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To understand this apostrophe of my uncle’s, made to absent French
savants, it will be necessary to allude to an event of high importance in a
palæontological point of view, which had occurred a little while before our
departure.
On the 28th of March, 1863, some excavators working under the direction
of M. Boucher de Perthes, in the stone quarries of Moulin Quignon, near
Abbeville, in the department of Somme, found a human jawbone fourteen feet
beneath the surface. It was the first fossil of this nature that had ever been
brought to light. Not far distant were found stone hatchets and flint
arrow-heads stained and encased by lapse of time with a uniform coat of rust.
The noise of this discovery was very great, not in France alone, but in
England and in Germany. Several savants of the French Institute, and amongst
them MM. Milne-Edwards and de Quatrefages, saw at once the importance of this
discovery, proved to demonstration the genuineness of the bone in question, and
became the most ardent defendants in what the English called this ‘trial
of a jawbone.’ To the geologists of the United Kingdom, who believed in
the certainty of the fact — Messrs. Falconer, Busk, Carpenter, and others
— scientific Germans were soon joined, and amongst them the forwardest,
the most fiery, and the most enthusiastic, was my uncle Liedenbrock.
Therefore the genuineness of a fossil human relic of the quaternary
period seemed to be incontestably proved and admitted.
It is true that this theory met with a most obstinate opponent in M.
Elie de Beaumont. This high authority maintained that the soil of Moulin
Quignon was not diluvial at all, but was of much more recent formation; and, agreeing
in that with Cuvier, he refused to admit that the human species could be
contemporary with the animals of the quaternary period. My uncle Liedenbrock,
along with the great body of the geologists, had maintained his ground,
disputed, and argued, until M. Elie de Beaumont stood almost alone in his
opinion.
We knew all these details, but we were not aware that since our
departure the question had advanced to farther stages. Other similar
maxillaries, though belonging to individuals of various types and different
nations, were found in the loose grey soil of certain grottoes in France,
Switzerland, and Belgium, as well as weapons, tools, earthen utensils, bones of
children and adults. The existence therefore of man in the quaternary period
seemed to become daily more certain.
Nor was this all. Fresh discoveries of remains in the pleiocene
formation had emboldened other geologists to refer back the human species to a
higher antiquity still. It is true that these remains were not human bones, but
objects bearing the traces of his handiwork, such as fossil leg-bones of
animals, sculptured and carved evidently by the hand of man.
Thus, at one bound, the record of the existence of man receded far back
into the history of the ages past; he was a predecessor of the mastodon; he was
a contemporary of the southern elephant; he lived a hundred thousand years ago,
when, according to geologists, the pleiocene formation was in progress.
Such then was the state of palæontological science, and what we knew of
it was sufficient to explain our behaviour in the presence of this stupendous
Golgotha. Any one may now understand the frenzied excitement of my uncle, when,
twenty yards farther on, he found himself face to face with a primitive man!
It was a perfectly recognisable human body. Had some particular soil,
like that of the cemetery St. Michel, at Bordeaux, preserved it thus for so
many ages? It might be so. But this dried corpse, with its parchment-like skin
drawn tightly over the bony frame, the limbs still preserving their shape,
sound teeth, abundant hair, and finger and toe nails of frightful length, this
desiccated mummy startled us by appearing just as it had lived countless ages
ago. I stood mute before this apparition of remote antiquity. My uncle, usually
so garrulous, was struck dumb likewise. We raised the body. We stood it up
against a rock. It seemed to stare at us out of its empty orbits. We sounded
with our knuckles his hollow frame.
After some moments’ silence the Professor was himself again. Otto
Liedenbrock, yielding to his nature, forgot all the circumstances of our
eventful journey, forgot where we were standing, forgot the vaulted cavern
which contained us. No doubt he was in mind back again in his Johannæum,
holding forth to his pupils, for he assumed his learned air; and addressing
himself to an imaginary audience, he proceeded thus:
“Gentlemen, I have the honour to introduce to you a man of the
quaternary or post-tertiary system. Eminent geologists have denied his
existence, others no less eminent have affirmed it. The St. Thomases of
palæontology, if they were here, might now touch him with their fingers, and
would be obliged to acknowledge their error. I am quite aware that science has
to be on its guard with discoveries of this kind. I know what capital
enterprising individuals like Barnum have made out of fossil men. I have heard
the tale of the kneepan of Ajax, the pretended body of Orestes claimed to have
been found by the Spartans, and of the body of Asterius, ten cubits long, of
which Pausanias speaks. I have read the reports of the skeleton of Trapani,
found in the fourteenth century, and which was at the time identified as that
of Polyphemus; and the history of the giant unearthed in the sixteenth century
near Palermo. You know as well as I do, gentlemen, the analysis made at Lucerne
in 1577 of those huge bones which the celebrated Dr. Felix Plater affirmed to
be those of a giant nineteen feet high. I have gone through the treatises of
Cassanion, and all those memoirs, pamphlets, answers, and rejoinders published
respecting the skeleton of Teutobochus, the invader of Gaul, dug out of a
sandpit in the Dauphiné, in 1613. In the eighteenth century I would have stood
up for Scheuchzer’s pre-adamite man against Peter Campet. I have perused
a writing, entitled Gigan —”
Here my uncle’s unfortunate infirmity met him — that of
being unable in public to pronounce hard words.
“The pamphlet entitled Gigan —”
He could get no further.
“Giganteo —”
It was not to be done. The unlucky word would not come out. At the
Johannæum there would have been a laugh.
“Gigantosteologie,” at last the Professor burst out, between
two words which I shall not record here.
Then rushing on with renewed vigour, and with great animation:
“Yes, gentlemen, I know all these things, and more. I know that
Cuvier and Blumenbach have recognised in these bones nothing more remarkable
than the bones of the mammoth and other mammals of the post-tertiary period. But
in the presence of this specimen to doubt would be to insult science. There
stands the body! You may see it, touch it. It is not a mere skeleton; it is an
entire body, preserved for a purely anthropological end and purpose.”
I was good enough not to contradict this startling assertion.
“If I could only wash it in a solution of sulphuric acid,”
pursued my uncle, “I should be able to clear it from all the earthy
particles and the shells which are incrusted about it. But I do not possess
that valuable solvent. Yet, such as it is, the body shall tell us its own
wonderful story.”
Here the Professor laid hold of the fossil skeleton, and handled it with
the skill of a dexterous showman.
“You see,” he said, “that it is not six feet long, and
that we are still separated by a long interval from the pretended race of
giants. As for the family to which it belongs, it is evidently Caucasian. It is
the white race, our own. The skull of this fossil is a regular oval, or rather
ovoid. It exhibits no prominent cheekbones, no projecting jaws. It presents no
appearance of that prognathism which diminishes the facial angle. [1] Measure
that angle. It is nearly ninety degrees. But I will go further in my
deductions, and I will affirm that this specimen of the human family is of the
Japhetic race, which has since spread from the Indies to the Atlantic. Don’t
smile, gentlemen.”
Nobody was smiling; but the learned Professor was frequently disturbed
by the broad smiles provoked by his learned eccentricities.
“Yes,” he pursued with animation, “this is a fossil
man, the contemporary of the mastodons whose remains fill this amphitheatre. But
if you ask me how he came there, how those strata on which he lay slipped down
into this enormous hollow in the globe, I confess I cannot answer that
question. No doubt in the post-tertiary period considerable commotions were
still disturbing the crust of the earth. The long-continued cooling of the
globe produced chasms, fissures, clefts, and faults, into which, very probably,
portions of the upper earth may have fallen. I make no rash assertions; but
there is the man surrounded by his own works, by hatchets, by flint
arrow-heads, which are the characteristics of the stone age. And unless he came
here, like myself, as a tourist on a visit and as a pioneer of science, I can
entertain no doubt of the authenticity of his remote origin.”
[1] The facial angle is formed by two lines, one touching the brow and
the front teeth, the other from the orifice of the ear to the lower line of the
nostrils. The greater this angle, the higher intelligence denoted by the
formation of the skull. Prognathism is that projection of the jaw-bones which
sharpens or lessons this angle, and which is illustrated in the negro
countenance and in the lowest savages.
The Professor ceased to speak, and the audience broke out into loud and
unanimous applause. For of course my uncle was right, and wiser men than his
nephew would have had some trouble to refute his statements.
Another remarkable thing. This fossil body was not the only one in this
immense catacomb. We came upon other bodies at every step amongst this mortal
dust, and my uncle might select the most curious of these specimens to demolish
the incredulity of sceptics.
In fact it was a wonderful spectacle, that of these generations of men
and animals commingled in a common cemetery. Then one very serious question
arose presently which we scarcely dared to suggest. Had all those creatures
slided through a great fissure in the crust of the earth, down to the shores of
the Liedenbrock sea, when they were dead and turning to dust, or had they lived
and grown and died here in this subterranean world under a false sky, just like
inhabitants of the upper earth? Until the present time we had seen alive only
marine monsters and fishes. Might not some living man, some native of the
abyss, be yet a wanderer below on this desert strand?
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