The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. Sir Daniel Wilson
informs us (lib. vii. cap. 56), that it was Pyrodes, the son of Cilix, who first devised the way to strike fire out of flint; “A myth,” says Sir John Evans, “which seems to point to the use of silex and pyrites (from πῦρ) rather than of steel.” In reality the flint and pyrites lie together in the same lower strata of the chalk. As the ancient flint-miners sunk their pits in search of the levels where the flint abounds they would meet with frequent nodules of pyrites. The first grand discovery of the fire-producer may have resulted from the use of the pyrites as a mere hammer-stone to break up the larger flints.
But whatever was the source of this all-important discovery, it dates among the earliest manifestations of human intelligence. Nodules of iron pyrites have been found in the caves of France and Belgium, among remains pertaining to the Palæolithic age, and are among the most interesting disclosures of the greatly more modern, though still prehistoric age of the barrows and cairns of the Allophylian period of Britain, and of Western Europe generally. Sir R. C. Hoare records the finding, among the contents of a cinerary urn, in a Wiltshire barrow, “chipped flints prepared for arrow heads, a long piece of flint, and a pyrites, both evidently smoothed by usage.”[11] More recent explorers, apprised of the significance of such discoveries, have noted the presence of nodules of pyrites, accompanying the personal ornaments and weapons occurring in graves of the same age: deposited there either as tokens of regard, or more probably with a vague idea of their utility to the dead in the life beyond the grave. In a communication to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on a group of stone cists disclosed, in 1879, on the farm of Teinside, Teviotdale, Lord Rosehill thus describes part of the contents of one of them. “It was filled with dark-coloured earth, mixed with charcoal; and closely intermingled in every part with fragments of bones which had been exposed to the action of fire.” A broken urn lay about ten inches from the top. “Close to the urn was a rounded piece of metallic-looking substance, which appears to be ‘radiated iron pyrites,’ and which,” adds Lord Rosehill, “I have myself discovered in several interments.”[12] More recently, in 1883, Major Colin Mackenzie reported to the same Society the discovery of a cist and urn in the Black Isle, Ross-shire.[13] He thus proceeds: “Whilst gathering together the broken pieces of the urn, a round-nosed flint-flake or scraper, chipped at the edges, was found amongst the debris, and proved to have a bluish tinge, as if it had been subjected to the action of fire. Close beside it there was found a round piece of iron pyrites, flat on one side, in shape somewhat like the half of an egg, divided lengthways, only smaller. Dr. Joseph Anderson at once recognised this as forming, along with the solitary flint, nothing less than a prehistoric ‘strike-light’ apparatus.”[14] No flint is procurable in the locality; and after the closest search, no other flint implement or flake was found on the site. In communicating this interesting discovery to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Major Mackenzie reviewed the disclosures of this class in Great Britain, so far as they had been noted by Hoare, Borlase, Bateman, Greenwell and Evans, furnishing a tabulated statement of eleven examples, chiefly found in barrows, and ranging over an area extending from Cornwall to Ross-shire; and to those additions have since been made. He draws attention to their occurrence in localities which produce neither pyrites nor flint. But with the former, at least, this need not surprise us. The prized and easily transported pyrites may be looked for in any ancient barrow or sepulchral deposit, and has probably in many cases passed unnoted before its significance was understood. Now that this is fully appreciated, it is seen to have been in use from the early stages of primitive art: the very dawn of science; and doubtless the pyrites and flint found in localities remote from those where they occur as natural products are in most cases due to primitive barter.
The old Promethean myth represents the fire-bringer interposing on behalf of a degraded race of beings whose helpless lot had been preceded by the Hesiodic Golden, Silver, and Bronze ages, as well as by an Heroic age of such demigods as the Titan son of Iapetus. By a reverse process of evolution from the lower to higher stages, the anthropoid, or Caliban of archæological science, becomes the tool-maker, the tool-user, and in the same primitive stage, the fire-maker. But the service of fire is required by man under the most varied conditions of life. The stone lamp with its moss wick, and the stone kettle, are important implements in the snow-hut of the Eskimo. On those he depends, not only for cooking, but for his supply of water from melted snow; and without the lighted taper of his stone lamp the indoor life of the long, unbroken Arctic night would be passed in a rayless dungeon. He has inherited the knowledge of the palæolithic fire-maker, from whom, indeed, some have claimed for him direct genealogical descent; and he generally treasures among his most useful appliances a piece of quartz, and a nodule of pyrites, which constitute his flint and steel. At the remote extreme of the southern continent the same precious bequest is in use by the Fuegians and Patagonians of Tierra del Fuego, the name of which is a memorial of its fire-using savages. The Fuegian makes a hearth of clay in the bottom of his rudely constructed bark canoe, on which he habitually keeps a fire burning. He prepares a tinder of dried moss or fungus, which is readily ignited by the spark struck from a flinty stone by means of a pyrites. The invaluable discovery is shared by the lowest races. The Australian, the Andaman Islander, and other rudest tribes of the Old and the New World, have mastered the same great secret, and turn it to useful account.
The tradition may have been perpetuated from generation to generation from the remotest dawn of human reason, or it may have been rediscovered independently among diverse races. But wherever the value of the pyrites in evoking the latent spark of the flint was known, it would be a coveted prize and a valuable object of barter. The story of the old fire-makers is recorded still in the charcoal ashes of many an ancient hearth; for charcoal is one of the most indestructible of substances when buried. In the famous Kent’s Hole limestone cavern at Torbay, Devonshire, explorers have systematically pursued research backward from the specifically dated stalagmitic record of “Robert Hodges, of Ireland, Feb. 20, 1688,” through Saxon, Roman, British, and Neolithic strata, to the deposit where human remains lay embedded alongside of those of the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, the fossil horse, the hyæna and cave-bear. There also lay, not only the finished implements, but the flakes and flint cores that revealed the workshop of the primitive tool-maker, and the charcoal that preserved the traces of his ancient fire. So, too, in the Cromagnon rock-shelter of the Perigord, in an upper valley of the Garonne, repeated layers of charcoal, interspersed with broken bones and other culinary remains of the ancient cave-dwellers, tell of the knowledge and use of fire in western Europe’s Reindeer and Mammoth ages by palæolithic man. Compared with such disclosures of primeval arts, the discoveries on which the Danish archæologists based their systematising of prehistoric remains belong, geologically speaking, to modern eras. Denmark is underlaid essentially by Upper Cretaceous rocks, the Etage Danien of most French writers, and the Faxoe Kelke of German geologists. Drift clays and gravels overlie the cretaceous rocks in many places, with more recent deposits of sands, gravels, etc. These latter are of Neolithic age, containing bones only of existing mammals. Palæolithic deposits, with bones of extinct species, do not appear to have been recognised in Denmark; nor is there any trace of the presence of palæolithic man. Hence the field alike of Danish antiquarian research and of archæological speculation was greatly circumscribed. But thus precluded from the study of primitive arts in that vague palæolithic dawn which lies outside of the speculations of the historian, and beyond resort to classical authorities for evidence in the interpretation of local disclosures, the Danish antiquary escaped the temptation to many misleading assumptions which long perplexed the archæologists of France and England; and so his limited range has tended to facilitate the investigations into subsequent disclosures relative to an ampler antiquity of man and his arts.
Within the old Roman provinces of Western Europe, the Latin conquerors were not only accredited with whatever showed any trace of Hellenic or Roman art, but with the sole skill in working in iron. The Dane and Northman were assumed to have followed in their wake with bronze, as with runes and other essentially non-classical products; though still the beautiful leaf-shaped sword and other choicest relics of the Bronze age were not infrequently ascribed to the Romans. But philologists had not yet assigned a place to the Celtic in the Aryan family of languages. The Celt was not only assumed to be the barbarous precursor, alike of Roman and Dane, but to be the primeval man of Western Europe. Hence when the first hoards of palæolithic flint implements were accidentally discovered in Sussex and Kent, their Celtic or British origin was assumed without question.