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Schoolboys have been taught from their earliest years that Columbus discovered America. Few events in prehistoric times seem more probable now than that Columbus was not the first to discover it.
The past, in which no doubt men strove and hoped, hated and loved and feared, had left the just recognisable ruins of some castles and the causeway built by an unknown hermit or the prehistoric lake-dwellers. A few thatched cabins, faintly smoking, and here and there a cairn of stones gathered laboriously off the wretched fields, were the evidences of present activity.
Perhaps the most characteristic artistic feature displayed in the pipe sculpture of the Mound-Builders, as has been well pointed out by Wilson, in his Prehistoric Man, is the tendency exhibited toward the imitation of natural objects, especially birds and animals, a remark, it may be said in passing, which applies with almost equal truth to the art productions generally of the present Indians throughout the length and breadth of North America.
It was not like the work of some of earth's prehistoric men, who already knew fire and were merely looking up fresh materials; it was a quest in which an idea, an idea given in a vision, was the sole driving force.
Among the peasantry of the north-east of Scotland the prehistoric weapons called celts went by the name of "thunderbolts" and were coveted as the sure bringers of success, always provided that they were not allowed to fall to the ground.
"The third stratum, the prehistoric figures, surmounting the piers of the arcade, also the first group over the tower entrance, show earliest forms of human, animal, reptile and bird life, symbolizing the Stone Age Period.
In this book he gives us a few remarks on the origin of the prehistoric track-way which ran from Winchester to Canterbury, an itinerary as exact as research can make it, and a little discourse on the reasons why it is both pious and pleasant to pursue such knowledge.
One must therefore be guarded against wild talk about prehistoric man in connection with these rock dwellings, which in many cases were used as fortresses during the three hundred years' struggle between the English and French in Aquitaine. My waterfaring back to Les Eyzies was far easier than the voyage up-stream.
In Egypt Professor Petrie found deposits of prehistoric Ægean pottery in the Delta, the Fayum, and even in Middle Egypt, proving that this civilization, whatever its origin, had been in contact with the ancient civilization of the Nile Valley, while even in the Western Mediterranean, in Sicily particularly, in Italy, Sardinia, and Spain, finds, less plentiful, but quite unmistakable, bore witness to the wide diffusion of Mycenæan culture.
"See the ruins on that bluff," he exclaimed; "those steep sides must have been washed by a great river in the prehistoric times. That was the fortress. Farther down lay the city. There are the dismantled ramparts; why, there's the very coping of a portico still intact! Don't you see three broken pillars lying beside their pedestals?
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