302 PHYSICAL ETHNOLOGY. 



suggestive of a difPerent condition of life, and a diverse stage in the progress of 

 the human race, as the bones of the mastodon or the JJrsus speloeus which are 

 imbedded in the same stratified gravel. That the flint-tools have certain char- 

 acteristics in form and workmanship is unquestionable. Yet the difl'erence 

 between them and more modern implements of the same material has been 

 exaggerated ; and the results indicated by this comparison of flint implements 

 of the New "World with those of the European drift is to shoAV, I think, that 

 the diversity between the two is not of an essential or very important nature, 

 and by no means such as would indicate any relative stages in a progressive 

 development which, in the sober estimation of some of our most cautious geolo- 

 gists, embraces a period scarcely measurable by centuries. Their present specu- 

 lations would render the interval between the Flint- worker of the British barrows 

 of ante-Christian centuries and the modern Indian too insignificant to be taken 

 into account, in relation to an age when man is assumed to have made his advent 

 in Britain while it formed a part of the continent of Europe, and when the 

 glaciers of the Scottish Grampians still contributed their Arctic floods to the 

 valleys of southern England and France. But also some of the facts indicated 

 here warn us that we have still to anticipate many new disclosures not less 

 striking and unlooked for than those of the European drift ; and among those 

 is the possible discovery of America's drift-period, comprehending the traces of 

 human art and the evidences of the presence of man in this New World, as it 

 is called, at periods compared with which that of its Mound-Builders is modern, 

 and even of its fancied Phoenician colonizers but of yesterday. 



