474 BALCH— EARLY MAN IN AMERICA. 



that time almost under the ban of rehgion as well as of science. 

 For this he was told, to put it in the words with which we now greet 

 discoverers, that he had handed a gold brick to the public. But 

 this did not upset Boucher de Perthes's equanimity one iota. He 

 was not only combative, but he was pertinacious and tenacious. He 

 continued his researches and ten years later he brought out another 

 big volume. Thereupon a few other scientists woke up and took 

 notice and went to the Somme Valley to dig. And they also found 

 flint artifacts in situ and in very short order it was seen that 

 Boucher de Perthes was right in his contentions. And now Boucher 

 de Perthes is universally recognized as the man who forced recog- 

 nition of Paleolithic man in Europe on a recalcitrant world. 



One hundred years ago, everybody in America — one may say 

 without much exaggeration — knew that there was even then an 

 American stone age. And some doubtless had this knowledge 

 drilled into them by finding a stone-headed arrow sticking in their 

 ribs. And they therefore were sure that stones were fashioned 

 into weapons and that they were used by our so-called Indians and 

 were not prehistoric. But history repeats itself. Just as Dr. 

 Schmerling had discovered a fossilized man in Belgium, so did Dr. 

 Lund, a Dane, report finding in 1844 in a cavern in the province 

 of Minas Gereas, Brazil, some fossilized human bones together with 

 bones of extinct animals. He concluded that South American man 

 extended " far back into historic times, and probably even beyond 

 these into geologic times. "^ The evidence presented by Dr. Lund, 

 however, was not so absolutely convincing that the human bones 

 were cotemporaneous with those of the extinct animals for the 

 scientific world of that day, any more than in the cases of Frere, 

 Schmerling and MacEnery, to be willing to accept the possibility of 

 such antiquity for the human race, so Dr. Lund's discovery also was 

 temporarily relegated to the limbo of oblivion. 



But there was a man in North America who had the same char- 

 acteristics as Boucher de Perthes : the faculty of observation, the 

 ability to reason from his observations and the pertinacity to stick 

 to them in the face of any and all opposition. This was Dr. Charles 



1 Ales Hrdlicka, " Early Man in South America," p. 165. 



