86 SIE DANIEL WILSON 



extends, with slight interruption, from Briar Island to Cape Blomidon. Here the strong 

 tidal rush of the sea undermines the clitF, and the winter frosts split it up, so that every 

 year the shore is strewn with broken fragments from the clifF, exposing a variety of 

 crystalline minerals, such as jasper, agate, etc. The boach gravel is also interspersed with 

 numerous rounded pebbles derived originally from the same source. I am indebted to 

 Mr. Greorge Patterson, of New Glasgow, N.S., for some interesting notes on this subject. 

 The pebbles of this beach seem to have been one of the chief sources of supply for the 

 Indian implement-makers of Nova Scotia. Few localities have hitherto been noticed in 

 the Maritime Provinces marked by any such large accumulation of chips as would suggest 

 the probability of manufacture for the purpose of trade ; though chips and fiuished 

 implements occasionally occur together on the sites of Indian villages or encampments, 

 suggestive of individual industry and home manufacture. But Mr. Patterson informs me 

 that he has found one place at Bauchman's Beach, in the County of Lunenburg, which 

 furnishes abundant traces of an old native workshop. There, until recently, could be 

 gathered agate, jasper, and other varieties of the fine-grained crystalline minerals from the 

 trap, sometimes in nodules, rounded and worn, as they occur at the base of the ocean- 

 washed cliffs. At times they showed partial traces of working ; but more frequently they 

 were split and broken, bearing the unmistakable marks of the hammer. Along with 

 those were cores and large quantities of flakes, or chips, with arrow-heads, more or 

 less perfectly formed. At one time, according to Mr. Patterson's account, they might have 

 been gathered in bushels ; but recent inroads of the sea have swept away much of the old 

 beach, and strewed the products of the Indian stone-workers where they may be stored 

 for the wonder of men of other centuries. It is curious, indeed, to reflect on the strange 

 memorials of the life of ages, so diverse from those with which the palaeontologist 

 now deals, that are accumulating in the submarine strata in process of formation for the 

 instruction of coming generations, should our earth last so long. The world will, doubt- 

 less, have grown wiser before that epoch is reached. But it will require some discrimi- 

 tion, even in so enlightened an age, to read aright the significance of this mingling of 

 relics of rudest barbarism with all the products of modern civilization that are being 

 strtwn along the great ocean highways between the Old and the New World. 



A curious illustration of the possible confusion of evidence is shown by the discovery 

 in 1884, of a large stone lance-head of the Eskimo type, deeply imbedded in the tissues 

 of a whale taken at the whaling station on Ballast Point, near the harbour of San 

 Diego, California.' In the mviseum of the University of Edinburgh is the skeleton of a 

 whale, stranded in the ancient estuary of the Forth in a prehistoric age, when the ocean 

 tides reached the site which had been elevated into dry land long ages before the Roman 

 invaders of Caledonia made their way over it. Alongside of the buried whale lay a rude 

 deerhorn implement of the old Caledonian whaler ; and had the San Diego whale sunk 

 in deep waters off the Pacific coast, it would have perpetuated a similar memorial of 

 rudest savage life, in close proximity, doubtless, to evidences of modern civilization. 

 Such, though in less striking form, is the process of intermingling the arts of the American 

 Stone age with products of modern skill and refinement, that is now in progress off the 

 Lunenburg coast of Nova Scotia. The inroads of the sea have not, however, even now 



' Science, iii. 342. 



