34 THE JOURNAL OF GEOLOGY. 



loss to explain the occurrence that he felt compelled to again 

 " take up the examination of the gravel deposits of the valley of 

 the Delaware " with the hope of " finally solving the problem."' 

 The true conditions would have been at once apparent to any 

 one not utterly blinded by the prevailing misconceptions. 



The entire simplicity of the archeologic conditions in the 

 Delaware valley may be further illustrated. Had William Penn 

 paused in his arduous traffic with the tawny Delawares, and 

 glanced out with far-sighted eyes from beneath the pendant 

 branches of the great elm at Shackamaxon, he might have 

 beheld an uncouth savage laboriously fabricating rude ice age 

 tools, making the clumsy turtle - back, shaping the mysterious 

 paleolith, thus taking that first and most interesting theoretical 

 step in human art and history. Had he looked again a few 

 moments later he might have beheld the same tawny individual 

 deeply absorbed in the task of trimming a long rude spear point 

 of " Eskimo " type from the refractory argillite. If he had 

 again paused when another handful of baubles had been judi- 

 ciously exchanged, he would have seen the familiar redskin 

 carefully finishing his arrow points and fitting them to their 

 shafts preparatory to a hunting and fishing cruise on the placid 

 Delaware. Thus in a brief space of time Penn might have 

 gleaned the story of the ages — the history of the turtle -back, 

 the long spear point and their allies — ^as in a single sheaf. But 

 the opportunity was wasted, and the heaps of flinty refuse left 

 upon the river bank by the workmen were the only record left 

 of the nature of the work of that day. Two hundred years of 

 aboriginal misfortune and Quaker inattention and neglect have 

 resulted in so mixing up the simple evidence of a day's work, 

 that it has taken twenty-five years to collect the scattered frag- 

 ments, to sift, separate and classify them, and to assign them to 

 theoretic places in a scheme of culture evolution that spans ten 

 thousand years. 



Yet is there really nothing in it all, in the theories, the 



' Abbott, C. C. Annual Report of the Curator of the Museum of American 

 Archeology, University of Pennsylvania. No. I, p. 7. 



