ON THE STONE AG-E. 75 



among the vast accumulations of implements and waste chips, hereafter described, on the 

 sites of the ancient workers' industriovis operations, though some of those found else- 

 where may haA^e been used for such a purpose. 



The evidence that the ancient dwellers in the Ohio valley were still in their stone 

 age is indisputable. But to a people apparently under the guidance of an order or cast 

 far in advance of themselves in some important branches of knowledge, and by whom the 

 utility of the metals was beginning to be discerned — though they had not yet mastered 

 the first step in metallurgy by the use of fire, — their speedy advance beyond the neolithic 

 stage was inevitable. But an open valley, accessible on all sides, was peculiarly un- 

 favourable for the fii'st transitional stage of a people just emerging from barbarism. Their 

 numbers, it is obvious, were considerable ; and agriculture must have been carried out on 

 a large scale to furnish the means of subsistence for a settled community. They had 

 entered on a course which, if unimpeded, would inevitably tend to develop the higher 

 elements of social life and political organization. But their duration as a settled com- 

 munity appears to have been brief. Some faint tradition of the irruption of the northern 

 barbarians of the New World survives. The Iroquois, that indomitable race of savage 

 warriors, swept through the valley with desolating fury ; the dawn of civilization on the 

 northern continent of America was abruptly arrested ; and the present name of the great 

 river along the banks and on the tributaries of which their memorials abound, is one 

 conferred on it by their supplanters, who were eqiially successful in thwarting the aims 

 of France to introduce the higher forms of European civilization there. 



Some singularly interesting information relative to the traces of the ancient flint- 

 workers in the Ohio valley, is furnished in the paper of Mr. Sellers, already referred to. 

 His observations were made when that region still remained, to a large extent, undis- 

 turbed by civilized intruders on the deserted Indian settlements. He notes many places 

 along the banks of the Ohio and its tributaries, at an elevation above the spring floods 

 except at rare intervals of violent freshets, where the flaking process of the old flint- 

 workers had been extensively carried on, and where cores and waste chips abound. 

 " At one of those places, on the Kentucky side of the river," he says, " I found a number 

 of chert blocks, as when first brought from the c[uarry, from which no regular flakes had 

 been split ; some had a single corner broken oft' as a starting point. On the sharp right- 

 angled edge of several I found the indentations left by small flakes having been knocked 

 off, evidently by blows, as a preparation for seating the flaking tool. Most of the localities 

 referred to are now under cultivation. Before being cleared of the timber and subjected 

 to the plow, no surface relics were found, but on the caving and wearing away of the 

 river banks, many spear and arrow heads and other stone relics were left on the shore. 

 After the laud had been cleared, and the plough had loosened the soil, one of the great 

 floods that occur at intervals of some fifteen or twenty years, would wash away the loose 

 soil, leaving the great flint workshops exposed." There, accordingly, he notes among the 

 materials thus brought to light, the cores or nuclei thrown aside, caches stored with fin- 

 ished and unfinished implements and flakes, the tools and wastage, vast accumulations of 

 splinters, etc., all serving to illustrate the processes of the ancient flint-workers. 



The depth at which some accumulations occur, overlaid by the growth of the so- 

 called primeval forest, points to them as contemporary with, if not in some cases much 

 older than, the earthworks of the Mound-Builders. The extent, indeed, to which some 



