636 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



neers of the migrating Aryans, and existing Europeans are no 

 doubt the descendants of the union of the two the Aryan lan- 

 guage having in great measure or entirely replaced the mother 

 tongue, perhaps a very crude one, of fossil man. It is, however, 

 maintained by some investigators that palaeolithic or fossil man 

 died out, and that a period or hiatus existed between his time and 

 the peopling of Europe by neolithic man. 



In America we have one skull reported from Brazil, the Lagoa 

 Santa skull, but of doubtful geological horizon. It is, however, 

 figured as of the Cannstadt type. In the United States we have 

 one skull from the gold sands under Table Mountain, California, 

 known as the Calaveras skull. This find has met with much 

 criticism. 



Weapons and implements of palaeolithic man have been re- 

 ported from the Pacific coast, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, and the 

 Atlantic coast in the Delaware River Valley. Investigators re- 

 gard this man, whose existence is proved by weapons and imple- 

 ments rudely fashioned of argillite, as being interglacial. Prof. 

 Holmes has within the past two months severely criticised the 

 Minnesota and Ohio finds. The question here also arises, What 

 became of him ? Did he follow the retreating ice northward ? for 

 it seems pretty generally agreed that the American Indian, come 

 from where he may, is not the descendant of palaeolithic man. 



We saw in the first part of this paper that there was no posi- 

 tive evidence of man prior to the Pleistocene period ; neverthe- 

 less, man must have existed before that time, for during that 

 period his known fossil remains covered a wide area, and when 

 we take into consideration the few fossils that are preserved by 

 the rocks in comparison to the whole number of any species that 

 perish, it is evident that Pleistocene man must have been numer- 

 ous ; and, as he must have descended from antecedent man, there 

 can be little doubt that he existed in Pliocene and perhaps Mio- 

 cene times. 



There have been many attempts made to measure the age of 

 geological strata none, however, that can be said to be satisfac- 

 tory. Not only are any experimental data that can be used very 

 uncertain indices of what actually took place in the remote past, 

 but the bias of the experimenter in favor of this or that hypothe- 

 sis is apt to be impressed on the result attained. It may be stated, 

 however, that scientific opinion, based on careful observations 

 and comparative computations from these observations, the de- 

 tails of which our time will not permit us to go into, seems now 

 generally agreed that the Glacial period closed from ten to fifteen 

 thousand years ago. 



We must remember that fossil man existed in preglacial or 

 interglacial times, long anterior to the close of the Glacial period. 



