PRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN. 55 
period, and with like success. Palæolithic implements have been recovered in this manner 
in Suffolk, Bedford, Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey, and other districts in the south of 
England. So entirely indeed has the man of the drift passed beyond the province of the 
archæologist, that in 1861 Professor Prestwich followed up his Notes on Further Discoveries 
of Flint Implements in Beds of Post-Pleiocene Gravel and Clay, with a list of forty-one localities 
where gravel and clay pits or gravel beds occur, as some of the places in the south of 
England where he thought flint implements might also by diligent search possibly be found ; 
and subsequent discoveries confirmed his anticipations. It has been by the application 
of the same principle to the drift and river-valley gravels of this continent that a like suc- 
cess has been achieved. The result of a careful study of this tool-bearing gravel of the 
Delaware may be thus summarized from recent reports of trustworthy scientific observers : 
The Trenton gravel is a post-glacial river deposit, made at a time when the river was larger 
than its present volume. It represents apparently the latest of the surface deposits of the 
upper Delaware valley. Its actual age, “and the consequent date to which the antiquity 
of man on the Delaware should be assigned, is a question which geological data alone are 
sufficient tosolvye.’* Dr. Abbott, however, while now recognising it as post-glacial, assumes 
it to be an immediate relic of the close of the glacial epoch ; and he accordingly remarks : 
“ The melting of a local glacier in the Cattskill Mountains would probably result, at the head 
waters of the Delaware, in a continued flood of sufficient volume, if supplemented by the 
action of floating ice, to form the Trenton gravels.”+ Whilst, therefore, he abandons the 
earlier idea of glacial, or inter-glacial man, he still recognizes in the implements of the 
Trenton valley gravel the evidence of a race of men akin to, and probably contemporary 
with, the river-drift men of Europe’s palæolithic era. 
American archeologists have undoubtedly been repeatedly deceived by the misleading 
traces of comparatively modern remains in deposits of some geological antiquity : as in 
instances already referred to in the California gravel-beds. There, indeed, ground and 
polished instruments of stone, including a “plumet” of highly polished syenite, “an 
exhibition of the lapidary’s skill superior to anything yet furnished by the Stone Age of 
either continent,”t appear to be not uncommon, in the same post-pliocene formation where 
the fossil remains of the elephant and mastodon abound. Dr. Abbott has not overlooked 
the danger to which the archeologist is thus exposed on a continent which, so far as its 
aborigines are concerned, may be said to be still in its Stone Age. He accordingly remarked 
in his‘original report: “The chance occurrence of single specimens of the ordinary forms 
of Indian relics, at depths somewhat greater than they have usually reached, even in con- 
stantly cultivated soils, induced me, several years since, to carefully examine the underlying 
gravels, to determine if the common surface-found stone implements of Indian origin were 
ever found therein, except in such manner as might easily be explained, as in the case of 
deep burials by the uprooting of large trees, whereby an implement lying on the surface, or 
immediatefy below it, might fall into the gravel beneath, and subsequently become buried 
several feet in depth; and lastly, by the action of the water, as where a spring swollen by 
spring freshets, cuts for itself a new channel, and carrying away a large body of earth, leaves 

* Primitive Industry, p. 547. 
+ Ibid, p. 545. 
Ÿ Foster’s Prehistoric Races, p. 55. 
