102 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OF [1894. 



Virginia, at the Iluninielstowu Cave in Dauphin County, Pennsyl- 

 vania and at the Nickajack and Lookout Caves in Tennessee. The 

 hamnierstone, aruillite cache blade, pottery and chert arrowheads 

 are duplicated at the Lenape villages at Point Pleasant, Ridges 

 Island and Gallows Run on the Delaware River, while the single 

 liarbed bone spear from a shell heap explored by me in September 

 1891 on York River, Maine, can he again referred to the Red Man. 



We may safely say that the notion of a precedent people vanished 

 at Hartman's Cave, and that the only Man that I found there or 

 that I have reason to suppose that Mr. Paret found there as the 

 possible contemporary of the reindeer, and bison, extinct peccary and 

 giant chinchilla was the chert- using, pottery-making Indian of the 

 Delaware Valley, already the possessor of the bow and arrow and the 

 quarry denoting cache blade. 



Antiquit]] of the human remains. — When we ask the third ques- 

 tion : Were the human remains of geological antiquity or of 

 modern date and, granting the association ot the extinct mammal bones, 

 use their presence to prove great age. We must remember that the ab- 

 sence of historical mention which largely gives the word "extinct" 

 its meaning, and which in Europe reaches back 2000 years at once, 

 has here as yet but a proved retrospect of hardly more than three 

 centuries. The fact that John Smith or the Jesuits did not ob- 

 serve the peccary in the northern United States does not disprove its 

 scanty or straggling existence in their time, and we cannot be cer- 

 tain that, as Jefferson supposed, a few superannuated mammoths 

 were not hiding in forest corners as late as the 18th century. Only 

 the correlation of the fauna of many more caves with human remains 

 can give us a just notion of the time-span of many of these animals 

 and make definite the still vague border line between archaeology 

 and paleontology. 



The problem of the clay. — It is for geology to explain the ex- 

 quisitely fine laminated clay containing no sign of life that so deeply 

 covers this cave floor. 



It must have been quiet water holding mud in solution that laid it 

 there, film upon film, nor could tlie process have been arrested by 

 dry intervals or the visits of men and beasts, since no dissimilar, dry 

 laid or life betokening stratum interrupts it. How this beautiful clay, 

 widely unlike the coarse, red deposits in the Lookout and Nickajack 

 Caves in Tennessee or the Durham Cave, 10 miles below Eastou on 



