Rock of Ages

“ Our theoretical journey backward into the ages begins with the Recent or last-formed deposits—those which lie nearest the outer surface of our earth. The Recent or Quaternary period forms a division of the Tertiary period, that is, the latest of the three great epochs into which, for purposes of classifying fossil forms by their relative ages, the geologist divides the rock-formations. ”

“ Know'st thou the land of the mountain and flood,
Where the pine of the forest for ages hath stood,
Where the eagle comes forth on the wings of the storm,
And her young ones are rock'd on the high Cairngor'm?
Know'st thou the land where the cold Celtic wave
Encircles the hills which its blue waters lave;
Where the virgins are pure as the gems of the sea,
And their spirits are light as their actions are free? ”

“ THE NEW STONE AGE IN
NORTHERN EUROPE CHAPTER I THE COMING OF MAN
MAN has been described as a “walking museum of paleontology.” He is like a mountain whose foundations were laid in a time so ancient that even the paleontologist hardly finds a record to decipher; whose strata testify to the progress of life through all the succeeding ages; whose surface, deeply ploughed by the glaciers, is clothed with grass and forest, flower and fruit, the harvest of the life of to-day. ”

“ The close of the Glacial period, introducing great physical and climatal changes, some new species of mammalia and man himself, should be regarded as the end of the Pleistocene, and the introduction of what some French geologists have called the Anthropic period, which I have elsewhere divided into Palanthropic, corresponding to the so-called Palæolithic age, and Neanthropic, corresponding to the later stone and metal ages. ”

“ Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages.—We know that the learned have divided the period man has inhabited the globe into what may roughly be called three Ages—the Stone, the Bronze, and the Iron. Ancient mythology presented us with another, ycleped the Golden, when our planet was supposed to be a paradise, and man lived in a state of perpetual happiness; it is to be feared that the idea of a golden age, either past or to come, is purely mythical. ”

“ Upon this summit theories grow lively; the arguments of the books breathe new life into the story of the mountains, and the past appears grander than the present. This country was in the beginning a solitary and boiling sea, then slowly cooled, finally peopled by living creatures and built up by their debris. Thus were formed the ancient limestones, the slates of transition and several of the secondary rocks. What myriads of ages are accumulated in a single phrase! Time is a solitude in which we set up here and there our boundaries; they reveal its immensity, but do not measure it. ”

“ Following the Palæolithic era, or rude stone age, is the Neolithic, or new stone, age; and now we find man using polished weapons, making pottery, using fire to warm himself with, and developing social manners. Instead of living in caves, he lived in lake dwellings, with others of his species, and gradually developed agricultural tastes. This metamorphosis, we know from the fossil remains found deposited in various strata, occupied a long period of time, probably thousands of years; and even then we are left thousands of years before the historical era, which followed the bronze and iron ages. ”

“ No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs: all comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of the Vacancy and the Rock; yet with such iron will, that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside them,—fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of enchanted pride—unnumbered, unconquerable. ”

“ In those dark mountains, which have almost no springs or water, you see what was once a land of fire, the melted rock blazing in the night like slag from an unimaginable furnace. They are full of minerals—silver, gold, platinum, probably, and perhaps precious stones. ”

“ Men write of and wonder at the strange gap between what are called the Paleolithic and the Neolithic ages, that is, between the ages when the spearheads and ax and arrowheads were of stone chipped roughly into shape, and the age of stone even-edged and smoothly polished. ”

“ The age of rough-stone implements or paleolithic, the age of polished-stone implements, or neolithic, the ages of copper, bronze, and iron, have succeeded each other without the possibility of our drawing the dividing line, any more than we can say exactly when what we call the middle ages ceased and modern time came in. ”

“ Now, a flourishing civilization with admirable arts, and especially a fixed literary language, presupposes ages of development and progress, so that we see the "prehistoric man" thrust thus at least one stage into "the dark backward and abysm of time." But only monuments inscribed by Nature's own hand are our helpers in the arduous task of attempting to measure by a scale of centuries the duration of the existence of "the fossil man." ”

“ So exact are the deductions to be drawn from these mute records of the past that they have been divided by Sir John Lubbock, in his "Prehistoric Times," into four well-defined ages—the drift age, the age of polished stone, the age of bronze, and the age of iron; each of these marking an advance in knowledge and civilization which amounted to a revolution in the then existing manners and customs of the world. The drift age or Paleolithic period is marked by deposits of rude stone implements ”

“ Most people who have not specially studied prehistoric archæology, and many of those who have studied it, believe that the period of human life on the earth may be divided into three principal epochs, the Iron age, the Bronze age, and the Stone age; and that the last named epoch may be once more subdivided into the Palæolithic and the Neolithic ages. All the great archæologists know, of course, that such a division would be utterly misleading; yet, in their written works, they have often used language which has led the world generally to fall, almost without exception, into the error. ”

“ In the generation that has elapsed since the first drawing of the cave-dweller artist was discovered, evidences of the wide-spread existence of man in an early epoch have multiplied indefinitely, and to-day the paleontologist traces the history of our race back beyond the iron and bronze ages, through a neolithic or polished-stone age, to a paleolithic or rough-stone age, with confidence born of unequivocal knowledge. ”

“ The age which we thus reach is called the Palæolithic, or "ancient" Stone age, because men made use of stone, which they chipped into shape, but, unlike the Neolithic people, never polished it. We find enormous numbers of these rough or Palæolithic stone implements both in caves and in the gravels deposited in the ancient beds of rivers. They are so abundant as to prove the existence of a very considerable human population in the remote ages when they were fashioned and used. ”

“ If it be proper ever to speak of respect for inanimate things, next to a great mountain, I have a profound respect for a great rock. It is the emblem of strength and power, which by its very height shelters and protects the feebleness of man. How often on the desert, under the burning sun, have I espied afar off a huge cliff rising above the plain, and urging on my wearied camel, thrown myself from it, and found the inexpressible relief of "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land!" ”

“ Several large and ruinous excavations, which are seen in the way, may arrest the attention of a traveller who is interested by such objects, and has no notion of those, still concealed from his view by the curtain of rocks which extends before him; but at length the rock leads him to the heights above one more ravine; whence he discovers within his horizon the most singular spectacle, the most enchanting picture, which Nature has wrought in her grandest mood of creation; which men, influenced by the vainest dreams of ambition, have yet bequeathed to the generations that were to follow them. ”

“ If colossal peaks rose, naked rock, against the sky, their gloom would be overpowering. And if fiends had the making of worlds, mountains would be dreadful bulks of black porphyry, the flame-born rock, — monuments and portents of malignity. ”

“ Instead of these appeared a reflection of the last and innermost nature of the man, the rock foundation, as it were, upon which was built the false and decorated superstructure that he showed to the world. ”

“ Enough of the forest has been cleared away to admit of the construction of the work, but the place still possesses much of its original wildness, and to see such beautiful mechanical work standing against the rude rocks,—to observe what changes have been wrought in the form of this rock to render it subservient to the purposes of the work, makes us feel that there has been a strife there; but it all shows that art has gained the ascendency. ”

“ In the long years before primitive man learned to weld iron or bronze he formed his weapons and his tools from stone and flint; and geologists and antiquarians have discovered several of these "Ages of Stone" of different periods. For example, the Stone Age which our grandfathers spoke of is now called the Neolithic Age; and in the second quarter of the last century it became gradually admitted that man had existed earlier than that and had swung hammers and chipped edges in what we now call Palæolithic times. ”

“ The Age or Iron.—The nearer we approach the present, with its rapid growths and changes, the shorter become the several ages into which we divide the history of man as to his physical surroundings and peculiarities, and the successive grades of spiritual and social development through which he has passed. Last of the prehistoric eras is the Age of Iron, represented in some of the pile-dwellings and their contents, but best, and with least admixture from earlier and later times, in the station of La Têne on Lake Neuchâtel. ”

“ What a source of endless amusement, what a field for deep reflection, is there in the investigation of this one little rock! When you contemplate the instinct of the different species, the powers given to them, so adapted to their wants and their privations—is not the eye delighted, is not the mind enlarged, and are not the feelings harmonised? Study the works of the creation, and you turn a desert into a peopled city—a barren rock into a source of admiration and delight. ”

“ So our divine Rock, once covering us, always covers us. The same yesterday, to-day and for ever! always good, always kind, always sympathetic! You often hold a sunshade over your head passing along the road or a street; but after a while your arm gets tired, and the very effort to create the shadow makes you weary. But the rock in the mountains, with fingers of everlasting stone, holds its own shadow. ”

“ The secrets of all the natural knowledge, the high historic memories, and the mystic rites, of the ancient land of wisdom, seemed to be there still, hidden in those profound treasuries of rock, which neither time, conquest, nor curiosity, had been able to penetrate. ”

“ This view, which is one of the first shewn to a stranger, must strike him with astonishment, whether he considers the vast labour which must have been bestowed on it in mere excavation, the rock being of red granite ”

“ And with our eager hands draw up the bucketless rope.
*****
This is the tragic, the symbolic face,
Le Rocher or Starved Rock,
Round which the eternal turtles drink and swim
And serpents green and strange,
As race comes after race,
War after war.
This is the sphinx whose Memnon lips breathe dirges
To empire's wayward star,
And over the race's restless urges,
Whose lips unlock
Life's secret which is vanishment and change. ”

“ These closing essays have impressed on us clearly and distinctly the isolation of the Paleolithic Age. When we reflect on its prolonged duration, its remoteness in time, and its complete severance from the Neolithic and succeeding ages, we are almost ready to wonder whether they were indeed human beings. But beginning with the Neolithic Age, we come to our own era. ”

“ From the foregoing observations we may infer that the ages of iron and bronze in Northern and Central Europe were preceded by a stone age, the Neolithic, referable to that division of the post-tertiary epoch which I have called Recent, when the mammalia as well as the other organic remains accompanying the stone implements were of living species. ”

“ The period in man's life on the earth at which these people lived--the period before metals were known--has been named by archæologists the Stone Age. But the Stone Age covers two stages of human culture--one in which stone implements were fashioned unskilfully, and a second in which they were finished with expert and careful hands. ”

“ All we can do is to classify man’s habitation of this earth, as well as we can, under certain well-defined, and known conditions. Thus, that called the Stone Age, must be divided into two parts, that of the roughly chipped flint implements—which is designated the Palæolithic period—and that of the polished and carefully finished stone arms and implements, which necessarily show a later time, and a higher state of civilisation—which is called the Neolithic period. ”

“ You hear miners and quarrymen talk very truly of the live rock. That stone, they say, was cut out of the live rock, meaning the rock as it is under ground, sound and hard—as it would be, for aught we know, to the end of time, unless it was taken out of the ground, out of the place where God’s Spirit meant it to be, and brought up to the open air and the rain, in which it is not its nature to be. ”

“ I say gazed at the “rock,” for, examine as we could, we could find no traces of the join of the sliding door; nor, indeed, could we hit upon the secret, now utterly lost, that worked it, though we tried for an hour or more. It is certainly a marvellous bit of mechanism, characteristic, in its massive and yet inscrutable simplicity, of the age which produced it; and I doubt if the world has such another to show. ”