560 INTER-GLACIAL AMERICAN MAN. 



the explorers have made extensive cuttings through the soil and 

 underlying drift-gravel, down to the slate-rock upon which it rests. 

 During one of these excavations, at a depth of some nine feet, in- 

 termingled with the gravel and boulders of the drift, three flint 

 implements were found, measuring between 3 and 4 inches in 

 length, and, according to the description of Mr. Jones, " in material, 

 manner of construction, and appearance so nearly resembling some 

 of the rough so-called flint hatchets belonging to the drift type, that 

 they might very readily be mistaken the one for the others." 



In some of the illustrations of American palaeolithic art thus 

 adduced, there are undoubted indications of an undue bias in favour 

 of the interpretation of the evidence in the direction of gi*eatest anti- 

 quity, even where, as in the case of an implement from Californian 

 gravel drift, the specimen adduced was a polished stone plummet, alto- 

 gether at variance with any palseotechnic processes hitherto disclosed. 

 But the most startling discoveries of primitive flint or stone im- 

 plements were of minor importance, in comparison with the recovery 

 of human remains from the auriferous drift of California. In 1857 

 Dr. C F. Winslow produced a fragment of a human skull found 

 eighteen feet below the surface, in the "pay drift" at Table Moun- 

 tain, in connection with the bones of the mastodon and fossil elephant. 

 A later disclosure brought to light a complete human skull, reported 

 to have been recovered from anriferous gravel, underlying five suc- 

 cessive lava formations. Professor Whitney, after inquiries which 

 satisfied himself of the genuineness of the discovery, produced the 

 skull at the Chicago meeting of the American Association for the 

 Advancement of Science, in 1869, to the manifest delight of some 

 who were prepared upon such evidence to relegate American man 

 to a remoter epoch than the flint-folk of the Abbeville and Amiens 

 gravel drift. It was subsequent to this startling production of a 

 complete human skull, assumed to be found in situ, in the drift, that 

 the highly polished plummet of syenite, in the form of a double cone 

 perforated at one end, was produced before the Chicago Academy of 

 Sciences, as an implement found at a depth of thirty feet, in the 

 drift gravel of San Joaquin, California, by workmen engaged in 

 digging a well. In this case also Professor Whitney appears to 

 have had no hesitation in assigning it to the age of the mastodon. 



That flint and stone implements of every variety of form, and 

 every degi'ee of rudeness of primitive art, abound in the soil of the 



