INTER-GLACIAL AMERICAN MAN. 561 



New World, has been established by ample proof. But along with 

 this, it has ever to be borne in remembrance that its indigenous popu- 

 lation has not even now abandoned such arts. So striking, indeed, 

 is the analogy between the arts of the primitive cave men of Belgium 

 and France, and those of the Hyperborean race of this continent at 

 the present day, that Professor Boyd-Dawkins, in his Cave Hunting, 

 thus sums up a review of them: "All these facts can hardly be 

 mere coincidences, caused by both peoples leading a savage life 

 under similar circumstances : they afford reasons for the belief that 

 the Exkimos of North America are connected by blood with the 

 palseolithic Cave dwellers." Such a far-reaching deduction, which 

 would recognize in living tribes within the Arctic Circle of the 

 American continent lineal descendants of the Cave dwellers at the 

 head waters of the Garonne in Europe's mammoth and reindeer eras, 

 is not one to be accepted as yet as more than a hypothesis. But the 

 analogies thus rscogriized between the manufactured implements and 

 weapons of tribes at present in occupation of Arctic America and 

 those of the post-glacial if not of the inter-glacial races of Europe's 

 prehistoric dawn, warn the archaeologists of America of the danger 

 of error from a too hasty assumption of a like antiquity for chance- 

 found objects analogous in form to the river-drift implements of 

 Europe. 



But the Report of the, Peahody Museum of American Archaeology 

 and Ethnology for the pi-esent year, 1877, includes a special report 

 by Dr. Charles C. Abbott, setting forth the discovery of data from 

 which it is assumed that man may be shown to have existed on this 

 continent during the process of formation of the great gravel deposit, 

 now ascribed to glacial action, which extends from Labrador even as 

 far south as Yirginia ; and has been found specially available for 

 archaeological research in the valley of the Delaware river, near 

 Trenton, New Jersey. 



The great importance which attaches to the discoveries now referred 

 to is due to the fact that they are the result of a systematic research, 

 based on the scientific analogies of European archseology. For it is 

 important to bear in remembrance, in reference to such disclosures, 

 that the evidences of the antiquity of European man do not rest on 

 any number of scattered, chance discoveries of isolated illustrations 

 of primitive art. On the contrary, the traces of primeval man are 

 now successfully sought for on purely geological evidence. It is a 



