178 



POPULAR SCIET^CE I^EWS. 



[December, 1889. 



crystals, and possibly some of the matrix, a diorite. 

 The dull red color of the weathered cliff is due to 

 oxidation of the iron pyrites. Where the surface 

 has not been so long exposed, iridiscence may be 

 discovered. 



A magnificent exposure of crystalline hornblende 

 is next examined, and then the car is drawn off on 

 another line to Copper Cliff mine, where the work- 

 ings are some distance below the surface. Here it 

 is that the crushing machine crunches luinps of ore 

 from all the mines, and sends them down a chute to 

 be screened. The roasting heaps and smelting fur- 

 naces are visited, and then, as the party waits for 

 the engine to take them back to Sudbury, Dr. Bell 

 lucidly explains to the younger members the mean- 

 ing of the various processes that they have seen. It 

 was a weird scene ; the sun sinking, a molten mass, 

 behind the blackened trunks, and the furnaces and 

 two or three frame boarding-houses alone suggesting 

 life in a wilderness of desolation wrought by the 

 fumes of the burning ore. 



On Thursday morning a special engine drew the 

 car on to Onaping, stopping at every exposure of 

 rock to enable the geologists to see for themselves 

 something of the system lying immediately above 

 the Laurentian gneiss, which has excited so much 

 interest among geologists generally, and given rise 

 to so many differences of opinion concerning its 

 nature and stratigraphical position. Naturally, 

 therefore, the outcrops and railway cuttings occa- 

 sioned vigorous discussion among the geologists of 

 the party, and many of the younger members found 

 pleasure and instruction in closely following the 

 debate. The botanical opportunities of the occasion 

 were not neglected, and at Vermillion River anthro- 

 pological interest was excited by a small band of 

 Ojibway Indians encamped close to an abandoned 

 outpost of the Hudson Bay Company. The tents, 

 birch-bark canoes, and the papooses laced up in 

 beds of moss and strapped to flat boards with con- 

 veniently hooped handles, were, to most of the 

 party, objects of curiosity, — as, no doubt, were a 

 party of people loading themselves with stones and 

 plants, to the Indians. 



Once more it seemed that Sudbury was reached 

 too soon, when a return was made there for dinner; 

 and when, in the afternoon, the car was attached to 

 an east-bound train, it was not without regret that 

 the party contemplated a return from this wild, new 

 country to the older civilization of their homes. 



**y 



[Original in The Popular Science JSfews.i 

 PRE-HISTORIC MAN. 



BY JOSEPH WALLACE. 



Many attempts have been made the past thirty 

 years, in Europe and America, to locate man in the 

 Miocene epoch. The discovery of stone implements 

 in gravel beds in the bluffs of the Delaware River, 

 near Trenton, N. J., raised the question as to the 

 antiquity of man in America, since these grand 

 deposits are believed to have been formed by glacial 

 action. But established proof of the existence of 

 Miocene human remains is still wanting. 



Dr. Abbott, who first called attention to the relics 

 in the Trenton gravel, was quite astonished to find 

 together implements of such various characters of 

 workmanship, and concluded that the poli$hed pieces 

 descended from the Indians who lived on the Dela- 

 ware a few centuries ago, the rougher ones, on the 

 contrary, from the Autochtones of the Paleolithic 

 time. This conclusion was disputed by Professor 

 J. M. Hugues, before the Cambridge Philosophical 

 Society, November 21, 1S76, who expressed his 

 doubts about the existence of the pre-glacial man ; 

 and Southall says that it is a wrong conclusion 

 altogether, as there cannot be any doubt that all the 

 pieces come from the same time. Consequently, 



that Dr. Abbott attributes to the pieces found in the 

 same place, a higher antiquity or different epochs, 

 merely because they are more or less rudely worked, 

 is not sufficiently well founded to gain general con- 

 fidence. However, we find French and Belgian 

 savants leading in these researches, and have, in a 

 measure, been quite successful in finding many 

 relics, which go to prove that man existed at a very 

 early period — much earlier than those who are not 

 blessed with scientific knowledge, have ever dreamt 

 or even conceived. 



There is no question to the Diluvian man as an 

 established fact. The name Diluvian is universally 

 given by modern geologists to a whole geological 

 period and formation, which is supposed to be the last 

 of the many geological resolutions that have been 

 produced by violent eruptions of water after the Ice 

 Age. It was not a simultaneous and general inun- 

 dation of the whole earth, but, instead of this, a 

 series of geological events took place, which occurred 

 partly in the human and partly in the pre-human 

 period, proof being wanting of a distinct separation 

 between the primeval and the recent fauna and 

 flora. On the contrary, it seems as if by degrees, 

 long before the first appearance of man, many 

 species of plants and animals had died out and had 

 been replaced by others, and that this took place in 

 consequence of geological convulsions, changes of 

 climate, and other causes, and occurred at different 

 times and in different countries. 



Dr. Dawson says : It seems not improbable that 

 it was when the continents had attained to their 

 greatest extension, and when animal and vegetable 

 life had again overspread the new land to its utmost 

 limits, that man was introduced on the eastern con- 

 tinent, and with him several mammalian species, 

 not known in the Pliocene period, and some of 

 which— as the sheep, the goat, the ox, and the dog 

 — have ever since been his companions and humble 

 allies. These, at least,' in the west of Europe, were 

 the Paleolithic men, the makers of the oldest flint 

 implements, and, armed with these, they had to 

 assert the mastery of man over broader lands than 

 we now possess, and over many species of great 

 animals now extinct. 



Many reasons could be brought up to show that 

 man could not exist in the earlier Tertiary epochs. 

 The Pliocene man who, of all the Tertiary men, 

 yet holds the fort, if strictly taken, does not need 

 to be older than the Diluvian man, whose existence 

 is firmly establislied, and man contemporaneous 

 with the Ice Age will, perhaps, remain unknown 

 for some time, because it is very probable that he 

 avoided those countries which were vast ice-fields — 

 inhospitable and extremely cold. 



The researches of Schmerling, Dupont, Perthes, 

 Lartel, Mortillet, Hamy, Madaillac, Desnoyer, 

 Capellini, Abbe Burgeois, and others, in the caves 

 and Pliocene deposits of France and Belgium, have 

 brought to light numerous evidences of man living 

 with the great bears, reindeer, the great feline 

 species, the mammoths, etc., when the physical and 

 climatological conditions were absolutely different 

 from the actual conditions. It is especially there 

 we find human remains from the Post-Glacial 

 times, particularly in the cavern deposits of Bel- 

 gium. 



In 1833, Schmerling found in the fossils of Liege, ' 

 proof of the living together of man with the now 

 greater extinct mammalia. E. Dupont was com- 

 missioned by the Belgian government to explore 

 the caves of the province of Namur, and in the 

 course of seven years he explored sixty in Namur 

 and Dinant. Of the animal remains, he brought to 

 light 40,000, many of them so well preserved that a 

 zoological determination could be attempted ; stones 

 showing the work of human ha,i.nds numbered about 



80,000. The human remains proved to be of the 

 Canstadt and Cro-magnon races — Paleocosmic or 

 Antediluvian men. Two of these skeletons were 

 found on the floor of the grotto of Spy, on the 

 Orneau River, near Namur, and associated with 

 various implements of flint and stone. 



The Canstadt man is described by Faipont and 

 Lohest as a peculiar race, and not precisely similar 

 to any modern one, although all of their peculiarities 

 may be found in certain races and in occasional 

 individuals. Their stature was short, body thickset 

 and muscular, with somewhat bandy-legged gait, 

 such as is seen in savages frequenting forests. The 

 I head is long, but low, with projecting eyebrows and 

 receding forehead, but with a somewhat large brain 

 case; large orbits, high and wide cheek-bones, giv- 

 ing a broad face ; jaws massive, the lower jaw reced- 

 ing abruptly, so as to produce a receding chin. 

 These are not prepossessing characters fcr early 

 European men, but they are entirely human and not 

 simian, and exist today in certain tribes of American 

 Indians, Negroes, and Australians, though in these 

 with a less full development of the brain. The 

 eminent naturalist, Qiiatrefages, says that Robert 

 Bruce, St. Mansuy, Bishop of Toule, and the mod- 

 ern Danish statesman, Kai-Likke, had Canstadt 

 shaped skulls. 



His contemporary, the man of Cro-magnon or 

 Engis, was of superior style, — tall, powerfully built, 

 with a less repulsive countenance, and good fore- 

 head. His brain case was larger than that of 

 European men of today, and much on a par with 

 the larger and better developed races of interior and 

 northern Asia and North America, — a man fit to 

 make his way in a world larger than the present, 

 and full of great and formidable beasts. 



Mortillet's collection and classification of types, 

 together with the stone, flint, and bone instruments 

 used by them, are noiV in the St. Germain Museum, 

 near Paris. The Acheulian type, first discovered 

 by M. de Perthes, is regarded as the oldest and lowest 

 human type ; the next is the type of Moustier, the 

 third is the type of Solutre, the fourth is the type of 

 Madelaine, the fifth is the type of Robenhausen, the 

 latter being discovered at Zurich, Switzerland. 

 Hamy has made out a full dozen of types, but his 

 classification and hypothesis do not meet general 

 approval, as he is regarded wild and visionary, and 

 badly affected with " type disease." 



The man of Acheul is represented very low in the 

 human scale : one who knew enough to give an 

 edge to a stone, but not enough to fasten the same 

 to a handle. The man of Moustier came to the idea 

 to fasten his sharp stone to a handle ; the man of 

 Solutre knew how to give a point to his laurel- 

 shaped spear; the man of Madelaine abandoned 

 stone for bone and horn implements, and the man 

 of Robenhausen invents the art of pottery, makes 

 bone needles, and executes handsoine designs of 

 mammoth, reindeer, cave bear, and other animals on 

 pieces of ivory. 



FoRM.\TiON OF Nitre Deposits. — Caves con- 

 taining deposits of earth with from 4 to 30 per cent, 

 of calcium nitrate and 5 to 60 per cent, of calcium 

 phosphate are common in Venezuela, not only in 

 the littoral mountain chains, but also on the flanks 

 of the Cordillera of the Andes. In these deposits 

 are embedded remains of mammalian bones, pre- 

 serving their form, but so friable as to fall to pow- 

 der when they are extracted. They consist solely of 

 calcium phosphate ; the gelatine' has been nitrified 

 and dissolved out, and the calcium carbonate of the 

 bone has been used up in neutralizing the nitric 

 acid produced. The nitric ferment is found in 

 abundance throughout the deposits in a very well 

 developed form. Some of these deposits are 10 

 metres thick. 



