PREHISTORIC MAN IN AMERICA. 91 



Once it came to be fully believed that man was a mammal in the sense that 

 systematists had recognized him to be, but a species of mammal among hundreds 

 of other mammals, who, with them, had some common ancestry, and the study 

 of archaeology assumed the rank of an inductive science. A short time has seen 

 the formation of imposing societies, many of them highly endowed; of magnifi. 

 cent museums, devoted exclusively to the preservation and exhibition of objects 

 pertaining to this science ; the publication of anthropological journals and trans, 

 actions, and, above all, the production of a large number of illustrated works, 

 which bring the science to the comprehension of the general reader. 



It is quite necessary to understand all this to comprehend the amazing growth 

 of a study which should have interested the race centuries ago. At the outset, 

 the term prehistoric man was looked upon as applying to a people who lived be- 

 fore the dawn of recorded history — a people who lived, not in any hypothetical 

 ■Eden, but among other places, in the valleys of France and the caves of Belgium 

 and England. 



So limited was his area, and so apparently similar were all his characteristics, 

 that for a time no further subdivision was necessary. A few years ago, compara- 

 tively speaking, his high antiquity and wide distribution over the face of the 

 earth was not dreamed of. No account was taken of any possible geological 

 changes having occurred since his appearance. It was enough to assert, with 

 more or less positiveness, that his remains were synchronous with those of a few 

 extinct species of mammals. That the contours of the land and ocean bounda- 

 ries were essentially the same for prehistoric man as for his historic descendants, 

 could not for a moment be doubted. That during man's early reign the English 

 Channel and Irish Sea had no existence, and an uninterrupted sweep of forest ex- 

 tended from the regions of Paris and London and across and beyond Ireland, far 

 out to the present one-hundred-fathom line, no one dreamed of conceiving. 



In the light of this knowledge, it is instructive to quote Dr. Wilson's words 

 in his "" Prehistoric Annals of Scotland." In reference to the Scottish aboriginal 

 traces he says : "There is one certain point in this inquiry into primitive arts 

 which the British antiquary possesses over all others, and from which he can start 

 without fear of error. From our insular position it»is unquestionable that the first 

 colonist of the British Isles must have been able to construct some kind of a boat 

 and have possessed sufficient knowledge of navigation to steer his course through 

 the open sea." Such were the positive and emphatic utterances of a writer who, 

 in his recent valuable work on prehistoric man, in referring to this very passage 

 confesses that this was no certain postulate after all, and who recognizes the pro- 

 found geological changes which have taken place since paleolithic man first chip- 

 ped the rude stone celts whose imperishable characters give us our only clue to 

 his existence. 



The hypothesis of geological changes of any magnitude being excluded, it 

 was impossible at that time to grasp the true import of rude chipped flints deeply 

 buried in river gravel. Just as soon as the early remains could be looked upon 



