AMERICAN ASPECTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 153 



by text and drawing that here stood the famous palisaded town of Ho- 

 chelaga. Its inhabitants, as his vocabulary shows, belonged to the 

 group of tribes whose word for five is wisk — that is to say, they were cf 

 the Iroquois stock. Much as Canada has changed since then, we can still 

 study among the settled Iroquois the type of a race lately in the Stone 

 age, still trace remnants and records of their peculiar social institu- 

 tions, and still hear spoken their language of strange vocabulary and 

 unfamiliar structure. Peculiar importance is given to Canadian an- 

 thropology by the presence of such local American types of man, rep- 

 resentatives of a stage of culture long passed away in Europe. Nor 

 does this by any means oust from the Canadian mind the interest of 

 the ordinary problems of European anthropology. The complex suc- 

 cession of races which makes up the pedigree of the modern English- 

 man and Frenchman, where the descendants perhaps of palaeolithic, 

 and certainly of neolithic, man have blended with invading Keltic, 

 Roman, Teutonic-Scandinavian peoples — all this is the inheritance of 

 settlers in America as much as of their kinsfolk who have staid in 

 Europe. In the present scientific visit of the Old to the New World, 

 I propose to touch on some prominent questions of anthropology with 

 special reference to their American aspects. Inasmuch as in an intro- 

 ductory address the practice of the Association tends to make argu- 

 ments unanswerable, it will be desirable for me to suggest rather than 

 to dogmatize, leaving the detailed treatment of the topics raised to 

 come in the more specialized papers and discussions which form the 

 current business of the section. 



The term prehistoric, invaluable to anthropologists since Professor 

 Daniel Wilson introduced it more than thirty years ago, stretches back 

 from times just outside the range of written history into the remotest 

 ages where human remains or relics, or other more indirect evidence, 

 justifies the opinion that man existed. Far back in these prehistoric 

 periods, the problem of Quaternary man turns on the presence of his 

 rude stone implements in the drift gravels and in caves, associated 

 with the remains of what may be called for shortness the mammoth- 

 fauna. Not to recapitulate details which have been set down in a 

 hundred books, the point to be insisted on is how, in the experience of 

 those who, like myself, have followed them since the time of Boucher 

 de Perthes, the effect of a quarter of a century's research and criticism 

 has been to give Quaternary man a more and more real position. The 

 clumsy flint pick and its contemporary mammoth-tooth have become 

 stock articles in museums, and every year adds new localities where 

 palasolithic implements are found of the types catalogued years ago by 

 Evans, and in beds agreeing with the sections drawn years ago by 

 Prestwich. It is generally admitted that about the close of the Gla- 

 cial period savage man killed the huge maned elephants, or fled from 

 the great lions and tigers on what was then forest-clad valley-bot- 

 tom, in ages before the later water-flow had cut out the present wide 



