EARLY MAN IN AMERICA. 



By EDWIN SWIFT BALCH. 



{Read April 13, 1917.) 



One hundred years ago, only one man — one may say without 

 exaggeration — knew that there had once been a stone age in Europe. 

 This was John Frere, who as far back as 1797, collected many flint 

 spear heads near Hoxne in southern England and recognized their 

 antiquity and their human origin. It was not until the first half of 

 the nineteenth century that two or three other men realized that cer- 

 tain stones which they found in digging had been man-handled and 

 used as weapons or tools. One of these men was Dr. Schmerling 

 of Liege, who in 1833 published a paper describing his investigations 

 in the cave of Engis, where he found worked flint implements, 

 weapons and ornaments of ivory and bone, and fossils of extinct 

 animals together with a fossil human skull and other fragments of 

 the skeleton. Another man, the Rev. J. MacEnery, between 1824 

 and 1841, obtained from that most interesting cavern Kent's Hole 

 near Torquay in southern England, numerous artifacts associated 

 with the bones of extinct animals. The scientific world of those 

 days, however, was unable to appreciate that the human race could 

 possibly date back to the time indicated by the extinct animal fos- 

 sils found in the same strata as the flint artifacts, so Frere's, Schmer- 

 ling's and MacEnery's discoveries were rejected and temporarily 

 forgotten. 



In the early part of the nineteenth century also, however, there 

 lived near Amiens a Frenchman, Boucher de Perthes, who was 

 molded out of most combative clay. He started digging in the 

 gravels of the Somme Valley and in 1832 he noticed in the gravel 

 pits some curiously shaped stones which he finally recognized must 

 have been shaped by man. And in the year 1847, he said so in a 

 big volume the very title of which, " Antiquites Celtiques et Antedi- 

 luviennes," shows how hesitatingly he was groping at a subject at 



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