220 GILPIN ON THE STONE AGE OF NOVA SCOTIA. 



found its way into the fissure to die, or the body must have by 



some means been carried in, previous to the washing down of the 



lead ore from higher levels, or before the waters carrying the lead 



dn solution precipitated it on these remains. A mineral vein is a 



.most unusual position in which to find organic remains ; and the 



( modernness of these clearly demonstrates the changes which mineral 



veins are subject to under the favorable conditions which this 



; region presents. 



ArTo IV, On the Stone Age of Nova Scotia. By J, 

 Bernard Gilpin, A. B., M. D., M, E. C. S., 



{Read Feb. 10, 1873.) 



Writers upon the Stone Age of the old world -know nothing 

 of the habits.9 the manners, not even the forms of the prehistoric 

 men who fashioned those stone axes and celts, (almost their only 

 record) which have of late excited so great interest. The age of 

 Bronze is a myth. The age of Stone has swallowed every myth in 

 its fabulous antiquity. Not so when we study our own stone 

 period. We know from contemporaneous writers their forms, their 

 [habits, their clothing, their wars, their peaces ; we can bring to the 

 I mind's eye the brown hands that toiled over pointing an agate, or 

 ground down the edge of an axe, — the dusky red man who fished 

 the short summer, hunted the long winter, eat of no bread, asked 

 nothing of the fair land he lived in, but shelter for his game, and 

 its profusion of wild berries which it cost him no toil to gather. 



Among the gentlemen who followed DeMonts in planting in 

 the year 1603, the French colony at Port Royal, now Annapolis, 

 Nova Scotia, was LesCarbot. From an old and rare translation 

 (London 1712,) of his original work published 1607 in France, 

 from the library of T. B. Akins, Esq., I quote the following parti- 

 culars of the habits of our Nova Scotian Indians, at the period of 

 160e3, now two hundred and seventy years gone, and what may be 

 called the end of their stone age. When it began, we can scarcely 

 conjecture. 



