PRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN. 58 
1877, gave publicity to a communication from Dr. Charles C. Abbott, setting forth the data 
from which he had been led to assume that man existed on the American continent during 
the formation of the great glacial deposit which extends from Labrador as far south as 
Virginia. The scene of his successful research is in the valley of the Delaware, near 
Trenton, New Jersey. There, in the river-gravel, deposited by the Delaware River in the 
process of excavating the valley through which its course now lies, Dr. Abbott’s diligent 
search has been rewarded by finding numerous specimens of rudely chipped implements 
of a peculiar type, to which he has given the name of “turtle-back celts.” They are 
fashioned of a highly indurated argillite, with a conchoidal fracture, and have been 
recovered at depths varying from five to upwards of twenty feet below the overlying soil, 
in the undisturbed gravel of the bluff facing the Delaware river, as well as in railway 
cuttings and other excayations. 
Here, to all appearance, intelligent research had at length been rewarded by the 
discovery of undoubted traces of the American paleolithic man; and Dr. Abbott, not 
unnaturally, gave free scope to his fancy, as he realized to himself the pre-occupation of 
the river valley with “the village sites of pre-glacial man.” There is a fascination in such 
disclosures which, especially in the case of the original discoverer, tempts to extreme 
views; and both in France and England, at the present time, the more eager among the 
geologists and archeologists devoted to this enquiry are reluctantly restrained from 
assuming as a scientific fact the existence of man in southern England and in France 
under more genial climatic influences, prior to the great ice age which wrought such 
enormous changes there. The theory which Dr. Abbott formed on the basis of the evidence 
first presented to him by the disclosures of the Trenton gravel may be thus stated: 
Towards the close of the great ice age, the locality which has rewarded his search for 
specimens of palæolithic art marked the termination of the glacier on the Atlantic coast. 
Here, at the foot of the glacier, a primitive people, in a condition closely analogous to that 
of the Eskimos of the present day, made their home, and wandered over the open sea in the 
vicinity, during the accumulation of the deposit from the melting glacier. But this drift 
gravel was modified by subsequent action. According to Dr. Abbott’s conclusions, it was 
deposited in open water, on the bed of a shallow sea. But the position of the large 
boulders, and the absence of true clay in the mass, suggest that it has undergone great 
changes since its original deposition as glacial debris ; and if this is to be accounted for by 
subsequent action of water, the unpolished surfaces of the chipped implements are incon- 
sistent with such a theory of their origin. Huge boulders, of the same character as those 
which abound in the underlying gravel, occur on the surface; and their presence there 
was referred to by Dr. Abbott as throwing light upon “the occurrence of rude implements 
identical with those found in the underlying gravels, inasmuch as the same ice-raft that 
bore the one, with its accompanying sand and gravel, might well gather up also stray 
relics of this primitive people, and re-deposit them where they are now found.” Accord- 
ingly, seeking in fancy to recall this ancient past, he says in his first report: “ In times 
preceding the formation of this gravel bed, now in part facing the Delaware River, there 
were doubtless localities, once the village sites of pre-glacial man, where these rude stone 
implements would necessarily be abundant,” and he accordingly asks “ may not the ice in its 
onward march, gathering in bulk every loose fragment of rock and particle of soil, have held 
them loosely together, and, hundreds of miles from their original site, left them in some one 
