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Updated: May 23, 2025
Illus., plans. The Discovery of Pre-Historic Human Remains near Cuzco, Peru. American Journal of Science, XXXIII, No. 196, 297-305, April, 1912. Illus., maps. A Search for the Last Inca Capital. Harper's Magazine, CXXV, 696-705, October, 1912. Illus. The Discovery of Machu Picchu. Ibid., CXXVI, 709-719, April, 1913. Illus. In the Wonderland of Peru.
I am only saying that these instincts, if they ever existed, DID pass away that there was a period; probably an immense period as we reckon time in human history, when pre-historic men lived much as savages live now, without any important aids and helps. The proofs of this are to be found in the great works of Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Tylor, of which I just now spoke.
Man is a many-sided being; so there is no help for it if anthropology also is many-sided. For one thing, he must sit at the feet of those whose particular concern is with pre-historic man. It is well to begin here, since thus will the glamour of the subject sink into his soul at the start.
The form differs from the content, history differs from the reality of which it is the history, and morality is more than the story of its vicissitudes, of its gradual, painful development from the pre-historic times to our own. What, then, is morality in se apart from its history?
Maybe: man may, after some terrible cataclysm, learn to strive towards a healthy animalism, may grow from a tolerable animal into a savage, from a savage into a barbarian, and so on; and some thousands of years hence he may be beginning once more those arts which we have now lost, and be carving interlacements like the New Zealanders, or scratching forms of animals on their cleaned blade-bones, like the pre-historic men of the drift.
It is a lunatic fancy, possible only to men of a certain class, which in our time does not multiply. Another hypothesis, much less improbable, though not satisfactory, is that civilization was brought to America in ancient times by the Malays. There was a great island empire of the Malays, whose history extended far back into pre-historic times, how far back can not now be known.
The origin of the poems was distributed among the clouds of pre-historic imagination; and instead of a single inspired Homer for their author, we were required to believe in some extraordinary spontaneous generation, or in some collective genius of an age which ignorance had personified. But the person of a poet has been found more difficult of elimination than a mere fact of history.
When taken in hand by the police of that city they solemnly declared that they had "come to Wisconsin to shoot Injuns." Much could be said of the love of fire which has not yet surrendered all of its charm for even the most unromantic adult. The mystic thrill that went through the unspoiled nerves of pre-historic man and filled his mind with awe is with us still.
The historian will find aliment less abundant. A century or two of Caucasian life in America is but a thing of yesterday to him, and, though far from uninstructive, is but an offshoot from modern European annals. For all that, he finds himself on our soil in presence of an antiquity which remains to be explored, and which clamors to be rescued from the domain of the pre-historic.
The artificial mound on which the Round Tower stands may or may not be pre-historic. The slopes of the hill were inhabited, like nearly all our English sites, by the Romans, and by the savages before and after the Romans; but the welter of the Saxon dark ages did not use this abrupt elevation for a stronghold.
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