Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/704

684 evidence that the reverse is true. Most of us would be amazed if not shocked at a true and life-size portrait of the real Eve, "mother of all living." We often hear, indeed, of giants' bones here and there dug up, but intelligent examination invariably proves them to have belonged to the mammoth or other animal. A singular blunder of the kind shows the real value of such reputed discoveries. Years ago, a skeleton was dug from the calcareous shale at Oeningen, which the veteran savant Scheuchzer confidently christened "Homo diluvii testis"—the man who saw the flood. Casts of it were made for various museums, and, in full faith in the legitimacy of the name, one Deacon Müller was moved to write some most pious and edifying lines about it. Unfortunately, the first competent study of the skeleton proved it to be that—not of an ancient sinner, but of a large salamander, closely resembling the Giant Salamander of Japan. Yet, to this day, every casually unearthed petrifaction, found no matter where or in what relations, is to many a memorial of the Noachian Deluge. Thus, theories which science has long ago refuted and dismissed from further consideration, are persistently held fast and reaffirmed.

If we are to attain even an approximate notion of the grade of culture reached by what we must provisionally regard as the autochthonic, primitive man of Europe, we must infer it from the yet preserved works of his hands rather than from the lamentably few osseous remains yet found with them. He had various articles of bone and horn, clubs and slings, and knives and spear-heads, some of which were long and slender, some short and round, chipped into shape out of flint and jasper. He had no pottery as yet, and no wrought metals. He split the longer bones of animals used as food, the better to get at the marrow; and this was not only eaten, but probably then, as by many savage races at present, employed as an unguent also. The domestication of animals was evidently not yet begun—even the horse being used neither for draught nor for carrying. That primitive race contented itself with the wild products of the forest, the chase, and the waters, as to food, and for dwellings used caves, generally in cliffs difficult of access and easy of defense, like those on the river Lesse, near Namur.

We are to picture to ourselves, then, a people very like the Esquimaux in circumstances and activities. It lived in our own Europe, but Europe covered to a considerable extent with glaciers, and keeping up a hard and continuous resistance both to wild beasts and the rigors of a climate at once very cold and very damp. The mammoth and rhinoceros, as we have seen, were protected by thick, woolly hair, and fed upon the twigs of the abundant conifers, as fragments yet found in the interstices of the teeth and ribs show. We must not be misled