PRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN. 57 
approximately assigned to American palolithic man is recent indeed, geologically speaking, 
But on any assumption of a common pedigree for the modern Eskimos and the Cave-men 
of Europe’s palæolithic age, it is entirely consistent to place the post-glacial man of Ame- 
rica in what may be accepted as an intermediate epoch. But so recent and specific a 
date as the assigned interval of ten thousand years implies, suggests a very partial 
appreciation of all the phenomena, including the enormous physical changes, involved ; 
or of the estimated interval which geologists have deduced as separating us from 
glacial times. “The last glimpse,” says Prefessor Geikie, “we obtain of palzeolithic 
man is in Southern France, where the reindeer and its alpine and northern congeners were 
his companions ; the first glimpse we get of his Neolithic successor is in Middle Europe, 
from which the northern fauna and flora had already taken their departure.”* The 
changes in climate, fauna and flora, implied in the contrast which is seen between the 
contents revealed to the explorers of the caves inhabited by the palæolithic hunters, and 
those of the kitchen middens of Denmark, and the lake dwellings of Switzerland, furnish 
evidence of a new geological epoch not less definite than the changes which separate the 
pleiocene and pleistocene into well-defined periods. The phenomena which a study of the 
geology of Europe’s Paleolithic period reveals, can only be accounted for on the assumption 
of a vast lapse of time between the advent and the disappearance of palæolithie man. 
Between that and the true Neolithic period, another considerable interval of time must 
have transpired. Sir Charles Lyell, when aiming at some approximate estimate of the age 
of the glacial period of Europe, names an interval of 800,000 years as that which divides 
us from its climax of extreme cold. Dr. John Evans, without attempting to guage the 
interval by years or centuries, contents himself with an appeal to the imagination of the 
intelligent observer, as he stands on the edge of a lofty cliff, such as that at Bournemouth, 
and, taking in at one view the wide expanse of bay between the Needles and the Ballard 
Down Foreland, he invites him to estimate the immensely remote epoch when what is 
now that vast bay was dry land, and a range of chalk downs, 600 feet above the present 
sea, bounded the horizon. Yet, he says, “ this must have been the sight that met the eyes 
of those primeval men who frequented the beaches of that ancient river, which buried 
their handiworks in gravels that now cap the cliffs, and of the course of which so strange 
but indubitable a memorial subsists in what has now become the Solent Sea.’ + 
But the fancy of an Eskimo pedigree for Europe’s paleeolithic man chimes in with an 
old idea of the American antiquary that the Skralings referred to in the Eric Saga were 
Eskimos, as is far from improbable, though the assumption rests on no definite evidence. 
Dr. Abbott accordingly reproduces the statement of Professor Dawkins, in confirmation of 
the revived belief. “We are without a clue to the ethnology of the river-drift man, who 
most probably is as completely extinct at the present time as the woolly rhinoceros or the 
cave-bear ; but the discoveries of the last twenty years have tended to confirm the identi- 
fication of the cave-man with the Eskimo.” Such a fanciful hypothesis once accepted as 
fact, its application to American ethnology is easy; and so Dr. Abbott proceeds to appeal 
unhesitatingly to evidence sufficient “to warrant the assertion that the palæolithie man 
* Prehistoric Europe, p. 380. 
7 Ancient Stone Implements of Gt. Britain, p. 621. 
Sec. II., 1883 8. 
