X.] THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 359 



one group of tribes from another in America distinguishes them 

 from all other tribes of the world 1 ." 



These general conclusions, however, leave untouched the 

 question of palaeolithic man in the New World, on p a iaeoiithi 

 which opinion continues to be divided, especially in Man in 

 the United States. Some confusion has certainly 

 been caused by the failure to distinguish carefully between time 

 and cultural sequences. It is not denied that multitudes of stone 

 implements occur in many parts of America which closely 

 resemble those of the palaeolithic age in Europe. Nevertheless 

 their value as evidence of a corresponding palaeolithic age in the 

 New World is denied, because here they represent, or may repre- 

 sent, merely a low stage of culture which still continues, and has 

 no necessary reference to time. The European objects occur in 

 undisturbed glacial and even pre-glacial deposits, in caves under 

 thick stalagmite floors, in association with long extinct faunas, and 

 under other circumstances, by all of which their pleistocene age 

 and absolute antiquity are established. But in America, it is 

 argued, they are mostly surface finds, and when occurring in situ, 

 doubts are raised on the geological age of the beds, or on their 

 condition (whether disturbed or not), or even on the good faith of 

 the finders. Hence in his Primitive Industry' 2 , Dr Thomas Wilson, 

 who favours antiquity, claimed for the objects in question no more 

 than that they were "to be taken as serious evidence in favour of 

 Palaeolithic Man in America," just as they have "proved him to 

 have existed in Europe," and this "under all reserve, and subject 

 to future discoveries." 



Since then such a discovery would appear to have been made 

 in 1897 by the party of experts who undertook by independent 

 inquiry to sift the much contested evidence from the Delaware 

 gravels at Trenton, where Dr C. C. Abbott had been at work for 



1 The same position is taken by others, among them being Prof. Edward 

 S. Morse, who opened a discussion on the subject at the meeting of the Amer. 

 Assoc. Detroit, 1897, and insisted upon the essential unity of the American race, 

 both in its physical characters and cultural developments, noting especially the 

 absence from America of tea, silk, and other useful and easily transported 

 Asiatic commodities, as already pointed out in Eth. Ch. XIII. 



2 Washington, 1894, p. 534 of the Smithsonian Report for 1892. 



