846 THE JOURNAL OF GEOLOGY. 



without traversing extensive cold and mountainous tracts quite 

 prohibitory to a strictly primitive naked man of tropical origin, 

 unless such transit were made in the early part of the Tertiary 

 era before the development of cold northern climates and before 

 the erection of the modern mountain systems. The early Ter- 

 tiary, however, was an era of submergence rather than of eleva- 

 tion and land connection, and the possibility of such migration 

 is extremely doubtful. Primitive man cannot well be supposed 

 to have gained access to America by water until he had learned 

 the art of navigation, or, in other words, until he had reached a 

 somewhat advanced state of civilization. The strong presump- 

 tion is, therefore, that man came to America only after he had 

 attained to a stage of development much beyond the primitive one. 

 It would appear that he must have become possessed of the power 

 of protecting himself from the vicissitudes of climate and of 

 securing the means of living under adverse conditions, or else 

 had acquired the arts of navigation to an extent that would per- 

 mit him to cross from the one continent to the other in warm 

 latitudes. 



As man's full evolution did not, therefore, probably take 

 place on this continent, a complete series of relics of that evo- 

 lution cannot be looked for here. Hence a system of interpreta- 

 tion of fossil relics which is based upon a theory of complete 

 evolution here or which presumes the existence here of a com- 

 plete series of relics does not carry inherent force, but rather the 

 contrary. It is more probable that the oldest fossil relics of man 

 on this continent represent, not a primitive, but some advanced 

 stage of evolution. There is no inherent reason for expecting 

 to find "paleolithic" or any other very primitive stage of culture 

 here, however well demonstrated that stage may be on the east- 

 ern continent. To establish the existence of that stage here, 

 unquestionable geological evidence, strong in itself and quite 

 independent of theoretical support, must be produced. The geo- 

 logical problem in America will be greatly clarified when it is 

 recognized that its solution must rest on strict stratigraphical and 

 palaeontological grounds, and not on any parallelism with a 



