Louis Figuier

“ The ravages of death break in upon them; how great are the cares which are now lavished upon those whom they have lost! They bear the corpse into its cavernous sepulchre; some weapons, an amulet, and perhaps an urn, form the whole of the funeral furniture. A slab of stone prevents the inroad of wild beasts. ”

“ Did any kind of religious worship exist among the men of the bronze epoch? Nothing would be more interesting than any discovery bearing on this point; but up to the present time no vestiges of anything in the shape of an idol have been found, nor anything whatever which authorizes us unhesitatingly to answer this question in the affirmative. The only thing which might prove the existence of any religious feeling, is the discovery, in various lacustrine settlements, of a certain number of crescent-shaped objects, most of them made of very coarse baked earth and some of stone. ”

“ It is acknowledged by all anthropologists that this portion of the skull of the man of Moulin-Quignon bears a perfect resemblance to that of a man of small size of the present age.
From the small number of skulls which we possess, it is impossible for us to estimate what was the precise degree of intelligence to be ascribed to man at the epoch of the great bear and mammoth. No one, assuredly, will be surprised at the fact, that the human skull in these prodigiously remote ages did not present any external signs of great intellectual development. The nature of man is eminently improvable ”

“ If, in the sketch of the Borreby skull, we place, before the eyes of our readers the type of the human cranium which existed during the period of the Stone Age, our only object is to prove that the primitive Northerner resembles the present race of man, both in the beauty and in the regularity of the shape of his skull; also, in order once more to recall to mind how false and trivial must the judgment be of those short-sighted savants who would establish a genealogical filiation between man and the ape. ”

“ If we were to enter into a detailed study of the vestiges of the polished-stone epoch existing in the other countries of Europe, we should be led into a repetition of much that we have already stated with regard to the districts now forming France and Belgium. Over a great portion of Europe we should find the same mode of life, the same manners and customs, and the same degree of nascent civilisation. ”

“ The fine arts had already begun to throw out promising germs, industrial skill had become an established fact, agriculture was in full practice, and bronze was made to adapt itself to all the caprices and all the boldest ideas of the imagination. What more can be necessary to prove that man, at this epoch, was already comparatively far advanced in intellectual culture? ”

“ Fire must have put an end to the weariness of the long nights. In the presence of fire, the darkness of the holes and caverns in which man made his first retreat, must have vanished away. With the aid of fire, the most rigorous climates became habitable, and the damp which impregnated the body of man or his rough garments, made of the skin of the bear or some long-haired ruminant, could be evaporated. With fire near them, the danger arising from ferocious beasts must have much diminished; for a general instinct leads wild animals to dread the light and the heat of a fire. ”

“ In the work which will follow the present volume we shall see, when speaking of the various races of man, that the majority of naturalists admit nowadays one common centre of creation for all mankind. Man, no doubt, first came into being on the great plateaux of Central Asia, and thence was distributed over all the various habitable portions of our globe. The action of climate and the influences of the locality which he inhabited have, therefore, determined the formation of the different races—white, black, yellow, and red—which now exist with all their infinite subdivisions. ”

“ Silver did not become known to men until a much later date; for this metal is very seldom met with in the tumuli of the bronze epoch. The fact is, that silver is seldom found in a pure state, and scarcely ever except in combination with lead ores; lead, however, was not known until after iron.
Bronze, as every one knows, is an alloy of copper and tin (nine parts of copper and one of tin) . Now it is precisely this alloy, namely bronze, which was the first metallic substance used in Europe; indeed the sole substance used, to the exclusion of copper. ”

“ Another excellent proof, which demonstrates the existence of man at a geological epoch anterior to the present era, is to be deduced from the intermixture of human bones with those of antediluvian animals. It is evident that if we meet with the bones of the mammoth, the cave-bear, the cave-tiger, &c.,—animals which lived only in the quaternary epoch and are now extinct—in conjunction with the bones of man or the relics of his industry, such as weapons, implements, utensils, &c., we can assert with some degree of certainty that our species was contemporaneous with the above-named animals. ”

“ Because we find a portion of a skull—not even a whole skull—belonging to a human being contemporary with the great bear, we assume that we can determine the amount of intellect possessed by man during this epoch. ”

“ If it be a fact that the man of the epoch of the great bear and the mammoth had a more robust leg, and a more largely developed thigh-bone than most of the races of existing man, the reason simply is, that his savage life, which was spent in the midst of the wild beasts of the forest, compelled him to make violent exertions, which increased the size of these portions of his body. ”

“ Mere chance, or the most casual observation, might have taught our earliest forefathers that a morsel of clay placed near a fire-hearth became hardened and altogether impenetrable to water, that is, that it formed a perfect specimen of pottery. Yet the art, though ancient, has not been universally found among mankind.
Ere long, experience must have taught men certain improvements in the manufacture of pottery. ”

“ Men, as individuals, may pass away, and generations may disappear; but they always hand down to their progeny and those that succeed them the customs of their epoch; which customs will undergo little or no change until the causes which have produced them also disappear. Thus it is with all that concerns the ceremonies observed in bearing man to his last resting-place—a duty which can never change, and always brings with it its train of sorrow and regret. Nowadays, a small sum of money is sufficient to give outward expression to our grief ”

“ If we cast a glance on the metallurgic industry of some of the semi-barbarous nations of ancient times, we shall find, as regards the extraction of iron, a process in use among them which will fully justify the idea we have formed of the way in which iron must have been obtained in primitive times. Gmelin, the naturalist, during his travels in Tartary, was a witness of the elementary process which was employed by these northern tribes in procuring iron. There, every one prepares his own iron just as every household might make its own bread. ”

“ Instruments made of stone, bone, reindeer or stag's horn, were replaced by those composed of metal. In all the communities of man civilisation and metals seem to be constant companions. Though bronze may have served for the forging of swords and spears, it also provides the material for implements of peaceful labour. Owing to the efforts of continuous toil, owing also to the development of intelligence which is its natural consequence, the empire of man over the world of nature is still increasing, and man's moral improvement follows the same law of progression. ”

“ Shapes are so well imitated, movements are so thoroughly caught, as it were, in the sudden fact of action, that it is almost always possible to recognise the object which the ancient workman desired to represent, although he had at his disposal nothing but the rudest instruments for executing his work. A splinter of flint was his sole graving-tool, a piece of reindeer horn, or a flake of slate or ivory, was the only plate on which primitive man could stamp his reproductions of animated nature. ”

“ Was man created by God complete in all parts, and is the human type independent of the type of the animals which existed before him? Or, on the contrary, are we compelled to admit that man, by insensible transformations, and gradual improvements and developments, is derived from some other animal species, and particularly that of the ape? ”

“ No specimen of the kind has, in fact, been found in the kitchen-middens of Denmark, or in the lacustrine settlements of the stone age, or even of the bronze age.
It must, then, be admitted that the tribes which were scattered over those portions of the European continent which now correspond to the south-west of France, possessed a special talent in the art of design. There is, moreover, nothing unreasonable in such a supposition. An artistic feeling is not always the offspring of civilisation, it is rather a gift of nature. ”

“ By the side of these savants, who represent to some extent, in ethnological questions, the partisans of the great geological cataclysms or revolutions of the globe, there are others who would refer the appearance of bronze in Europe to a great extension of commercial relations. They utterly reject the idea of any conquest, of any great invasion having brought with it a complete change in manners, customs, and processes of industrial skill. In their opinion, it was commerce which first brought bronze from the East and introduced it to the men of the West. ”

“ Thou hast turned the course of rivers, cleared the mountain sides of the forests which covered them, and cultivated the plains and valleys; by thy culture the earth has become a verdant and fruitful garden. Thou hast changed the whole aspect of the globe, and mayst well call thyself the lord of creation! ”

“ Money, in the shape of coin, the conventional symbol of wealth, came into use during this epoch, and must have singularly facilitated the operations of trade. Agriculture, too, had advanced as much as it could at this earliest dawn of civilisation. The remains of cereals found in the lake-settlements of Switzerland, added to the iron instruments intended to secure the products of the cultivation of the ground, such as the scythes and sickles which we have previously depicted (figs. 254 and 255) , are sufficient to show us that agriculture constituted at that time the chief wealth of nations. ”

“ On one side they are picking up the fluor spar, the colour of which is pleasing to their eyes; on the other, they are digging out the great slabs of sandstone which are to be placed as hearthstones round their fire.
"But, alas! inauspicious days arrive, and certainly misfortune does not seem to spare them. A falling in of the roof of their cave drives them out of their chief dwelling-place. The objects of their worship, their weapons, and their utensils—all are buried there, and they are forced to fly and take up their abode in another spot. ”

“ However great may be thy moral grandeur, and however complete thy empire over a docile nature, confess and acknowledge every hour the Almighty Power of the great Creator. Submit thyself before thy Lord and Master, the God of goodness and of love, the Author of thy existence, who has reserved for thee still higher destinies in another life. ”

“ The persistence in practising the routine of all the most ancient processes may be explained by the monopoly of the iron-working trade being retained in the same families. We have the less need to be surprised at this, because we may notice that the wood-cutters and charcoal-burners of our own days, when they have to take up their abode in a locality for any length of time, and to carry on their trade there, always make certain arrangements which have doubtless been handed down from the most primitive times. ”

“ That astonishing scientific and industrial movement which this nineteenth century presents to us in its most remarkable form—the material comfort which existing generations are enjoying—all our mechanical appliances, manufactures of such diverse kinds, books and arts—not one of all these benefits for man, in the absence of metals, could ever have come into existence. Without the help of metal, man would have been condemned to live in great discomfort ”

“ In all probability, gold, among all the metals, is the first with which man became acquainted. Gold, in a metallic state, is drifted down by the waters of many a river, and its glittering brightness [Pg 206] would naturally point it out to primitive peoples. Savages are like children; they love everything that shines brightly. Gold, therefore, must, in very early days, have found its way into the possession of the primitive inhabitants of our globe.
Gold is still often met with in the Ural mountains; and thence, perhaps, it originally spread all over the north of Europe. ”

“ This valiant, although numerically speaking, inconsiderable people, can boast of a great number of distinguished men who are an honour to science. The unwearied researches of their archæologists and antiquarians have ransacked the dust of bygone ages, in order to call into new life the features of a vanished world. Their labours, guided by the observations of naturalists, have brought out into the clear light of day some of the earliest stages in man's existence and progress.
There is no part of the world more adapted than Denmark to this kind of investigation. ”