They laid
bare the secrets of dead ages. These musty Memorials told us when Man
lived, and what were his habits. For here, side by side with Man, were
the evidences that he had lived in the earliest ages of creation, the
companion of the other low orders of life that belonged to that forgotten
time. Here was the fossil nautilus that sailed the primeval seas; here
was the skeleton of the mastodon, the ichthyosaurus, the cave-bear, the
prodigious elk. Here, also, were the charred bones of some of these
extinct animals and of the young of Man's own species, split lengthwise,
showing that to his taste the marrow was a toothsome luxury. It was
plain that Man had robbed those bones of their contents, since no
tooth-mark of any beast was upon them albeit the Tumble-Bug intruded the
remark that 'no beast could mark a bone with its teeth, anyway.' Here
were proofs that Man had vague, groveling notions of art; for this fact
was conveyed by certain things marked with the untranslatable words,
'FLINT HATCHETS, KNIVES, ARROW--HEADS, AND BONE ORNAMENTS OF PRIMEVAL
MAN.' Some of these seemed to be rude weapons chipped out of flint, and
in a secret place was found some more in process of construction, with
this untranslatable legend, on a thin, flimsy material, lying by:
"'Jones, if you don't want to be discharged from the Musseum, make
the next primeaveal weppons more careful--you couldn't even fool one
of these sleepy old syentific grannys from the Coledge with the last
ones.
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