28 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



by floes and icebergs in spring-time, if not all the year round. The 

 hearth itself tells only that its builders knew the uses of fire, and 

 constructed rude fireplaces, but is silent as to their knowledge of 

 water-craft, as to their implements and utensils, as to whether 

 they were hunters or fishermen, and so as to nearly all of their 

 habits and customs. Miss Babbitt's quartz-chips appear (though 

 the geologic relations are somewhat obscure) to represent the site 

 of a primitive workshop or rendezvous on the banks of a river 

 heading in the ice-sheet a few miles or scores of miles up-stream. 

 The artificial origin of the chips has been disputed, and is in- 

 dicated by their concentration in a certain local stratum and 

 their absence from contiguous strata and other localities rather 

 than by their form — the distribution being apparently explicable 

 only on the hyiDothesis that they were artificially accumulated, 

 whether or not they were artificiaLy fabricated. The rude chips 

 throw no light on the habits, customs, or environment of the men 



Fig. a— Margin of the later Quatebnabt Ice-Sheet in the Vallet of Delaware River. 



by whom they may have been fashioned, save that, if artificial, 

 they exhibit the lowest known grade of culture ; but this testi- 

 mony of the quartz-chips is apparently antagonized by that of the 

 polished-stone axe and disk, the copper spear-head, etc., recorded 

 by N. H. Winchell from another part of the same terrace-plain. 

 The deposit in which the Madisonville imjjlement was found 



