Peale.] 4.Q2 [June. 



give evidence that they have not escaped the observation of those 

 close and learned investigators, the archaeologists of Denmark. 



These implements, as far as my observation extends, have been 

 hitherto entirely neglected in this country ; but that is not so much 

 a matter of wonder, vrhen vfe know that the arrow and spear heads, 

 so frequently found, are generally regarded as relics only, or the poor 

 weapons, of the despised and degraded Indians, who formerly roamed 

 in savage independence over these their hunting-grounds, with no 

 thought of their ethnological relations or bearing on the history of 

 the human race, and are therefore held in little esteem. 



But may we not, without presumption, hazard a few remarks on 

 a most important deduction to be drawn from the facts now being 

 developed from examinations in nearly every part of the world? 

 The close, nay exact similarity, of all these implements, derived as 

 they are from regions far apart in space, in various climates, and, 

 more singular still, from periods so remote from each other as to 

 carry up archseology into the domain of geology; the implements of 

 the former being so imbedded with the debris of the latter, that to 

 assign a determinate age to either is probably beyond the reach of 

 human investigation. Entirely prehistoric in their early associations, 

 we find them, together with the bones of the great pachyderms and 

 many other extinct animals, embedded in diluvium, in the earth and 

 stalagmites of caves ; and thence we descend from the era when 

 these extinct monsters, the mammoth, the e'ephant, and the rhino- 

 ceros, and numerous rapacious beasts, held coeval possession with 

 man of the river-banks of all climes down to the times which wit- 

 ness the same rude arts of the stone age practised by savages on this 

 and it may be other continents, simultaneously with the arts of the 

 highest civilization; when the instrumentality of the plough, the 

 ship, and the factory furnish all that man's necessity calls for, or his 

 most refined existence seems to need. 



During all this interval man obeyed the same instinctive impulses. 

 Even now we take a pebble (no better tool being at hand) to open a 

 spiny chestnut burr, or to crack the shell of a nut. A savage, with 

 no metal to aid him, makes of this pebble a more convenient tool, by 

 pecking, with a still harder fragment of atone, cavities for his fingers ; 

 and, in a further advance, cuts a groove around it, in which he binds 

 a tvi'the handle, and then grinds its extremity to an edge, thus making 

 the tools which serve all his limited wants, until more enlightened 

 civilization teaches the use of metal. 



Now does not all this indicate the unity op his origin ? He 



