April 17, 1903.] 



SCIENCE. 



619 



its preparation, may do a deal of harm or 

 an equal amount of good. That is, it may 

 give an erroneous conception of the culture 

 of the mound-building tribes in Ohio. A 

 scientific critic should be infallible. Mr. 

 Fowke is not infallible. Beginning with the 

 year 1803 and coming down to the present, 

 he has resurrected the published opinions of 

 scores of writers, and has held up their 

 theories to ridicule and contempt. But they 

 were the pioneers in American archeology. 

 These men made many mistakes. It would be 

 as logical for one interested in the develop- 

 ment of steam navigation to contrast Fulton's 

 steamboat with the Kaiser Wilhelm der 

 Orosse to the detriment of Fulton, as it is 

 for Mi. Fowke to measure these pioneers by 

 our present standard of knowledge. 



The whole tone of the book is that prehis- 

 toric man in Ohio is scarcely worthy of study; 

 that nothing new has been learned regarding 

 him ; that (p. 148) " Our museums are filling 

 up with material from all these sources, and 

 yet, for years, the accumulation has added 

 nothing in the way of real information to 

 what we already knew." 



If this is true, why continue work in pre- 

 historic anthropology? 



Mr. Fowke does not believe the prehistoric 

 earthworks and mounds required the time in 

 their construction assigned by other investi- 

 gators, who made many exaggerations. But 

 he presents a rather illogical argument. I 

 have space for only part of it. 



" Forty deck hands on a western steamboat, 

 working steadily, will transfer ten thousand 

 bushels of corn from the bank to the vessel 

 in one day. An equal weight of dry earth will 

 make a mound forty feet in diameter and ten 

 feet high" (p- 85). No Indian ever worked 

 as deck hands work. The corn in sacks and 

 usually handled on trucks, is rushed from the 

 deck into the warehouse, the negroes stimu- 

 lated to run by the curses of the mate. JMr. 

 Fowke places the natives, who had no shovels, 

 no trucks, and no inclined planes or board 

 floors on which to move the ' dry earth ' — 

 even as negroes hustle sacked corn — on a par 

 with the fastest workers of modem times. 

 The field testimony is that the earth for 



mounds was scooped up in the immediate 

 neighborhood and carried in baskets or skins. 

 This was naturally a slow process, as the na- 

 tives used stone or shell digging tools. 



On page 88 there is a sentence which is 

 calculated to prejudice the author in the eyes 

 of fair-minded men. Mr. MacLean, in one 

 of his books, refers to the mound-builders as 

 selecting the region between the lakes and 

 the gulf, the reason for which is apparent 

 to any observer. As to this opinion, Mr. 

 Fowke says, ' The last quotation is about as 

 sensible as to say that a man displayed great 

 literary inclination by electing to b'e born in 

 Boston.' 



He contends that the number of rings in 

 a tree is no evidence as to its age, to all of 

 which we may subscribe. But, unfortunately, 

 he cites all the trees of rapid growth in sup- 

 port of his argument, even bringing in trees 

 of tropical regions, as in Yucatan, where M. 

 Charnay found trees twenty-two years old two 

 feet in diameter. As to the great oaks four 

 or five feet in diameter, found on some of the 

 earthworks, he has nothing to say. 



Mr. W. C. Mills's important investigations 

 of the last few years are almost entirely 

 omitted. In many places Squier and Davis 

 are cited because their measurements are not 

 in accord with those of the author, who ignores 

 the fact that the diameter of an embankment 

 or of a mound may have been enlarged many 

 feet through continuous cultivation. The 

 Hopewell exploration, for example, showed 

 that the EjEgy mound was originally much 

 higher and narrower than even in Atwater's 

 time; to-day it is nearly one half larger and 

 broader than it was found to be in 1891. 

 Applying to this Mr. Fowke's method of 

 reasoning, the structure could never have had 

 the dimensions assigned to it by early ob- 

 servers. 



The chapter on Flint Eidge gives an ex- 

 haustive account of that famous site. The 

 pages devoted to the manufacture of imple- 

 ments and to the finished products are also, 

 with the exception of a few remarks on cere- 

 monial stones, above criticism. In such de- 

 scriptions and in field work the author is seen 

 at his best, and the critical student would be 



