BALCH— EARLY MAN IN AMERICA. 475 



Conrad Abbott, who lived on his family homestead near Trenton, 

 New Jersey, ^vlore than fifty years ago he began to collect the 

 relics of the past in the neighborhood. He noticed that some of the 

 stone artifacts were much rougher than others and he reasoned 

 from this that therefore they were older. And in a paper " The 

 Stone Age in New Jersey," published in 1872,2 he announced his be- 

 hef that these ruder artifacts were paleolithic. He says of them 

 either that there were execrable workmen among the tool-makers 

 or else that the age of the crude specimens far exceeds that of the 

 finely wrought relics. He discovered also that in every class of 

 reHcs there is always a gradation from poor or primitive to good or 

 elaborate, indicating a lapse of years from ancient to modern times, 

 from a paleolithic to a neolithic age. He further surmised that the 

 earlier implements were so rude that the people who fashioned them 

 may well have been too primitive to wander from another continent, 

 and therefore that the first inhabitants along our Atlantic coast 

 and inland may have been autochthones. And thereupon Abbott 

 was promptly told that he also had handed a gold brick to the public. 



But Abbott, like Boucher de Perthes, weathered the storm and 

 continued his researches and nine years later, in 1881, he published 

 a book " Primitive Industry," based on his rambles over fields and 

 along the banks of the Delaware and on his patient observations in 

 railroad cuttings and canal excavations. And in this book he was 

 able to announce^ that there are three stages of stone culture in the 

 Delaware Valley. Taking these downw'ards or backwards they are 

 as follows: (i) In the surface soil there is a polished stone neo- 

 lithic stage with jasper and quartz implements of the historic Indian 

 and a few rough argillite implements ; (2) some distance below this, 

 in alluvial deposits, generally of yellow sand, there is a stage of 

 rough argillite implements; (3) a good distance below this again, in 

 the Trenton gravels, there is a stage where there are a few very 

 rough argillite paleolithic implements. 



Now the difficulty of seeing these facts in the field at Trenton 

 is enormous. I have visited Abbott many times at Trenton, and 

 have rambled over his ancestral acres and along the banks of the 



- American Naturalist, 1872, Vol. 6, p. 146. 

 3 Page 517. 



