DISCOVERY 



265 



the loquacious Pigafetta break silence concerning 

 the personality whom he obviously loved so well. 

 Remembering that blood-stained beach he cannot 

 restrain himself, but breaks off his narrative to address 

 himself directly to his patron, the famous Grand 

 Master of Rhodes, Villiers de I'lsle Adam : 



"He died: but I hope your illustrious Highness 

 will not allow his memory to be lost, so much the 

 more since I see revived in you the virtue of so great 

 a captain, since one of his principal virtues was con- 

 stance in the most adverse fortune. In the midst of 

 the sea he was able to endure hunger better than we. 

 Most versed in nautical charts he knew better than 

 any other the art of navigation, of which it is a certain 

 proof that he knew by his genius and his intrepidity 

 without anyone having given him the example how- 

 to attempt the circuit of the globe which he had 

 almost completed." ^ 



Many men have had a worse epitaph : few men have 

 deserved a better. 



REFERENCES 

 Lord Stanley of Aldersley. The First Voyage round the World 

 bv Magellan, translated from the Accounts of Pigafetta and 

 other Contemporary Writers. (Hakluyt Society, 1874.) 

 This contains a translation, with short notes and an intro- 

 duction, of all the relevant contemporary documents, the 

 authorship of some of which is in dispute. 

 Some additional information will be found in Early Spanish 

 ]'oyages to Magellan's Strait, edited by Sir Clements 

 Markham (Hakluyt Society, igii). There is also a 

 Life of Magellan, by F. H. Guillemard (London, 1890). 

 See also the article Magellan by Prof. Beasley, in the 

 Encycl. Brit, (nth edition, vol. xvii, p. 302). 



The Antiquity of Man in 

 America — r 



By E. N. Fallaize, B.A. 



Hon. Sec. Rnjal Anthropnloijical InsliUile 



Americ-\ has always been a centre of interest to the 

 student of man and his culture. The highly developed 

 civilisation of the central area has been the subject of 

 many theories, fantastic and otherwise, while the 

 origin of the American race — a race lauded as the 

 noblest or vilified as the basest of mankind according 

 to the prepossessions or prejudices of early writers — 

 was a puzzle which for long was the subject of con- 

 jecture. In the circumstances it need hardly be said 

 that the original stock has not failed to be derived 

 from the ubiquitous Ten Tribes of Israel. In the 

 early days of discovery the Indians were held to be 



1 Stanley, p. 102. 



2 For the order of the geological ages mentioned in this 

 article the reader is referred to the table illustrating Professor 

 AVegener's article in Discovery for May last. 



outside the pale of humanity because they were not 

 mentioned in Holy Writ ; while a more lenient view 

 regarded them as the descendants of the Canaanites 

 e.xpelled from the Holy Land by Joshua. 



In considering the origin and antiquity of man in 

 America and the relation of this problem to the 

 question of the evolution of the human race, there 

 are, broadly speaking, three problems which present 

 themselves for consideration : 



1. What was the origin of the American-Indian 

 population found by the Spanish explorers on 

 their arrival and as it exists to-day ? Was this 

 population aboriginal or was it immigrant ? In 

 the latter case, when and whence did it arrive ? 



2. What degree of antiquity can be assigned to 

 the existence of man on the American continent ? 



3. If a high degree of antiquity can be assigned 

 to man in the New World, and if we accept the 

 view which derives all races of men from a single 

 origin, does the evidence point to an origin in the 

 Old World, from which early man in America is 

 an offshoot, or, vice versa, was the old world stock 

 derived from America ? 



Interest in these questions, upon which there had 

 come to be almost a general agreement among a 

 majority of anthropologists, has again been aroused 

 by the discovery of a fossil tooth of an early human 

 or sub-human type in the Upper Snake Creek beds of 

 Nebraska. The tooth was forwarded to the American 

 Museum of Natural History by its finder, Mr. Harold 

 L. Cook, of the United States Geological Survey, and 

 is described by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborne in 

 American Musemn Novitates of April 25 last. It has 

 been pronounced by two eminent authorities on fossil 

 teeth, Drs. W. D. Matthews and W. K. Gregory, to 

 belong to a hitherto unknosvn species more nearly 

 resembling Pitbccantliropiis crectus, the ape-man of 

 Java, and man than the apes. Pithecanthropus eredits 

 is now regarded by most competent authorities as 

 definitely within the human family, and, up to the 

 present, has been held to be its earliest representa- 

 tive. Although it was at first assigned to the Upper 

 Pliocene, the last phase of the Tertiary period, it is 

 now considered to belong to the Pleistocene, the first 

 period of the Quaternary Age, immediately preceding 

 geologically recent times. As the Upper Snake Creek 

 beds belong to the Upper Pliocene, both the geological 

 and the morphological evidence suggest that in this 

 tooth we have a relic of the earliest and most primi- 

 tive member of the human family yet known. 



It will immediately be apparent that this discovery, 

 should further investigation bear out the estimate of 

 its early character, has a bearing of immense importance 

 on the general problem of the origin and antiquity of 

 man, as well as on the history of the human race in 



