SKELETAL REMAINS 35 



receding lower jaw, such as might be expected in geologically ancient 

 man. The teeth are of ordinary size; they are worn off to a quite 

 marked extent, a condition which points to rather coarse vegetable 

 diet, and is general among Indians after early middle age. The canines 

 are in no w^ay morphologically peculiar, but their points have been 

 worn off to the level of the incisors; this happens invariably, unless 

 the teeth are displaced, as the process of attrition advances. 



There is, on the whole, nothing connected with the remnants of the 

 Penon skeleton which would indicate man of a type earlier than, or 

 radically different from, the Indian. 



XII. THE CRANIA OF TRENTON 



There is no other region oil this continent that has been brought as 

 conspicuously to the attention of archeologists and students of man s 

 antiquity as that along the Delaware river in and about Trenton, Ne\v 

 Jersey. This district is rich in deposits of glacial gravels, and for 

 nearly thirty years these have been searched wherever exposed for the 

 remains of early man and his art. For nearly twenty years, with a 

 few intermissions, Prof. F. W. Putnam, of the Peabody Museum, 

 Cambridge, Massachusetts, has carried on, principally through Mr. 

 E. Volk, careful explorations of these gravels, with the view of deter 

 mining the question of man s presence in the Delaware valley before 

 the advent there of the Indian. The deposits in the valley have 

 yielded many remains and relics of the Lenape (Delawares), who 

 occupied it up to and even for some time after the appearance of the 

 whites. They have yielded also implements which were thought to 

 belong to an earlier culture, and parts of human skeletons of a seem 

 ingly earlier people. Unfortunately, the geological evidence of the 

 presence of early man in the region is not conclusive, and the age of 

 many of the remains is still unsettled. The idea that during post- 

 Glacial time or even before the close of the Glacial period man lived 

 where Trenton now stands has found adherents, but the best-qualified 

 -students of the question, including Professor Putnam himself, main 

 tain a careful reserve. 



It was under these circumstances that the writer was invited 

 by Professor Putnam, in 1898, to examine all the osteological 

 material recovered in the Delaware valley and to determine what 

 the anatomical features of the remains indicate as to the antiquity of 

 the Trenton man. A detailed account of this examination was pub 

 lished in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 

 in 1902, and the essentials are here given, with additional observations 

 based on the writer s more recent knowledge of certain reports on 

 European crania. 



