Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

The Relics of Man preserved by the Earth give his — most Permanent Record

The Relics of Man preserved by the Earth give his
most Permanent Record

(1) By history we generally mean the written annals of the races and nations of men; but that is the most ephemeral of all records. A few centuries will see the best of our books the victim of paper-destroying insect and vegetable parasites; whilst a few thousand years will accomplish the decay of the toughest parchment.

(2) We forget that there is a record of man's movements and developments far more enduring than anything he can write or print. It is the record kept by the fingers of the wind on the bosom of the earth. A city is deserted, and year in year out the sand is blown across its features, till at last it vanishes beneath a softly rounded hill. And some mounds like that of Hissarlik on the Plains of Troy sectioned by Dr. Schliemann, have been found the palimpsest or re-written record of half a dozen or more civilisations, each unconscious of the time-obliterated foot-prints of those that have gone before it.

(3) There is no historian like Mother Earth, that, with page 2her fitful helpers, the elements, keeps silently within her bosom the memory of millions of years. Long before man appeared she was treasuring up ineffaceably in the rocks the annals of the evolution of her children; and the geologist, once her Benjamin, man, had begun to penetrate beneath the surface in search of metals and coal, sought curiously for time and order in the rocks and their records; whilst the anthropologist found traces of man tens of thousands of years before the date at which his own legends placed his origin. Find after find has pushed back the date from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. And the discovery of a skull, an upper molar tooth and a thighbone that are distinctly human, in a Tertiary or early Quaternary bed in East Java has pushed it back into nearly a million years ago.

(4) But the traces of man's work in cave-dwelling and rudely chipped flint and spearhead take us into the hundreds of thousands of years, to what is called the Quaternary epoch, the last geological age of the earth, the age in which all the alluvial deposits have been formed; whilst the polished stone weapons and implements of neolithic man, or man of the new stone age, take us no farther back than tens of thousands of years.