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and terrible inundations, followed by the upheaval of mountains accompanied by volcanic eruptions. Traditions whose traces recur in Mexico, in Central America, in Peru, and in Bolivia, suggest even the idea that man existed in these different countries at the time of the gigantic upheaval of the Andes, and that he has retained the memory of it.'

Thus all the proofs that we have collected together touching the great age of the human race, and those which scientific men of every nationality are daily collecting, are it is true of unequal value, but all are in perfect agreement, and most of them are checked by geologists of the first rank, and judges whose competence cannot be surpassed, among whom is the eminent palæontologist, M. Ed. Lartet. He says upon this subject, "The truth so long contested, that of the co-existence of man with the great extinct species (elephas primigenius, rhinoceros tichorhinus, hyana spelaa, ursus spelaus, &c.), appears to me to be henceforward unassailable and definitely conquered by science.' ('Cavernes du Périgord,' p. 35.)

We repeat then, with the real founder of archæology, 'God is eternal, but man is old indeed,' even in the New World. Such is the logical conclusion of the first part of this work.

PART II.

PRIMITIVE CIVILISATION.

CHAPTER I.

DOMESTIC LIFE.

I. THE ORIGIN OF THE USE OF FIRE.

FIRE, the common source of heat, light, and life, the active agent in numberless industries, and above all in the working of metals, is beyond question one of the most precious conquests which man has made from nature. Its discovery

was more than a benefit; it was a giant stride forward in the path of civilisation. With the use of fire society arose, family life and all the sacred joys of the domestic hearth; art and industry were born, with all the wonders which they have produced and are daily producing. Hence it is easy to understand that fire has been and still is among a great many nations the object of a special worship (the priests of Baal, the Brahmins of India, the vestal virgins, the priestesses of the sun in Peru, are a few examples among many), and that it has often figured in the religious and funeral rites of nations remote from each other both in time and space; for example, the Chaldeans, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Hindus, Peruvians, Mexicans, &c. But how and at what epoch did man arrive at this great discovery, without which it is difficult to corceive the possibility of his various arts, nay of his very existence? Did he steal fire from heaven, as the Indian and Hellenic myths tell us; or, as other legends say, did he

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turn to account the spontaneous burning of the forests, the rubbing of two dry branches violently agitated by the wind; or, lastly, did he from the very beginning endeavour to find one of those simple and practical means employed at the present day by certain savage or half-civilised tribes to procure themselves the fire necessary to daily life?

In spite of a number of contrary assertions, however far we go back in the history of man we always find him in possession of fire. The fable of Prometheus, who went to seek it on Olympus itself, is no other than the Vedic myth which represents the god Agni, or the celestial fire, in Latin Ignis, as hidden in a casket whence Matarichvan forced him to come forth, and presented him to Manou the first man, or to Brighu the brilliant, father of the priestly family of that name.

The name of Prometheus himself is of Vedic origin, and recalls the process employed by the ancient Brahmins to obtain the sacred fire. They used for this purpose a stick which they called matha or pramatha, the prefix pra adding the idea of robbing by force to that contained in the root matha of the verb mathâmi or manthnami, to produce by friction. Prometheus is he who discovers fire, brings it from its hiding place and communicates it to men. From Pramanthâ or Prâmâthyus, he who hollows by friction, who steals fire, the transition is easy and natural; and there is but a step from the Hindu Prâmâthyus to the Greek Prometheus, who stole the fire from heaven to kindle the spark of life in the man of clay.

The lighting stick or pramantha was furnished with a cord of hemp twisted with cow's hair, and by means of this cord rolled round the upper part, the priest of Brahma imparted to it a rotatory motion alternately from left to right, and from right to left. The stick was turned in a little hollow formed at the point of intersection of two pieces of wood placed one above the other in the form of a cross, and of which the extremities bent at right angles were firmly fixed by four bronze nails. The whole apparatus

was called Swastika.' The father of the sacred fire bore the name of Twastri, that is, the divine carpenter, who made the Swastika, and the Pramantha whose friction produced the divine child Agni, in Latin Ignis. His mother was named Maya. He himself was styled Akta (anointed, Xploròs) after the priests had poured upon his head the spirituous Sôma, and on his body butter purified by sacrifice.

In his interesting work upon the origin of fire ('Die Herabkunft des Feuers') Adalbert Kühn always designates the and this other similar sign by the name of arani, and he considers them both as the principal religious symbols of our Aryan ancestors. He adds: "This process of kindling fire naturally led man to the idea of sexual reproduction. This is what we see in a hymn of the Rigveda where the Pramanthâ evidently represents the male, and in which the dimensions of the Arani and of its various parts are accurately given and the exact spot indicated on which the pramanthâ should be placed in order to obtain the desired result.'

The legend of which we have just spoken recurs in the Zend-Avesta, or sacred book of the Persians, and in the Vedic hymns of Hindustan, under its double form at once material and metaphysical. But the authors of these hymns bear witness that this same legend had long before their time been symbolised in a great national worship, whose founder, Rhibu, is none other than Orpheus himself. This tradition, common to the Greeks, Hindus, and Persians, carries us back to those early times when the branches

or

It is a remarkable fact that the Swastica of India occurs often in these two forms, upon the fusaïoles or terra-cotta discs found in such abundance by Dr. Schliemann under the ruins of ancient Troy. Hence the natural conclusion that the Trojans were of Aryan race. See Heinrich Schliemann, Trojanische Alterthümer, and Emile Burnouf, La science des Religions. The close resemblance which exists between certain ceremonies of the worship of Agni and certain rites of the Catholic religion may also be explained, at least to a certain extent, by their common origin. Agni, in the condition of Akta or anointed, is suggestive of Christ; Maya, Mary His mother; Twastri, Saint Joseph, the carpenter of the Bible.

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of this yet undivided stock still wandered on the banks of the Oxus.

In his Researches on the Early History of Mankind,' Tylor gives valuable details respecting the invention of fire, and the various means employed in every age to procure it. The primitive method seems to have been, in his opinion, the friction of two pieces of dry wood one against the other; but this process improved with the lapse of time, and in proportion to the degree of ingenuity of the

peoples by whom it was adopted. Thus in the first place the friction was produced by means of a stick moved rapidly backwards and forwards upon a piece of soft dry wood placed upon the ground. This method is employed by the savages of Tahiti, New Zealand, the Sandwich Islands, Timor, &c. This process is named stick and groove (see fig. 65) by Tylor, as opposed to the fire drill which is far more generally used (figs. 66, 67, and 68.) In its simplest form the fire drill consists of a stick of which