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.