52 DR. DANIEL WILSON ON 
Moreover, it is to be noted that it is not amid the privations of an arctic winter, with its 
analogies so suggestive of a condition of life corresponding to that of the men of Europe's 
paleolithic age; but in southern latitudes, with a climate which furnishes abundant 
resources for savage man: that the crudest efforts at tool-making now occur. In a report 
of the United States Geological Survey for 1872, Professor Joseph Leidy furnishes an inter- 
esting account of numerous implements, rude as any in the Drift, observed by him while 
engaged on a survey at the base of the Unitah Mountains in Southern Wyoming. “In 
some places,” he remarks, “ the stone implements are so numerous, and at the same time 
are so rudely constructed, that one is constantly in doubt when to consider them as natural 
or accidental, and when to view them as artificial.” * But with these others are mingled of 
fine finish. The Shoshones who haunt the region seem to be incapable of such skill as the 
latter imply; and express the belief that they were a gift of the Great Spirit to their 
ancestors. Yet many are fresh in appearance; though others are worn and decomposed on 
the surface, and may, as Professor Leidy assumes, have lain there for centuries. He also des- 
cribes a stone scraper, or feshoa, as the Shoshones call it, employed by them in the dressing of 
buffalo skins ; but of so simple a character that he says, “ had I not observed it in actual use, 
and had noticed it among the materials of the buttes, or horizontal strata of indurated clays 
and sandstone, I would have viewed it as an accidental spawl.” When illustrating the 
characteristics of a like class of stone implements and weapons of Great Britain, Dr Evans 
figures and describes an axe, or war-club, procured from the Indians of Rio Frio, in Texas. 
Its blade is a piece of trachyte, so rudely chipped that it would scarcely attract attention 
as of artificial working, but for the club-like haft, evidently chopped into shape with 
stone tools, into which it is inserted. Nothing ruder has been brought to light in any 
drift or cave deposit. f Another modern Texas implement, in the Smithonnia collections 
at Washington, ¢ is a rudely fashioned flint blade, presenting considerable resemblance to 
a familiar class of oval implements of the river drift. 
So far, therefore, as unskilled art and the mere rudeness of workmanship are concerned, 
it might be assumed that the aborigines of this continent are thus presented to our study 
in their most primitive stage. They had advanced in no degree beyond the condition of 
the European savage of the river-drift period, when, at the close of the 15th century, they. 
were brought into contact with modern European culture; and nothing in their rude arts 
seemed to offer a clue to their origin, or any evidence of progression. For anything that 
could be learned from their work, they might have entered on the occupation of the 
northern continent, subsequent to the visits of the Northmen in the tenth century; and, 
indeed, American archzeologists at present generally favour the opinion that the Skraelings, 
as the Northmen designated the New England natives whom they encountered, were not 
Red Indians but Eskimos. But whatever may have been the local distribution of races at 
that date, geological evidence, which has proved so conclusive in relation to European 
ethnology, has at length been appealed to by American investigators, with results which 
seem to establish for this continent also its primæval stone-period, and remote prehistoric 
dawn. 
The “ Report of the Peabody Museum of American Archzeology and Ethnology” for 

* U.S. Geological Survey, 1872, p. 652. 
+ Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain, p. 140. 
t Vide Prehistoric Man, 3rd Ed, vol. i., p. 180. Fig. 54. 
