Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/397

Rh leads to the conclusion that the state of the arts in those early times remained stationary for almost indefinite periods. There may, however, have been different degrees of civilisation, and in the art of fabricating flint tools, of which we cannot easily detect the signs in the first age of stone, and some contemporary tribes may have been considerably in advance of others. Those hunters, for example, who feasted on the rhinoceros and buried their dead with funeral rites at Aurignac, may have been less barbarous than the savages of St. Acheul, as some of their weapons and utensils have been thought to imply. To a European who looks down from a great eminence on the products of the humble arts of the aborigines of all times and countries, the knives and arrows of the Red Indian of North America, the hatchets of the native Australian, the tools found in the ancient Swiss lake-dwellings, or those of the Danish kitchen-middens and of St. Acheul, seem nearly all alike in rudeness, and very uniform in general character. The slowness of the progress of the arts of savage life is manifested by the fact, that the earlier instruments of bronze were modelled on the exact plan of the stone tools of the preceding age, although such shapes would never have been chosen, had metals been known from the first. The reluctance or incapacity of savage tribes to adopt new inventions, has been shown in the East, by their continuing to this day to use the same stone implements as their ancestors, after that mighty empires, where the use of metals in the arts was well known, had flourished for three thousand years in their neighbourhood.

We see in our own times, that the rate of progress in the arts and sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as knowledge increases, and so, when we carry back our retrospect into the past, we must be prepared to find the signs of retardation augmenting in a like geometrical ratio; so that the progress of a thousand years at a remote period, may correspond to that of