.3 



THE CANADIAN JOURNAL 



NEW SERIES. 



K"o. XYII.— SEPTEMBER, 1858. 



SOME ETHNOaEAPHIC PHASES OE CONCHOLOGT. 



BY DANIEL WILSON, LL B. 



PEOFESSOE OF HISTOET AND ENGLISH lilTEElTITEE, UKITEKSITT COLLEGE, TOEONTO. 



Read before the Canadian Institute, 5th Dec, 1857. 

 The existence of a singular class of rude primitive weapons and 

 implements, made of stone, shell, or bone, in nearly every quarter 

 of the globe, has excited a very general interest of late years among 

 the archaeologists of Europe. Made, as these simple relics of primi- 

 tive art are, of the most facile and readily wrought materials, and by 

 the constructive instincts rather than the acquired skill of their 

 rude artificers, they belong to one condition of man, in relation to the 

 progress of civilization ; though pertaining to many periods of the 

 world's history, and the most widely severed areas of the globe. In 

 one respect, however, — and not in this one alone, — such relics pos- 

 sess a peculiar value to the Ethnologist, when searching into the 

 primeval condition of our race. The materials of such infantile pro- 

 cesses of manufacture have within themselves most frequently the 

 evidences of their geographical origin, and in some of them also of 

 their chronological eras. The periods to which numerous ancient 

 sepulchral and other British and European relics pertain may fre- 

 quently be determined, like those of inferior and older strata, by 

 their embedded fossils The bones of the J5os primigenius have been 

 found indented with the primitive stone javelin of the aborigines of 

 Northern Europe ; while those of the Megaceros Hihernicus have 

 been discovered alongside of the more artistic bronze weapons of 

 YOL. III. Z 



