INAUGURAT ADDRESS. 3 
the forest, and its returning springs. We catch the earliest glimpses of them in the 
graphic notes of Cartier and Champlain ; and yet their own legends seem to tell of a time 
when the mastodon—whose huge skeletons are met with in the superficial drift gravels,— 
was known to their fathers; even as the mammoth is proved to have been familiar to 
Europe’s paleolithic men. But of the events of all the intervening centuries we have no 
more definite record than of the leaves of the recurring autumns, or the snow that melted 
on each renewal of the spring. 
But the all-absorbing theme of archæological inquiry, the evidence of the antiquity of 
man, receives no less attention on this continent than in Europe; and already not only 
flint and stone implements from the auriferous gravels of California and the river drift of 
New Jersey, have been produced as the workmanship of men of the glacial period; but 
even assumed crania of those palæolithie workmen have been accredited by American 
geologists and archeologists. So far, however, as the man of this continent and his arts 
are concerned, the reliable disclosures hitherto made are referable, for the most part, to periods 
which must be classed as recent, whether we compare them with the archeological or the 
historical determinations of antiquity in the old world. On the other hand, any traces of 
philological relations between the native languages of America, and those of Asia, Africa, 
or Polynesia, can be accounted for only on the assumption of migrations of extremely remote 
date. But Language carries us back but a little way, when brought into competition with 
the materials for prehistoric research which Archeology has supplied. 
The comprehensive aspect which the prehistoric archeology of Europe has now 
assumed, with its palæolithic and neolithic periods, illustrated not only by abundant 
examples of primitive arts, but by sepulchral disclosures familiarizing us with the 
physical form and cerebral capacity of the workmen: enables us to systematize our know- 
ledge of Europe’s earliest post-glacial epoch. Much has now been recovered relativé to 
the geographical condition of Europe in the later geological periods associated with man. 
We know the character of the fauna, and the accompanying climatic conditions of succes- 
sive periods of change. Still more, we are familiar with the rude implements of the river- 
drift ; and with the ingenious arts of man, contemporary with the strange animal life of 
that prehistoric dawn. Abundant examples have sufficed to illustrate the peculiar work- 
manship, for example, of the men of the Reindeer period of southern France. We possess 
their graphic drawing of the living Mammoth; and the carvings and etchings of the rein- 
‘deer, the fossil horse, and other long-extinct fauna, graven by the cave-dwellers of La 
Madelaine and other rock shelters of the Vézère, when the Garonne valley more nearly 
approximated in climate to that of the Moose or the Abbitibe rivers of our own Hudson 
Bay territory. We have, moreover, the large, well-developed skulis of the men of Mentone, 
Cro-Magnon, and other paleeolithic cave sepultures ; with al] the accumulated evidence of 
cave and river-drift, kitchen-middens, lake dwellings, crannoges, cists and barrows. Much 
knowledge remains still to be added, before the history of that strange prehistoric dawn 
assume coherent verisimilitude. But we have learned enough to no longer doubt that a 
history lies behind Europe’s oldest written records compared with which even the 
chroniclings of the Pharaohs are recent. Hitherto, however, the assumed proofs of any 
corresponding American palæolithic art have been, at best, isolated and indecisive ; with, 
perhaps, the single exception of the “turtle-back celts” reported by Dr. Charles C. Abbott, 
as characteristic of the glacial drift of the Delaware River, New Jersey. But the age of 
