20 



THE ATLANTIC SLOPE NATURALIST. 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTES. 



Mr. Warren Upbam in the Ameri- 

 can Anthropologist goes on record as 

 considering that "The loess and the 

 Lansing skeleton are of Late Glacial 

 age, but are probably twice or perhaps 

 three times as ancient as the traces 

 of man in his stone implements and 

 quartz chips occurring in glacial 

 gravel and sand beds at Trenton, New 

 Jersey, and Little Falls, Minnesota. 

 In the Somme Valley and other parts 

 of France, as also in southern Eng- 

 land, stone implements in river drift 

 prove that man eixsted there before 

 the Ice age, that is, probably 100,000 

 years ago, or doubtless four or five 

 times longer ago than the date of the 

 skeleton at Lansing, Kansas. ' ' This 

 is guessing dates rather closely(?). 



The Imperial Diet of Japan has ap- 

 propriated a sum of money for a ' ' lin- 

 guistic commission" for the revision 

 of the Japanese language and its dia- 

 lects and also for the reduction of the 

 Chinese idiographs in common use. 



Prince P. Kropotkin's "Memoirs of 

 a Revolutionist" contains much in- 

 teresting and original information for 

 those who are interested in the present 

 disturbances in Manchuria and the 

 ethnic modifications which perhaps 

 may result therefrom. 



Professor Dr. E. Balz has left his 

 docentship in the University of Tokio 

 and will devote his time to anthropolog- 

 ical study in the islands of Eastern Asia. 



Dr. Alfredo Chavero has been ap- 

 pointed Director of the Museo Nacional 

 of Mexico. 



For centuries it has been told that 

 the American aborigines smoked the 

 bark of red- willow, either plain or 

 mixed with tobacco as necessity or 

 taste might dictate. Now, however, 

 Dr. Washington Matthews, in the 

 American Anthropologist for January- 

 March, 1903, brings forth strong evi- 

 dence which seems to indicate that 

 the Indians did not smoke red-wil- 

 low bark. Dr. Matthews, during 



many years spent among tribes in- 

 vestigated this question quite closely 

 and never found an instance where red- 

 willow bark was smoked, although lie 

 did find other plants besides tobacco so 

 used. 



Dr. A. Hrdlicka has received the 

 appointment of Assistant Curator in 

 the United States National Museum. 



W. E. R. 



Prehistoric Hammers. 



The box containing some two dozen 

 stone sledge hammers, which Professor 

 W. H. Holmes picked up from a pile of 

 1300, discovered by miners employed by 

 a Mr. Lewis Cox in his iron mine at Les- 

 lie, Mo., lying about in tunnels driven by 

 prehistoric man, will probably reach the 

 National Museum at an early date, says 

 a Washington exchange. Professor 

 Holmes states that the hammers are 

 made of black hematite and have no 

 other finish than a groove about the mid- 

 dle of each, showing where formerly they 

 were bound by wythes to wooden han- 

 dles. The arrow points which he found 

 in the neighborhood of this aboriginal 

 paint mine were all of flint and quartz, 

 and the reason, doubtless, why the ham- 

 mers, which are mere roughly-squared 

 stones, were made of the black hematite 

 instead of greenstone, jasper and other 

 stone of which the pre-Columbian Indians 

 fashioned their war axes, was owing 

 doubtless to the fact that the only material 

 hard enough to peck and chip away the 

 hard hematite in reaching the pockets of 

 red oxide was the hematite itself. The 

 discovery of a mummy in an ancient cop- 

 per mine in Chile, together with the im- 

 plements which had been employed in 

 life — a discovery made some few years 

 ago, in time to show the remains at the 

 Buffalo Exposition — revealed the fact 

 that, in mining, the pre-Columbian In- 

 dians had a way of hafting a large stone 

 hammer with two separate handles so 

 that it could be wielded with both hands, 

 and from the shape of the hammers from 

 the old Leslie works Professor Holmes 

 thinks that many of them were wielded 

 as two-handled hammers. — Ex. 



