TRADITIONS OF A LOST CONTINENT. 13 Caribs of the Antilles, and both to the tribes of the whole eastern coast of America from its extreme northern limit to Paraguay and Uruguay in the south.1 Humboldt suggests that the summits of the Madeira and of the Canary Islands may have once been the western extremity of the chain of the Atlas mountains. Others go farther and assume that these islands and those of the West Indies are the summits of mountain chains that once crowned an Atlantic continent which was afterward submerged and disintegrated by some great cataclysm. The similarity of the flora on the islands of the coast of Africa and Western Europe, and those of Central Europe and Eastern America can only be accounted for, according to some geologists, by the supposition of such a continent before the human period. The bolder theorists are disposed to accept the fact without the limitation, as the time of the destruction of such a continent, if it ever existed, and the first appearance of man are alike uncertain. Tradition of an Atlantic Continent. In curious coincidence with these mingled facts and conjectures the story is recalled which Plato says was related to Solon by an Egyptian priest of the island called Atlantis, "larger than Asia [Minor] and Libya combined," lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules, inhabited by a powerful and warlike people, and which was destroyed by earthquakes and floods nine thousand years before his time. In later times the "Island of Antilia," the "Island of the Seven Cities," the "Island of the Holy Bishop Brandon," placed midway in the "Sea of Darkness," as the Atlantic was then called, found its place in the earliest maps of the world, sometimes under one name, sometimes another, when the geography of one half the globe was merely guessed at. These speculations, traditions, and supposed fables are not history; but it is not impossible that in them may yet be found some aid in putting together the unwritten story of the early human race on this continent. It is not indeed yet established upon unquestioned evidence that man is as old here as anywhere else; but that such evidence is forthcoming is hardly a subject of doubt now even among those slowest to believe. The natives of North America, when first visited by Europeans a few centuries ago, belonged as distinctly to the Stone Age as the earliest inhabitants of Europe did at an epoch too remote to be accurately measured in years. It is not easy, therefore, to distinguish in this country between the possible relics of a primeval race and those of the modern Indians, where, whatever the difference of time be1 Professor Retzius of Stockholm. Smithsonian Report, 1859. 2 Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America. By Alexander von Humboldt. See Lecture by Edward Suess, in Vienna, translated for Smithsonian Report, 1872. Opinions of Professors Unger and Heer, quoted by Lyell, Antiquity of Man, p. 492. tween them, there was none of culture. Thus Lyell repeatedly refers, in different works,1 to the shell-heaps along the American coast from Massachusetts to Georgia as identical with the Kjökken-Möddings, the kitchen refuse-heaps, of Denmark. As witnesses to the existence of a Shell-heaps on coast of U. S. people in an early stage of barbarism, these refuse heaps of shells on the coasts of different countries are undoubtedly identical, but it may be questioned whether those upon our own are the work of the modern Indian, or of a race that long preceded them, and coeval, perhaps, with those primitive savages who fed in Denmark upon shell-fish which can no longer live in the waters of the Baltic, and upon the birds whose food was the buds of trees buried now in the bogs beneath successive forests. Such heaps are found from Nova Scotia to Florida, upon all the Sea Islands of the Southern States, along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and upon the banks of fresh-water streams. Their number and their size suggest the former presence of a large population and its long continuance. One upon Stalling's Island, in the Savannah River, two hundred miles above its mouth, is three hundred feet in length by one hundred and twenty in width, and with an average elevation of more than fifteen feet.2 Did the scattered tribes of Indian hunters accumulate these huge relics of their summer fishing? Perhaps when longer studied, and with a definite purpose, they may shed new light here, as the shell-heaps of Denmark, the caves of Germany, France, and England, the remains of human habitation beneath the lakes of Switzerland, have done in Europe, upon the antiquity of the early inhabitants.3 But where the fact to be observed depends upon geological evidence, the question is simply one of verification of that evidence. This involves, ordinarily, scientific knowledge and accurate observation. Such observation and knowledge will, in the long run, be brought to bear upon the subject and to dispel all doubts, if that is possible, either one way or the other. Meanwhile the progress of the accumulation of such evidence, whether more or less conclusive, is neither valueless nor without interest. 1 Visit to the United States. Antiquity of Man. 2 Antiquities of the Southern Indians. C. C. Jones, Jr. 3 The late Professor Jeffries Wyman, of Cambridge, who had examined the structure and contents of these refuse-heaps with the careful habit and rigid method of scientific research, asserts, in a private letter, that no glass beads or tools of metal have hitherto been found in them, though such articles were largely distributed among the Indians by the earliest European visitors; that some of the older mounds are wanting in any traces of pottery; that no pipes or fragments of pipes have been found in them by him and other accurate explorers, though smoking was the universal custom of the Indians when first known; that trees have been observed upon them, which showed by their annular growth an age antedating from one to three centuries the landing of Columbus; and that there is no record, with a single exception, in the narratives of the early voyagers of these heaps marking the dwelling-places of the Indians. FOSSILS FOUND IN AMERICA. U. S. 15 Thus, near Natchez, Mississippi, there was found about thirty years ago, a fragment of a human bone, the pelvis, in association with the bones of the mastodon, the megalonyx, and other extinct animals. Were the man and the beasts to whom these bones belonged living at the same time? That time was about a hundred thousand years ago, when the mastodon and megalonyx, whose remains must have been buried beneath the present valley and delta of the Fossil reMississippi, were certainly alive. The fissure at the bot- mains in tom of which the bones were found was made during the earthquakes of 1811-12, which extended through a portion of the Mississippi Valley, heaving the earth up into long hillocks, and tearing it open into deep ravines. Sir Charles Lyell, on his visit to this country in 1846, carefully examined the locality and these fossils, with a stronger bias, he has since said, against the probability" of the contemporaneous entombment of man and the mastodon than any geologist would now be justified in entertaining."2 He suggested that the human bone may have fallen from the surface of the soil, while those of the fossil beasts came from strata underneath. Other scientific men afterward adopted this suggestion, though he has since candidly acknowledged that "had the pelvic bone belonged to any recent mammifer other than man, such a theory would never have been resorted to."3 So in New Orleans, in 1852, a human skeleton was dug from an excavation, made for the foundation of gas-works, at a depth of sixteen feet, and beneath four successive buried forests of cypress. Dr. Dowler, into whose possession this skeleton came, believed, from its position, that it had lain there not less than fifty thousand years, but whether this be correct or not, depends upon intricate calculations as to the yearly deposits of the river, about which there is great difference of opinion among geologists. There is on Petit Anse Island, in Louisiana, a bed of almost pure rock salt, found in every part of it at a depth of from fifteen to twenty feet. On this spot have been disinterred the fossil bones of the mastodon and the elephant, and underneath them lay fragments of matting and bits of broken pottery in great profusion. The people to whom this refuse once belonged had resorted to the island for salt, before, it is assumed, the superimposed mud of fifteen or twenty feet in depth, and in which the mastodons and elephants were buried, was deposited; on the other hand, it is doubted whether the whole mass of soil and all it contained may not have been washed down from the surrounding hills, mingling together indiscriminately the remains of various ages. 1 Sir Charles Lyell, Second Visit to the United States, vol. ii. p. 151. 8 Ibid., p. 239. Discovery of Evidence still more interesting and conclusive that man and the extinct animals were contemporaneous is alleged to have been found in Missouri nearly forty years ago. A Dr. Koch, of St. Louis, an enthusiastic, though not a scientific, collector and exhibitor of fossil remains, affirmed that in 1839 he dug up, in the bottom lands of the Bourbeuse River, in Missouri, from a depth of eight or nine feet, the bones of a mastodon, in such juxtaposition with human relics as mastodon in to show that man and this beast, whose race is no longer Missouri. in existence, met upon that spot in deadly hostility. He asserted that, when the exhumation was made, the great bones of the legs of the animal stood erect as if the creature had become immovably mired in the deep and tenacious clay. Around it had been kindled a fire by human hands, and in the ashes that lay about the skeleton to the depth of from two to six inches were scattered bits of charred wood and half-burnt bones, stone arrow-heads, stone axes, and rough stones, these last brought evidently from the beach of the river at some distance, where in a stratum of the bank, and there only in the neighborhood, are similar stones still found. All these missiles unquestionably had been hurled at the creature, whose gigantic strength, stimulated by pain and rage and fear, the torments of the flames, the shouts of the pursuers, the sharp wounds from their stone weapons, was not enough to extricate him from the slough into which his great weight had sunk him. There are in this case two considerations to be borne in mind. If man and the mastodon did not live at the same time, a discovery of their remains in the alleged relations is necessarily impossible. But there is no inherent improbability in the story if they were contemporaneous; so huge a beast might easily become mired in a swamp, and then be surrounded and put to death by the savages by such means as were at their command.1 The only remarkable thing about the incident would be that subsequent deposits of earth should have so completely covered these fossil remains, without disturbing them, that they could be exhumed in their original condition so long afterward.2 1 Savages are alike in all ages and countries. "The people," in the Lake region of Eastern Africa, says the great traveller, Livingstone, "employ these continuous or set-in rains for hunting the elephant, which gets bogged and sinks in from fifteen to eighteen inches in soft mud; then even he, the strong one, feels it difficult to escape.” — The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, p. 143. 2 See Article XXXV., Silliman's Journal, May, 1875, by James D. Dana; which is devoted to a discussion of this case. Professor Dana considers Koch's statement very doubtful," but his doubt is evidently as to Koch's truthfulness and character, and not as to any inherent improbability in such a discovery, as he says, "it is to be hoped that the geologists of the Missouri Geological Survey now in progress will succeed in settling the question positively." And on the essential point which alone gives the story any importance, he adds: "The contemporaneity claimed will probably be shown to be true for North America by future discoveries, if not already established; for Man existed in Europe long before the extinction of the American mastodon." |