476 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1935 



national collections at once yielded him several hundred likely ob- 

 jects, many of them actually labeled " Rude and unfinished imple- 

 ments of the Paleolithic Type " and derived from practically all 

 sections of the United States, including a few from the environs of 

 Washington itself. Private collectors supplied many more speci- 

 mens, gathered principally from the hills in and around the Capital 

 City ; and a personal visit to the local sites thus indicated revealed 

 these rude " implements " in great profusion and added a round 300 

 items to his series, making a total of 745 for the District of Columbia 

 alone and a grand total for the country of about 1,400 specimens. 

 Highly gratified, Curator "Wilson's comparative studies next em- 

 boldened him to state that our American coups-de-poing were not 

 only similar to those of Europe but identical with them in both form 

 and purpose. On the strength of these observations he sent out in 

 1888, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, an illustrated 

 circular calling for additional information. It came quickly in 

 the shape of 209 replies, 33 of them accompanied by actual speci- 

 mens. As a result, a table was published in the cited report which 

 purports to demonstrate the existence of Paleolithic implements in 

 35 of the United States and Territories, as well as in the adjacent 

 Canadian Province of Ontario, and which places the number of speci- 

 mens then available in the National Museum at 1,739 and the total 

 reported upon at the grand figure of 8,501. 



Meanwhile, during this same ninth decade, conservative as well 

 as critical students made their timely appearance. Among the first 

 the most formidable, or at least the best informed, was Prof. H. W. 

 Haynes, of Boston. Like Wilson, he was conversant with the details 

 of European archeological investigations, claimed to have discovered 

 the first known paleoliths in Egypt, and was the possessor of person- 

 ally made prehistoric collections from va]ious parts of the eastern 

 United States. On the basis of his study of these latter data he 

 expressed himself as convinced that our rude American implements 

 occurred in isolation and that they were not of Indian origin; but 

 at the same time he was not prepared to vouch for their true Paleo- 

 lithic character and still less for their geologic antiquity.'' 



The real opposition was led by Prof. W. H. Holmes, of the Bureau 

 of American Ethnolog}^ in Washington, D. C, who, according to per- 

 sonal communications, stepped into his role of critic in the late 

 eighties as a direct result of the claims made by Thomas Wilson and 

 F. W. Putnam. In the course of the next 10 years he patiently inves- 

 tigated, or reinvestigated, not only the District of Columbia sites but 

 many other more famous localities throughout the countrj'^, including 



" Proc. Boston See. Nat. Hist., vol. 21, p. 382, 1882. See also Haynes and others in 

 Justin Wiusor"s Narrative and critical history of America, vol. 1, part 2, pp. 329-412. 



