BOOKS.

PREHISTORIC MAN.* Wa have nowhere seen it stated that objection was publicly made to Sir John Lubbock during his recent candidature for the represen- tation of West Kent on account of his new book on Prehistoric Times. The zeal even of the Conservative agent, the overbold Mr. Lewis, though it carried him almost to the kicking point, failed to carry him as far as that. And the electors of Buteshire, who once rejected Mr. Lamont, have at this election accepted him, in spite of his profession of belief in Mr. Darwin's views as to the " Origin of Species," so that it is superfluous to deprecate the making of attempts to represent a man's scientific opinions as dis- qualifying him for political life. But whilst we avoid this fallacy, let us be careful not to fall into another, which would teach us that an entrance into the outer world of politics is necessarily fatal to the inner scientific life. Indeed for the ethnologist, and especially for the archaeological ethnologist, no study can be more suggestive than the study of man during the period of elections. The behaviour of our own savages on the nomination and polling days will make it a much easier matter to reproduce in imagina- tion the demeanour and comportment of prehistoric roughs ; the rickety hustings and the swaying, surging mob beneath them, will illustrate the precarious nature of the platforms on which dwelt the Swiss Lacustrians, whilst the efforts of a drunken ruffian with

• Prehistoric Tines, as Itatrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and C145l01114 of Modern Samna. By John Lubbock, FAS., Vice-President of the Linutesn Society, Fellow of the Geological, Zoological, and other Societies, and President of the Etbnolog'eal Society. Loudon: Williams and Norg.ite. 1565.

a stubborn paving stone will throw great light on the first attempts which man made at fashioning flints. But without descending further to particulars, we think the names of Sir W. Raleigh, of Sir G. C. Lewis, and of Colonel Mute are sufficient illustrations of our position, that familiarity with the actual business of the world gives a reality and manliness to the writings of a statesman or politician which is sometimes missing in disquisitions written on the same subjects by men who are pure specialists.

There is no need to waste words about Sir John Lubbock's scientific claims on our attention, when he writes on such a subject as prehistoric times. He has long ago won a reputation as an anatomist and physiologist, and of the many sciences which are ancillary to archaeological ethnology, there are none of such vital importance to it as the two which are nowadays jointly named biological.

In his work now before us we have the relics of ancient so illus- trated by the actualities of modern savagery, as to present us with a moving diorama of those "old, unhappy, far-off times" of Stone and Bronze. But besides fulfilling this, its object and the promise of its title-page, the book devotes two entire chapters to the con- siderationof the question of the "Antiquity of Man ;" and in a third, the last in order but not least in importance in the volume, we find Sir John Lubbock speculating, firstly, as to the way in which man first became susceptible of civilization ; and, secondly, as to the prospects of attainment by our race of a grade of earthly happi- ness such as is ordinarily called Utopian. And we are informed that the principle which has guided our author in both his lines of research, and aided his vision alike in looking forwards and in looking backwards, is the vera causa set forth so clearly by the now world-famous Darwin. He writes thus at p. 481 :—

" The great principle of Natural Selection, which is to biology what the law of gravitation is to astronomy, not only throws an unexpected light on the past, but illuminates the future with hope ; nor can I but feel surprised that a theory which thus teaches us humility for the past, faith in the present, and hope for the future, should have been regarded as opposed to the principles of Christianity or the interests of true religion."

The first two chapters of the book are prudently devoted to the work of bringing before us, not the over-distant Stone period, but the age of Bronze, which a smaller effort of imagination enables us to reproduce for ourselves. In these chapters Sir John Lub- bock has devoted some space and labour to the proving agaiust Mr. Wright that bronze implements denote a pre-Roman period. This, we think, was a little superfluous. In a letter in the Philosophical Transactions for 1825, addressed to Sir H. Davy by his brother, we have given us an account of a Corcyrwan bronze helmet which might have lain at the bottom of the sea since the Peloponnesian war, but which had been so protected by the electro-chemistry of its alloy nature that the " mineralizing process had penetrated very little into the substance of the helmet, and the metal was found bright beneath." Now five per cent., we make bold to say, of the gentlemen who have just voted against Mr.

Gladstone at Oxford will recollect the line from the first Georgic, " Exesa inveniet scabra rubigine pile!"

and of them some yet smaller per-centage might with much trouble be brought to see that this line shows that the Roman javelin could not have been made of bronze. Sir John Lubbock, however, is less superfluous, though not less successful, in defending Pytheas, of whom those gentlemen have never heard, against Sir G. C. Lewis, whose works they have never read.

Leaving the Bronze period, to which Homer and Hesiol wit- ness, we ascend to the Stone ages, of the hearth and cave life of the earlier periods of which .ZEschylus seems somehow to have heard or divined the story, if we may guess at least from certain lines, 447 et seq., of his extant Prometheus. The distinction between the chipped or multifacetted flint and the ground or polished flint epochs, is considered by our author to be sufficiently well established to justify the introduction of the phrases " Palma- lithic " and " Neolithic " periods. Of the shapes and forms sup- posed to be characteristic of each very abundant and excellent illustrations are given.

With the different localities, now so familiar to our ears, of the valley of the Somme, of the Swiss Lake habitations, and the Danish Kjokkenmiiddings, Sir John Lubbock has made it his business to gain an actual ocular and manual acquaintance. It is perhaps to the sympathy which our author, in common with most of his countrymen, feels for the inhabitants of evil-intreated Denmark, that we owe the peculiarly vivid colours of the chapter on the " Shell Mounds." Here we have its early inhabitants brought before our eyes as if by photography (p. 188) :—

"Carrying our imagination back into the past, we see before us, on the low shores of the Danish Archipelago, a race of small men, with

heavy, overhanging brows, round heads, faces probably much like those of the present Laplanders. As they must evidently have had some pro- tection from the weather, it is most probable that they lived in tents made of skins. The total absence of metal is the Kjokkenmoldings proves that they had not yet any weapons except those made of wood, stone, horn, and bone. Their principal food must have consisted of shell fish, but they were able to catch fish, and often varied their diet by game caught in hunting. It is perhaps not uncharitable to conclude that when their hunters were unusually successful, the whole com- munity gorged itself with food, as is the case with many savage races at the present time. It is evident that marrow was considered a great delicacy, for every single bone which contained any was split open hi the manner beat adapted to extract the precious morsel. We have already seen that the mound builders were regular settlers, and not mere summer visitors, and on the whole they seem to have lived in very much the same manner as the Tierra del Fuegians, who dwell on the coast, feed principally on shell fish, and have the dog as their only domestic animal."

Three entire chapters are devoted to the history of "Modern Savagery," which is made in this work, as it was in the museum of the late lamented Mr. Christy, to throw the most valuable as well as the least expected lights on the hearth, or rather on the hut, cave, and lacustrine life of our remote and unsung ancestors. The subject of savage life is a delicate and dangerous one, and under coarse manipulation it readily becomes revolting. "By a selec- tion of instances," says Dr. Livingstone, " it would not be difficult to make such people appear excessively good or uncommonly bad." Forster, the companion of Captain Cook, adopted the former of these onesided views, perhaps because in the days of Louis XV. it would have been difficult to contrast Tahiti, even as we have it de- depicted in the poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, to disadvantage with the purlieus of the palace and the park of the most Christian King. And indeed, though ninety years and more have rolled away since those evil days, it is possible even now to say that the cruelty of a French physiologist can match anything which a savage either endures or inflicts in the way of torture, that the squalor of English pea- santry as described by Dr. Hunter, as denied by Mr. Henley, and as witnessed by ourselves, is less tolerable than similar destitution under more genial suns, and that the disclosures of our Divorce Court are more loathsome than the lax connubial relations of absolute barbarians. In every country there are moral turkey buzzards, and they make no secret of their discovery of the carrion on which they feed. Of the other equally false, and perhaps more than equally odious, method of regarding savage life, there are always many advocates to be found, the chambers of whose imagery may be compared to the caves of our Troglodytic fore- fathers or the huts of the modern Esquiinaux, the floors of which were and are covered with dead animals' bones and all un- cleanness. The man who taunts a blind man with his blindness is ordinarily considered to be a brute, or indeed something worse.

" Sordidus et lusco qui possit dicere, Lusce !'"

—and a man who exults in describing the moral degradation of his fellow-men is to the full as vile as he. Both these most serious errors Sir John Lubbock avoids. At p. 465 he says :—

" After making every possible allowance for savages, it must, I think, be admitted that they are inferior morally as well as in other respects to the more civilized races. There is indeed no atrocious crime nor vice recorded by any traveller which might not be paralleled in Europe, but that which is with us the exception is with them the rule, that which with us is condemned by the general verdict of society, and is confined to the uneducated and vicious, is amongst savages passed over almost without condemnation, and often treated as a matter of course."

We have heard that a distinguished sceptic summed up the results of a journey into heathendom in the plain words, " After all, the Christian is the best;" and we are sure that there isno Indian judge of much experience, scarcely indeed even a " Haileybury irregular" with none at all, who will not accept Henry Martyn's quotation, "The dirt came out," as the truest description of what is seen on opening into the interior of modern pagan life. It is for the legitimate purpose of being opposed to and compared with the relics of ancient prehistoric savages that the details of life such as this are collected by our author ; to those dead bones they impart a life, a ghastly life, it is true, of physical struggle and moral degradation, but a life notwithstanding.

With the last sentences of his chapter on " American Archaeo- logy" we may fitly close this notice of Sir John Lubbock's most valuable volume. They are curious and interesting, as showing how completely the events of this year 1865, in which our author writes, and in which he could and does quote Fitzroy, Christy, and Sir John Richardson as living authors, have outrun and run counter to the anticipations even of enlightened and benevolent men :--

" If, however, the facts above recorded justify the conclusion that parts at least of North America once supported a numerous and agri- cultural population, then we c.innot but ask,—what fatal cause destroyed this earlier civilization ? Why were these fortifications for- saken ?—these cities in ruins ? How were the populous nations which once inhabited the rich American valleys reduced to the poor tribes of savages which the Europeans found there ? Did the North and South once before rise up in arms against one another ? Did the terrible. appellation of the Dark and Bloody Land,' applied to Kentucky, com- memorate these ancient wars ? Absit omen! Let us hope that our kinsmen in America may yet pause, ere they in like manner sacrifice a common prosperity to a mutual hatred."