PALAEOLITHIC MAN IN AMERICA. 153 



an arctic life, and that many remained and, with the gradual- amel- 

 ioration of the climate, their descendants changed in their habits 

 so far as to meet the requirements of a temperate climate. This 

 explanation, it seems to me, best accords with known facts. 



It is fitting, after a long tramp in search of human relics or 

 remains, still so abundantly scattered over and through the su- 

 perficial soil, to halt, at the day's close, upon the river's bank, 

 and rest upon one of the huge ice-transported bowlders that reach 

 above the sod. From such a point I can mark the boundary of 

 the latest phenomenon of the valley's geological history, and seem 

 to see what time the walrus and the seal sported in the river's icy 

 waters ; what time the mastodon, the reindeer, and the bison ten- 

 anted the pine forests that clad the river's banks, and what time 

 an almost primitive man, stealing through the primeval forests, 

 surprised and captured these mighty beasts what time, linger- 

 ing by the blow-holes of the seal and walrus in the frozen river, 

 surprised and killed these creatures with so simple a weapon as a 

 sharply chipped fragment of flinty rock. And, as the centuries 

 rolled by, and the river lessened in bulk, until it but little more 

 than filled its present channel, there still remained along its shores 

 the more cultured descendants of the primitive chipper of pebbles. 

 As a savage, so like the modern Eskimo that he has been held to 

 be the same, this pre-Indian people still wrought the argillite 

 that their ancestors were forced to use for their palaeolithic tools ; 

 and as these spear-points are being gathered from the alluvial 

 deposits of the more modern river, I can recall to their accustomed 

 haunts this long-gone people, who, ere they gave place to the fierce 

 Algonkin, were the peaceful tenants of this river's valley. Then, 

 as we gather the beautiful arrow-heads of jasper and quartz, and 

 pick from superficial soils grooved axes, celts, chisels, curiously 

 wrought pipes, strange ornaments, ceremonial objects, and frag- 

 ments of pottery, literally without number, we marvel at the skill 

 of those who wrought them, and faintly realize how long these 

 comparatively recent comers must have dwelt in this same valley, 

 to have accumulated such an endless store of these imperishable 

 relics. 



We rightly speak of the antiquity of the Indian, but, remote as 

 is his arrival on the Atlantic coast, it is modern indeed, in com- 

 parison with the antiquity of man in the same region. We can 

 think of it, and perhaps faintly realize it, as " time relative," but 

 in no wise determine it as " time absolute." 



Dr. Buedon Sanderson foresees another division in science. He observes, in 

 a biological paper in the British Association, that morphology and physiology have 

 now diverged so widely, as regards subject and method, that there seems to be 

 danger of a complete separation of one from the other. 

 10* 



