48 DR. DANIEL WILSON ON 
have been blotted from creation since American humanity’s first appearance. The form of 
these crania, moreover, proves that the general type of races inhabiting America at that 
inconceivably remote era was the same which prevailed at the Columbian discovery ; ” * 
and so the authors of “ Types of Mankind” arrive at the conclusion that with such evidence 
of the native American type having occupied the continent in geological times, before the 
formation of the Mississippi alluvia, science may spare itself the trouble of looking else- 
where for the origin of the American race. The high authority of Professor Agassiz was 
adduced at the time in support of this and other equally crude assumptions ; but they have 
ceased to receive the countenance of men of science. 
Meanwhile the progress of European discovery has familiarized us with the idea of 
the rude primeval race of its palæolithic era, so designated in reference to their charac- 
teristic implements recovered from the river drift of France and England, and the sedi- 
mentary accumulations of their rock shelters and limestone caves. That flint and stone imple- 
ments of every variety of form abound in the soil of this continent, has been established 
by ample proof; and if mere rudeness could be accepted as evidence of antiquity, many of 
them rival in this respect the rudest implements of the European drift. But it has to be 
kept in view that the indigenous tribes of America have not even now abandoned the 
manufacture of implements of obsidian, flint and stone, as well as of bone and ivory. So 
striking, indeed, is the analogy between the simple arts of the palæolithic cave-men of 
southern France, and those still practised by the Eskimo on our own Canadian frontier 
that Professor Boyd Dawkins has been led from this to find a pedigree for the American 
aborigines not less ancient than that which Dr. Dowler long ago deduced from his discovery in 
the delta of the Mississippi. The implements and accumulated débris of the ancient hunters 
of the Garonne, the contemporaries of the mammoth and other extinct mammals, and of 
the reindeer, musk-sheep, cave-bear, and other species known only within the historic 
period in extreme northern latitudes, undoubtedly suggest interesting analogies with the 
modern Eskimo. Only under similar climatic conditions to those in which they now live, 
could such accumulations of animal remains as have been found in the caves of the valley 
of the Vésére be possible in places habitually resorted to by man. But such analogies form 
a very slender basis on which to found the startling hypothesis that the race of the mam- 
moth and reindeer period in the remote post-pliocene era of southern France has its living 
representatives within the Arctic circle of the American continent. 
The students of modern archeology have become familiar with startling disclosures ; 
and the supposed identification of living representatives of the race of the pleistocene river 
beds or cave deposits is too fascinating a one to be readily abandoned by its originator. 
Professor Dawkins conceives the men of the river-drift era to have been a race of still older 
and ruder savages than the palæolithic cave-men, who were more restricted in their range, 
and considerably in advance of them in the variety and workmanship of their weapons 
and implements. The elder ruder race has vanished; but the cave race of that indefinite 
but vastly remote era of late pliocene, or post-pliocene Europe, is assumed to live on, within 
the Arctic frontiers of our own Dominion. 
In discussing the plausible hypothesis which thus aims at recovering in the hyper- 
boreans of this continent the race that before the close of Europe’s pleistocene age, hunted 

* Types of Mankind, page 351. 
