34. GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



lying against it, and to which modern Indians 

 resorted to find material for implements, and left 

 behind them rejected or unfinished pieces. This 

 alleged discovery has therefore no geological or 

 anthropological significance. The same acute and 

 industrious observer has inquired into a number of 

 similar cases in different parts of the United States, 

 and finds all liable to objections on similar grounds, 

 except in a few cases in which the alleged implements 

 are probably not artificial. These observations not 

 only dispose, for the present at least, of palaeolithic 

 man in America, but they suggest the propriety of a 

 revision of the whole doctrine of ' palaeolithic ' and 

 * neolithic ' implements as held in Great Britain and 

 elsewhere. Such distinctions are often founded on 

 forms which may quite as well represent merely local 

 or temporary exigencies, or the debris of old work- 

 shops, as any difference of time or culture. 



For the present, therefore, we may afford to pass 

 over with this slight notice the alleged occurrence of 

 miocene and pliocene man, and this the rather since, 

 if such men ever existed in the northern hemisphere, 

 the cold and submergence of the pleistocene must 

 have cut them off from their more modern successors 

 in such a way that man must practically have made 

 a new beginning at the close of the glacial age. 



I do not refer here to the finds of skulls and 

 implements in the auriferous gravels of Western 

 America. Some of these, if genuine, might go back 

 to the pliocene age, but in so far a.s the evidence now 



