Io8 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



and rail are daily pouring millions of pounds worth of articles into 

 the various great markets of the world, is equally great, and occupied 

 a corresponding length of time. 



No estimate of the time necessary for the carrying out of such 

 a change can be given, or even guessed at. There are no means of 

 knowing. In tracing the course of this great transition time rela- 

 tive can only be used for a period which must necessarily have 

 occupied several thousand years, and if it be found that the man of 

 the Tertiary Period had commercial intercourse with his neighbors, 

 then the thousands may be indefinitely increased. We have written 

 history of commercial transactions occurring some two thousand 

 years before the birth of Christ, and traditions going several cen- 

 turies still farther back. In the Imperial museum at St. Petersburg, 

 there is a Chinese bank note dating from the 2200 year B. C. 

 As the Chinese of that period were in possession of paper money, 

 we may infer that their commerce was at least several hundred 

 years older. Of the trade in the days of the flint worker, however, 

 we have no such evidence as in the case of China, but only the 

 evidences left behind him in his works ; numerous specimens of 

 which have come down to our day. 



Beginning then, at the earliest links in the chain of which we 

 have any evidence whatever, we may with propriety consider the 

 proofs produced by Archaeologists in favor of the dwellers in pre- 

 historic times having had a certain commercial relation with each 

 other, although in many instances widely separated. Of the fact 

 that these people had such relations with each other, the evidences, 

 although not many, are indisputable. They may be treated 

 under the following five divisions, which, I think, embraces nearly 

 all the various proofs which can be offered : 



First : We frequently find articles of various kinds belonging 

 to both the so-called first and second stone periods in positions 

 which, apart from their form, the geology of the districts shews, 

 must have been carried by some means from the native home of the 

 material to the place where the article is found. 



Second : The carriage of the raw material or manufactured 

 implements must have been performed by human agency, the un- 

 disturbed character of the deposit in many places being such as to 



