a veranda, Harry Noel and Nora Dupuy sat together that Tuesday morning; Harry pretending to read a paper, which lay, however, unfolded on his knees--what does one want with newspapers in Paradise?--and Nora almost equally pretending to busy herself, Penelope-like, with a wee square of dainty crewel-work, concerning which it need only be said that one small flower appeared to take a most unconscionable and incredible time for its proper shaping. They were talking together as young man and maiden will talk to one another idly under such circumstances--circling half unconsciously round and round the object of both their thoughts, she avoiding it, and he perpetually converging towards it, till at last, like a pair of silly, fluttering moths around the flame of the candle, they find themselves finally landed, by a sudden side-flight in the very centre at an actual declaration.

'Really,' Harry said at length, at a pause in the conversation, 'this is positively too delicious, Miss Dupuy, this sunshine and breeziness. How the light glances on the little green lizards on the wall over yonder! How beautiful the bougainvillea looks, as it clambers with its great purple masses over that big bare trunk there! We have a splendid bougainvillea in the greenhouse at our place in Lincolnshire; but oh, what a difference, when one sees it clambering in its native wildness like that, from the poor little stunted things we trail and crucify on our artificial supports over yonder in England! I almost feel inclined to take up my abode here altogether, it all looks so green and sunny and bright and beautiful.'

'And yet,' Nora said, 'Mr Hawthorn told me your father's place in Lincolnshire is so very lovely. He thinks it's the finest country-seat he's ever seen anywhere in England.'

'And Mr Hawthorn told me,' Nora put in, 'that you'd got such splendid conservatories and gardens too.'

'Well, we have: there's no denying it. They're certainly good in their way, too, very good conservatories. You see, my dear mother's very fond of flowers: it's a perfect passion with her: brought it over from Barbadoes, I fancy. She was one of the very first people who went in for growing orchids on the large scale in England. Her orchid-houses are really awfully beautiful. We never have anything but orchids on the table for dinner--in the way of flowers, I mean--we don't dine off a lily, of course, as they say the aesthetes do. And my mother's never so proud as when anybody praises and admires her masdevallias or her thingumbobianas--I'm sorry to say I don't myself know the names of half of them. She's a dear, sweet, old lady, my mother, Miss Dupuy; I'm sure you couldn't fail to like my dear mother.'

'She's a Barbadian too, you told us,' Nora said reflectively. 'How curious that she too should be a West Indian!'

'She's a beautiful old lady, certainly,' Nora answered, gazing in some surprise at Lady Noel's clear-cut and haughty, high-born-looking features. She couldn't for the moment exactly remember where she had seen some others so very like them; and then, as Harry's evil genius would unluckily have it, she suddenly recollected with a start of recognition: she had seen them just the evening before on the lawn in front of her: they answered precisely, in a lighter tint, to the features and expression of Isaac Pourtal?s!

'How proud she must be to be the mistress of such a place as Noel Hall!' she said musingly, after a short pause, pursuing in her own mind to herself her own private line of reflection. It seemed to her as if the heiress of the Barbadian brown people must needs find herself immensely lifted up in the world by becoming the lady of such a splendid mansion as Harry had just half unconsciously described to her.

But Harry himself, to whom, of course, Lady Noel had been Lady Noel, and nothing else, as long as ever he could remember her, again misunderstood entirely the course of Nora's thoughts, and took her naive expression of surprise as a happy omen for his own suit. 'She thinks,' he thought to himself quietly, 'that it must be not such a very bad position after all to be mistress of the finest estate in Lincolnshire! But I don't want her to marry me for that. O no, not for that! that would be miserable! I want her to marry me for my very self, or else for nothing.' So he merely added aloud, in an unconcerned tone: 'Yes; she's very fond of the place and of the gardens; and as she's a West Indian by birth, I'm sure you'd like her very much, Miss Dupuy, if you were ever to meet her.'

Nora coloured. 'I should like to see some of these fine English places very much,' she said, half timidly, trying with awkward abruptness to break the current of the conversation. 'I never had the chance, when I was last in England. My aunt, you know, knew only very quiet people in London, and we never visited at any of the great country-houses.'

He spoke in a soft persuasive voice, which thrilled through Nora's very inmost being; and as she looked at him, so handsome, so fluent, so well born, so noble-looking, she could hardly refrain from whispering low a timid 'Yes,' on the impulse of the moment. But something that was to her almost as the prick of conscience arose at once irresistibly within her, and she motioned away quickly, with a little gesture of positive horror, the hand with which Harry strove half forcibly to take her own. The image of scowling Isaac Pourtal?s as he emerged, all unexpectedly, from the shadow the night before, rose up now in strange vividness before her eyes and blinded her vision; next moment, for the first time in her life, she perceived hurriedly that Isaac not only resembled Lady Noel, but quite as closely resembled in face and feature Harry also. That unhappy resemblance was absolutely fatal to poor Harry's doubtful chance of final acceptance. Nora shrank back, half frightened and wholly disenchanted, as far as she could go, in her own chair, and answered in a suddenly altered voice: 'Oh, Mr Noel, I didn't know you were going to begin that subject again; I thought we met on neutral ground, merely as friends now. I--I gave you my answer definitely long ago at Southampton. There has been nothing--nothing of any sort--to make me alter it since I spoke to you then. I like you--I like you very much indeed; and I'm so grateful to you for standing up as you have stood up for Mr Hawthorn and for poor dear Marian--but I can never, never, never--never marry you!'

Harry drew back hastily with sudden surprise and great astonishment. He had felt almost sure she was going this time really to accept him; everything she said had sounded so exactly as if she meant at last to take him. The disappointment took away his power of fluent speech. He could only ask, in a suddenly checked undertone: 'Why, Miss Dupuy? You will at least tell me, before you dismiss me for ever, why your answer is so absolutely final.'

Nora took up the little patch of crewel-work she had momentarily dropped, and pretended, with rigid, trembling fingers, to be stitching away at it most industriously. 'I cannot tell you,' she answered very slowly, after a moment's long hesitation: 'don't ask me. I can never tell you.'

Harry rose and gazed at her anxiously. 'You cannot mean to say,' he whispered, bending down towards her till their two faces almost touched one another, 'that you are going willingly to marry your cousin, for whom your father intends you? Miss Dupuy, that would be most unworthy of you! You do not love him! You cannot love him!'

'I hate him!' Nora answered with sudden vehemence; and at the words, the blood rushed hot again into Harry's cheek, and he whispered once more: 'Then, why do you say--why do you say, Nora, you will never marry me?'

At the sound of her name, so uttered by Harry Noel's lips, Nora rose and stood confronting him with crimson face and trembling fingers. 'Because, Mr Noel,' she answered slowly and with emphasis, 'an impassable barrier stands for ever fixed and immovable between us!'

Well it was, indeed, for Harry Noel that he didn't hint aloud in the mildest form this unlucky thought, that flashed for one indivisible second of time across the mirror of his inner consciousness; if he had, heaven only knows whether Nora would have darted away angrily like a wounded tigress from the polluted veranda, or would have stood there petrified and chained to the spot, like a Gorgon-struck Greek figure in pure white marble, at the bare idea that any creature upon God's earth should even for a passing moment appear to consider himself superior in position to a single daughter of the fighting Dupuys of Orange Grove, Trinidad!

'Then you dismiss me for ever?' Harry asked quivering.

Nora cast her eyes irresolutely down upon the ground and faltered for a second; then, with a sudden burst of firmness, she answered tremulously: 'Yes, for ever.'

At the word, Harry bounded away like a wounded man from her side, and rushed wildly with tempestuous heart into his own bedroom. As for Nora, she walked quietly back, white, but erect, to her little boudoir, and when she reached it, astonished Aunt Clemmy by flinging herself with passionate force down at full length upon the big old sofa, and bursting at once into uncontrollable floods of silent, hot, and burning tears.

POPULAR LEGAL FALLACIES.

BY AN EXPERIENCED PRACTITIONER.

The laws of England relating to lotteries may conveniently be divided into three classes, according to the objects which are sought to be attained thereby. The imposition of penalties. The punishment of offenders as rogues and vagabonds. The legalisation of art-unions. The inconsistent provisions of the Act of Parliament relating to the third class, with the tone of legislation within the first and second classes, have led to some curious misconceptions. For example, in Wales, especially in South Wales, and to a smaller extent in some counties of England, it is generally believed that a common raffle can be made quite legal by advertising it as being conducted upon art-union principles; although--as we shall presently show--there is no connection between the two, and therefore no ground for the supposition that the pretence implied in the words quoted has any real existence.

The pernicious effects of lotteries appear to have early been a subject of careful attention on the part of the legislature. To go no farther back than the year 1698, we find it recited that 'several evil-disposed persons for divers years last passed have set up many mischievous and unlawful games called lotteries, not only in the cities of London and Westminster and in the suburbs thereof and places adjoining, but in most of the eminent towns and places in England and in the dominion of Wales, and have thereby most unjustly and fraudulently got to themselves great sums of money from the children and servants of several gentlemen, traders, and merchants, and from other unwary persons, to the utter ruin and impoverishment of many families, and to the reproach of the English laws and government, by colour of several patents or grants under the Great Seal of England for the said lotteries or some of them, which said grants or patents are against the common good, trade, welfare, and peace of His Majesty's kingdoms.' It was accordingly enacted that any person keeping, &c., any lottery either by dice, lots, cards, balls, or any other numbers or figures, should be liable to a penalty of five hundred pounds, one-third part thereof for the use of His Majesty, his heirs and successors; one other third part thereof to the use of the poor of the parish where such offence should have been committed; and the other third part thereof with double costs to the use of the informer suing for the same. In the year 1806, the latter part of the preceding enactment was altered to this extent--the whole of the penalty was to go to the Crown, and no proceedings were to be taken for recovery of penalties inflicted by any of the laws concerning lotteries except in the name and by the authority of the Attorney-general for the time being. Since the last-mentioned date, the proceedings for recovery of penalties under the former Act have been very rare, although the law stands thus to the present day.

It is somewhat remarkable that many of the enactments against lotteries have been contained in Acts of Parliament by which government lotteries were authorised, thus leading to the inference that the raising of money for the service of the state, which must necessarily lead to the same evils of gambling, &c., as the lotteries set up by the 'evil-disposed persons' against whom the former legislation was aimed, was of more importance than the cause of morality which had been sought to be served by the imposition of penalties so heavy. The persons who availed themselves of the advantages offered by the keepers of unauthorised lotteries were not allowed to go free from the danger of being proceeded against for penalties; but these penalties were much more moderate, being only twenty pounds for each offence.

Besides the penalties and punishments provided for the conductors of and participants in lotteries, there is a distinct set of enactments which aim at the prevention of advertising lotteries, whether English or foreign. So far as the latter class is concerned, the law has no power to interfere with the persons implicated therein so long as they are without the jurisdiction of our courts. But if any person in the United Kingdom should endeavour to spread the knowledge of such schemes by allowing advertisements to be inserted in his newspaper or other periodical, or by printing and distributing notices relating thereto, then the law provides that he shall become liable to a penalty of fifty pounds besides full costs; and the same penalty applies to private lotteries which may have been established in this country.

In the year 1846, an Act of Parliament was passed for legalising art-unions. The following are the requisites for enabling an Association of individuals interested in the promotion of art to take advantage of the protection thus afforded. The Association must be purely voluntary, and must not be established for the acquisition of pecuniary profit, the subscriptions--beyond the necessary expenses--being entirely expended in the purchase of drawings, paintings, and other works of art for distribution amongst the subscribers. The art-union which is to be protected by the Act must either have been incorporated by royal charter, or a license must be obtained from the Board of Trade, after the deed of settlement, or the rules and regulations of the Association--as the case may be--have been submitted to that honourable body for approval. Whenever the Association is so conducted as to become perverted from the purposes contemplated by the Act, power is reserved to revoke the charter, &c., previously granted to such Association. It will be observed that the provisions respecting art-unions are not of an elastic nature; but that the protection intended to be afforded by the Act is strictly limited to Associations for artistic purposes, established under government sanction and supervision. Hence, it should be noted that the advertising of an intended lottery which has not been so sanctioned, as being on art-union principles, would be of no avail to protect the managers of such a lottery from prosecution under the vagrancy laws; or from an action for penalties at the suit of the Attorney-general for the time being.

It is not our present purpose to attempt to criticise or to vindicate the laws in question; we simply explain how the law stands, and leave to others to reconcile the principles of legislation in the interests of morality, which appear to place art upon a pedestal outside the sphere of moral considerations.

FOOTNOTES:

It should be understood that this series of articles deals mainly with English as apart from Scotch law.

WHERE THE TRACKS LED TO.

I have been often much inclined to write down the particulars of a remarkable business I was once engaged in, which was not only queer and full of unexpected turns in itself, but was of unusual interest to me personally. The account will also be curious, as showing how much, or how little, of the qualities the public always will assign to us is required. I had been in the metropolitan police, and, when my story begins, had just retired on a decent superannuation. While in the force, I think I had as much experience as many of the men who have been talked about; but I never before met with anything in the least like the incident I am going to describe.

I was pensioned off late in the year, in November; so, as Christmas drew near, I had not yet grown tired of the pleasure of being my own master, and would sit, after the gas was lighted, by the hour at a time alone with my pipe, picturing how I would enjoy myself in the holidays, when some of my friends would be coming up to London; for I had not much of a family party at home, as I lived with my daughter, the only one left with me out of four. She was now nineteen years old, and just like her mother, as I remembered her, some thirty years before. Winifred--called so after a favourite sister of my wife, who died young--was a very pretty girl, as many others besides me thought; and wonderfully steady too. She was a dressmaker; none of your day-workers or needlewomen, but really an artist--I believe that is now the correct name; and at the West End would have commanded a high salary. She could have gone to the West End easily enough; but she would not do this, nor would she live in the house where she was employed, and where she might have had, young as she was, full charge of a department. She would not leave her father, who, she knew, if she went away, would be dull and mopish in the house without her.

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