FOSSIL MAN. 



263 



his wit stood him well in need to escape their 

 equally determined efforts to capture him. 

 While the seal and walrus disported in the 

 river, while fish in countless thousands stemmed 

 its floods, while geese and ducks in myriads 

 rested upon the stream, so, too, in the forest 

 roamed the mcose, the elk, the reindeer, the 

 bison, the extinct great beaver, and the masto- 

 don, all of which, save the elk, had long since 

 left for more northern climes when European 

 man first sighted North America. 



The association of man and the mastodon is 

 somewhat startling to most people ; but, as has 

 been time and again conclusively shown, it is ho 

 unwarranted fancy. We are apt to consider the 

 mastodon as a creature of so distant a time in 

 the unrecorded past, that man must necessarily 

 have appeared much later upon the scene. The 

 truth is, comparatively speaking, the creature so 

 recently became extinct that, in all probability, 

 our historic Indians were acquainted with it. 

 Certain it is that, in the distant long ago of the 

 great Ice age, the mastodon existed, and equally 

 certain that with him lived that primitive man 

 who fabricated the rude implements we have de- 

 scribed. The bones of the animal and the bones 

 and weapons of the man lie side by side, deep 

 down in the gravels deposited by the floods 

 from the melting ice-sheet. In February, 1885, 1 

 18 



