OF THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 10^ 



own by 100,000 years. Professor Dawson, however, states with good 

 show of reason, that man could not possibly have existed in either 

 Europe or America at that early date, and that probably none of 

 these cavern deposits date further back than 6,000 or 7,000 years at 

 most. At a recent meeting of the French Association at Grenoble, 

 M. de Mortillet read a paper on Tertiary Man, in which he affirmed 

 the existence of man in the Tertiary Period. A number of flints 

 were exhibited from both the upper and lower Tertiary, which had 

 been intentionally chipped and exposed to fire. These traces, so 

 far from bringing us any nearer the original ape, show man in his 

 earlier stages to have been a being in many respects superior to 

 some of the savages of our own time. He was a man, and as such no 

 doubt had trade dealings with his fellow men, although at present 

 the evidences are not known. 



In America also, we have in the same unwritten history, testi- 

 mony of commercial relations existing between widely extended and 

 far distant tribes or communities. We find the natives of the coast 

 exchanging their shells for the metals of the north with the inland 

 tribes;. the inhabitants of the plains exchanging dried meats and 

 other products of the chase with the laborious mining population of 

 the region of the Great Lakes, while the agriculturalist of the south 

 carried home with him copper in exchange for his zea maize and 

 tobacco. 



This prehistoric man — this dweller i^ caves, crouching before 

 the entrance of some water worn cavity in the side of a rock, en- 

 gaged in the chipping of flint into implements, either for his own 

 use, or for the purposes of bartering with the other men of his time, 

 was the business man of the day, and the progenitor of the merchant 

 princes of the present time. 



The transition from the one to the other — from the rude 

 implement maker fashioning his stock in trade out of the hard flint, 

 to the Whitworths, the Armstrongs, and the Montcriefts, engaged in 

 manufacturing the hundred-ton guns and all the other modern 

 implements of war, is a great one, and is the result of the work of a 

 great many centuries. The change from the dwellers in countries 

 producing the favorite stone for the axes, chisels and other imple- 

 ments of war or the chase, carrying their wares from place to place 

 wherever they might be wanted, to the present day, when steamboat 



