Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe | Page 5

shivering and

homeless humanity would have to be pupil to the beasts to learn where
to shelter his head. Where did man first appear? Where was the Garden
of Eden? Indisputably on the chalk. There he found all his first
demands supplied. The walls of cretaceous rock furnished him with
shelter under its ledges of overhanging beds, flints out of which to
fashion his tools, and nodules of pyrites wherewith to kindle a fire.
Providence through aeons had built up the chalk to be man's first home.
Incontestably, the great centres of population in the primeval ages were
the chalklands, and next to them those of limestone. The chalk first, for
it furnished man with flints, and the limestone next when he had
learned to barter.
He could have lived nowhere else, till, after the lapse of ages, he had
developed invention and adaptability. Besant and Rice, in
"Ready-money Mortiboy," speak of Divine Discontent as the motive
power impelling man to progress. Not till the chalk and the limestone
shelters were stocked, and could hold no more, would men be driven to
invent for themselves other dwellings. The first men being sent into the
world without a natural coat of fur or feathers, would settle into caves
or under overhanging roofs of rock, and with flint picked out of it,
chipped and pointed, secure the flesh of the beast for food and its hide
for clothing. Having accomplished this, man would sit down
complacently for long ages. Indeed, there are certain branches of the
human family that have progressed no further and display no ambition
to advance.
Only when the districts of chalk and limestone were overstocked would
the overflow be constrained to look elsewhere for shelter. Then some
daring innovators, driven from the favoured land, would construct
habitations by grubbing into the soil, and covering them with a roof of
turf. The ancient Germans, according to Tacitus, lived in underground
cabins, heaped over with dung to keep them warm during the long
winter. With the invention of the earthenware stove, the German Bauer
has been enabled to rise above the surface; but he cherishes the manure
round his house, so to speak, about his feet, as affectionately as when it
warmed his head.

For a long time it was supposed that our British ancestors lived in pit
dwellings, and whole clusters of them were recorded and mapped on
the Yorkshire Wolds, and a British metropolis of them, Caer Penselcoit,
was reported in Somersetshire. Habitations sunk deep in the rock, with
only a roof above ground. But the spade has cracked these
archæological theories like filberts, and has proved that the pits in the
wolds were sunk after iron ore, or those in Somerset were burrowings
for the extraction of chert. [Footnote: Atkinson, "Forty Years in a
Moorland Parish." Lond. 1891, p. 161, _et seq._ Some pits are,
however, not so dubious. At Hurstbourne, in Hants, pit habitations have
been explored; others, in Kent and Oxfordshire, undoubtedly once
dwelt in. In one of the Kentish pits 900 flakes and cores of flint were
found. The Chysoyster huts in Cornwall and the "Picts houses" in
Scotland were built up of stones, underground.] But the original
paleolithic man did not get beyond the cavern or the rock-shelter. This
latter was a retreat beneath an overhanging stratum of hard rock,
screened against the weather by a curtain of skins. And why should he
wish to change so long as these were available? We, from our advanced
position, sitting in padded arm-chairs, before a coal fire, can see that
there was room for improvement; but he could not. The rock-dwelling
was commodious, dry, warm in winter and cool in summer, and it cost
him no trouble to fashion it, or keep it in repair. He had not the
prophetic eye to look forward to the arm-chair and the coal fire. Indeed,
at all periods, down to the present day, those who desire to lead the
simple life, and those who have been reared in these nature-formed
dwelling-places, feel no ambition to occupy stone-built houses. In
North Devon the cottages are reared of cob, kneaded clay, and thatched.
A squire on his estate pulled down those he possessed and built in their
place brick houses with slated roofs. The cottagers bitterly resented the
change, their old mud-hovels were so much warmer. And in like
manner the primeval man would not exchange his abris for a structural
dwelling unless constrained so to do.
The ancients knew that the first homes of mankind were grottoes. They
wrote of Troglodytes in Africa and of cave-dwellers in Liguria. In
Arabia Petræa, a highly civilized people converted their simple rock-
dwellings into sumptuous palaces.

I might fill pages with quotations to the purpose from the classic
authors, but the reader would skip them