322 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



studies, that all the stone implements of our Eastern sea-board are not 

 of one origin, go far to confirm the position of the historical student 

 that an earlier race than the Indian once resided here ? 



De Costa remarks: "During the eleventh century the red-man lived 

 upon the North American Continent, while the eastern border of his 

 territory could not have been situated far away from the Atlantic 

 coast. In New England he must have succeeded the people known as 

 Skraellings. Prior to that time, his hunting-grounds lay toward the 

 interior of the continent. In course of time, however, he came into 

 collision with the ruder people on the Atlantic coast, the descendants 

 of an almost amphibious glacial man." 



This " amphibious glacial man," I submit, is he who fashioned the 

 rude palaeolithic implements, that, with bones of extinct and Arctic 

 mammalia, are now found in the glacial drift of our river-valleys ; and 

 his " descendants," a rude people, with whom the Indian finally came 

 in contact, were those who fashioned the plainly finished argillite ar- 

 row-heads and spears that are now, in part, commingled with the 

 elaborate workmanship of the latest race, save one, that has peopled 

 this continent. 



-*- 



BODILY DEFORMITIES IN GIRLHOOD. 



By CHARLES EC-BERTS, F. R. C. S.* 



HOPE the time is not distant when a careful study of the living 

 model of the child and the adult, and the whole period of the de- 

 velopment of the one into the other, will form a part of the student's 

 ordinary course of anatomy and physiology, as such knowledge is 

 essentia] to the surgeon engaged in removing and preventing deform- 

 ities of the body. Orthopedic surgery as a specialty is a great evil 

 both to the profession and the public. The specialist who concen- 

 trates all his attention on a narrow field of study and practice is 

 tempted to exaggerate its importance, and to analyze and disintegrate 

 his facts till he loses sight of their relation to and their dependence on 

 each other ; while, on the other hand, the general practitioner is dis- 

 heartened and repelled by the apparent complication of the subject, 

 and is induced to hand over to the specialist many cases which he is 

 quite competent to treat, or, as is too often the case, to undervalue 

 the importance or deny the existence of many deformities. How else 

 can we explain the difference in practice between the fussy mechanical 

 ingenuity with which many professed orthopedists treat the slightest 

 deformities of children which, by the way, they often tell us are only 

 visible to their specially trained eye, and are hidden from that of the 



* Late Assistant-Surgeon to the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children, etc. 



