from year to year, from century to century, from age to age, the incredibly thick ice sheet from the north and the glaciers from the mountains, kept moving and pressing farther south and out of the mountains in all directions. At last far toward the south of Europe, an arctic climate prevailed, a short warm summer, and many long months of bitter cold. Take just one illustration: The Rhone glacier which now stops short at the opening to the valley at the Rhone Glacier Hotel, extended down the bottom of the valley, joined the tremendous glacier from Mont Blanc, filled with solid ice all the region of the Lake of Geneva, reached the Jura Mountains with an ice thickness of three thousand feet, topped the Jura range and extended onward until it joined the glaciers beyond Lyons from the mountains of Auvergne. All the tropical flora and fauna necessarily had been destroyed or driven southward with the hippos and the saurians. Probably the great mass of living men all over Europe had passed away. The original hairy, prognathous, anthropoidal brute had been wiped out, even if he had not been exterminated merely by the approach of arctic cold.
To form some conception of what a social community would do in the presence of such a profound calamity, we may take a lesson from the beavers. They, too, had been living in Europe since early in the Tertiary Age. Conditions were so favorable that, at one time in that age, a giant beaver was developed of proportions as large as those of a grizzly bear. In a tropical climate they had no reason to develop their present peculiar genius. But with the advent of the Ice Age they found it necessary to bestir themselves if they intended to live. At least this is what they would have thought had they been capable of reflection. The beavers’ food is the root of a water plant and the bark of certain trees. They live in a gregarious way and dwell in permanent societies. Such a colony has survived, according to actual observation, for two hundred years.
The beaver in this Ice Age developed extraordinary engineering and building skill in order to overcome the wintry climate that threatened his existence. First he must have a home, and a home that was comparatively safe. He, although a rodent, lived much in the water and he had his rodent teeth with which to cut down trees and he had his digging front paws. He took a place in the bank and below the surface of lowest water in the stream and ran a tunnel into the bank, first horizontally and then upward, what miners call a “raise” or “upraise,” and at the top of the “raise” he excavated a large chamber, high enough to remain always above the level of high water in the stream. But at the same time this tunnel must be so placed that the water would not freeze down below the entrance to the tunnel, and thus cut off the beaver from his access to his food supply sunk to the bottom of the stream. In using engineering judgment he never failed in selection. He ran an opening for air from this room to the surface of the ground and covered the hole with sticks plastered together. This was a safe home in winter for most purposes. But later he learned to build an actual hut on top of the ground and plastered it together of sticks and mud. Access to this hut was through the tunnel. This dwelling, however, was not safe from a diving animal like the otter, which is one of the most voracious and predacious creatures known. If an otter entered the tunnel he could at leisure eat up the whole community. The beavers built a second tunnel giving another exit for the chamber, precisely as the miners have a main shaft and then another called the escape shaft.
The beavers must maintain a more or less fixed level of water in the stream. To do this they build a dam, starting it in the center of the stream, with a bunch of logs laid lengthwise in the stream and anchored to the bottom by means of stones and plastered clay. Gradually they build up their dam across the stream, plastered with mud on the upstream side and with a curve upstream. The curve toward the current is an astounding deduction. It gives strength to the dam. In course of time they exhaust the trees immediately adjacent to the stream, which furnish the bark they eat, so in the Ice Age they became hydraulic engineers, running canals back from the pond formed by their dam. These canals were run as truly as if done by a surveyor’s level, so that they always remained full of water. Thus the beavers could tap a fresh supply of bark by felling trees, and the canals furnished their means of transport. They carefully kept the canals free from weeds.
Most ingenious of all their acts is their felling of trees so as to make them fall at the precise place they should fall alongside the stream or canal. They stored their food supply at the bottom of the stream by sticking it into the mud or loading it down with rocks. How many unsuccessful experiments went to the development of these various instinctive habits, no one can say, but thus the beavers prepared themselves to defy the arctic winters. Like the ants, every beaver works like a beaver and their communities have “no guide, overseer or ruler”; and thus they have continued through the ages, although in a warm climate they have abandoned most of the labor imposed on them by a long winter. This instinct to avoid work seems to be ingrained even in the subconscious mind of men.
Man, who had a much better brain than the beaver, was certainly capable of just as much. Perhaps he was not entirely unprepared. The approach of the Ice Age was gradual, lasting over many thousands of years. The first advent of chilly weather must have taught men the necessity of preserving fire. There was no necessity for inventing fire. It was there to use. Certainly they had felt no need of its uses in a tropical climate. Then and there, at the advent of the cold, began man’s worship of fire and the cult of the sacred flame which must never be allowed to expire. True to his nature, man continued to worship the sacred flame, long after he had lost all necessity for maintaining a fire. At this time of the long approach of cold some one of humankind had found that a cutting edge, an actual weapon, could be fashioned by chipping flint. Slowly the flint knife, the flint-headed spear or javelin, and the flint axe came into use. These inventions made invincible weapons; they passed from tribe to tribe until all men were living in what is called the Old Stone Age, consisting of the Eolithic and Paleolithic ages. Still later, when men lived in swamps or beside lakes, came the bone harpoon for spearing fish or other animals. The bow and arrow was an invention of a much later time, for that invention required a complicated sort of ingenuity.
Man had now gained the beginning of his mastery over the wild beast and had begun to alter the course of nature. Just what is the connection between the Ice Age and the development of flint weapons archaeology has not certainly told us, but we know that the two phenomena are parallel. How far men had been carnivorous animals from the beginning we cannot say, but the human dentition, which is a compromise between that of a herbivore and that of a carnivore, had not changed since man’s advent. Nor can we say whether human beings were originally fighting animals; but the proof points to their peaceful character. From the beginning they were both flesh-eating and plant-eating animals. But as soon as they became hunters of the wild beast, they would rapidly develop a fighting propensity. The general effect would be to strengthen the race with a better food supply, to give men courage and skill, and also would enable them to endure a harsher climate by reason of the covering of the body with the skins of their game. The naked brutes had begun to wear some kind of clothing.
Another change was not at first of so much importance, but it was to become so. Men naturally crept under available shelter and became cave dwellers. They were incapable of creating an artificial kind of dwelling. The use of fire enabled them to fight off the cold while sheltered in the cave, but it took men ages to learn the lesson that ants had acquired, of keeping their dwellings clean. The dwelling in caves threw men closer together. There was more communion among them and a common place to resort as a fixed abode. The development of an esthetic instinct will be noticed later. In this hunting stage language was developed, and was steadily improved. The development of spoken speech continued for countless years before a written speech was devised.
The Glacial Age gave mankind a thorough training before it relaxed its stern discipline. The ice sheets of tremendous thickness continued to advance and recede. A tropical climate would return to Europe and then the ice would again advance. Four times at least this change took place. And always came the cold and cruel winters, the failure of the food supply, the coming of famine, the dying women and children. A vivid picture of such a life is drawn in Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Farther and farther to the south the mass of men were driven. During these changes new races appeared. Many causes may have contributed to this result in the long ages. Mixing of tribes or absorption of one tribe in another, cold and want, failure of
