302 



NATURAL SCIENCE. May, 



vegetables, &c., consigned to a Belgian station before 8 a.m. is 

 delivered the next morning in the London markets at 5 a.m." The 

 carriage rates are not given, but their advertisement would probably 

 not add to the farmers' joy. 



The Antiquity of Man in the Eastern United States. 



The Delaware caves and the Glacial Gravels of Trenton, Nev/ 

 Jersey, have long been regarded by some writers as affording evidence 

 of Glacial Man, although others have not accepted this conclusion. 

 The question has been thoroughly investigated by Mr. Henry C. 

 Mercer, curator of the Museum of American and Pre-historic 

 Archeology of Pennsylvania University. Mr. Mercer had previously 

 sought for the remains of pre-historic man in the hill-caves of Yucatan, 

 Central America {see Natural Science, vol. viii., p. 159, 1896), and 

 had further qualified himself for the present researches by study of 

 drift implements in the museums and private collections of Europe, 

 and of the localities at which they have been found in England, 

 Belgium, France, and Spain. The result of his investigations, which 

 may therefore be accepted with considerable confidence, appears, with 

 with one or two other essays, in a well illustrated volume of 178 pages, 

 entitled "The Antiquity of Man in the Delaware Valley and the 

 Eastern United States" (Ginn & Co., Boston, U.S., 1897). 



Mr. Mercer failed to find a single specimen in place at Trenton, 

 and became convinced that the argillite " turtlebacks " on which so 

 much stress has been laid, were "rejects" or wasters "the work of 

 modern Indians and intruded " into the glacial gravels. He shows 

 that whole quarries of argillite were worked by Indians, whose village- 

 sites are in the vicinity. The fact that after most careful and pro- 

 longed search nothing was discoverable anywhere else in the Delaware 

 Valley to corroborate the alleged antiquity of the chipped blades from 

 Trenton has led him to the conclusion "that the question of glacial 

 man has been narrowed down to evidence produced at one site, and 

 to a question of the correctness of observations of individuals." 



The same volume records the story of the exploration of an 

 Indian ossuary on the Choptauk River, Maryland. Professor E. D. 

 Cope describes the physical characters' of the bones found there, and 

 Dr. R. H. Harte discusses their diseased conditions. Mr. Mercer's 

 investigations of an aboriginal shell-heap on York River, Maine, 

 yielded evidences of cannibahstic practices. He also describes an 

 interesting rock shelter in Triassic shale, known as the " Indian 

 House," in the Delaware Valley, and recounts his exploration in 1893 

 of the famous Durham cave, which made known the fact, interesting 

 to palaeontologists, that a species of an extinct genus of the peccaries 

 [Mylohyus pennsylv aniens, Cope) had far out-lived the epoch usually 

 attributed to the animal in North America. Its remains were 

 undoubtedly " mingled with those of still existing animals, if not with 



