PHYSICAL ETHNOLOGY 



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The Lewiston implement is more irregular and ruder in workmanship. It 

 has been reduced to the required shape by comparatively few strokes, and ap- 

 pears to have been broken off at the one side by an ill-directed blow of tin; 

 Btone hammer by Avhich it may be presumed to have been wrought. The oppo- 

 site and only complete edge is cliipped and fractured as if by frequent use. It 

 is to be regretted that more minute information as to the precise locality and 

 circumstances of this discovery has not been secured. But it may not yet bo 

 too late for the recovery of the desired data. As an undoubted relic of the 

 American drift, it would afford startling evidence of a minute conformity be- 

 tween the most ancient traces of human art in both hemispheres. Even as, 

 more probably, a stray relic of the ancient monuments ©f AVisconsin, or the 

 Ohio valley, it possesses considerable interest to the American archajologist, 

 thus found so far from the ascertained seats of the extinct Mound-Builders. But 

 it is probable that the implements of the modern Indians include those of the 

 very same form. In the same cabinet of the Smithsonian collection, which in- 

 cludes the Wisconsin examples referred to, is a roughly shaped disc, figured 

 here, (Fig. 12) brought with other remains from Texas. It measures 40- inches 

 in length, and, as is shown by the accompanying illustration, it repeats one of 

 the commonest types of the smaller drift implements, and also corresponds to 

 them in its irregularly fractured edge and rongli workmanship. 



Fig. 12. — TEXAS FLINT IMPLEMENTS. 



The subject selected for illustration here, from among many which I 

 brought inider the notice of my audience, though apparently trifling, has 

 a certain significance Avhich may justify its reproduction. A comparison 

 of the ordinary flint and stone implements, and of the rude pottery still manu- 

 factured by the Red Indians of the American forests and prairies, with examples 

 recovered from ancient sepulchres of Britain and the north of Eurcpe, dating 

 before the Cb.ristian era, proves a correspondence in many cases so striking as 

 to admit of the one being substituted for the other without detection by the 

 most experienced archreologist. To prove, therefore, that in the drift under- 

 neath the Gaulish and Roman graves of Abbeville and Amiens, or the British 

 and Saxon barrows of Suffolk, lie imbedded the rude flint implements of an 

 elder perioc?, essentially differing from both, furnishes indications as strikingly 



