X viii MAN AND THE GLACIAL PERIOD. 



ously with the terminal moraine one hundred miles farther 

 northward, and which have been so thoroughly studied by 

 Abbott, that the most conclusive proof of the existence of 

 glacial man is found" (p. 23). "Excluding all doubtful 

 cases, there remains a fairly consistent body of testimony 

 indicating the existence of a widely distributed human 

 population upon the North. American continent during 

 the later Ice epoch" (p. 24). "However the doubtful 

 cases may be neglected, the testimony is cumulative, parts 

 of it are unimpeachable, and the proof of the existence of 

 glacial man seems conclusive " (p. 25). 



In view of the grossly erroneous statements made by Mr. 

 McGee concerning the Nampa image (described on pages 

 298, 299), it is necessary for me to speak somewhat more 

 fully of this important discovery. The details concern- 

 ing the evidence were drawn out by me at length in two 

 communications to the Boston Society of Natural History 

 (referred to on page 297), which fill more than thirty pages 

 of closely printed matter, while two or three years before 

 the appearance of the volume the facts had been widely 

 published in the New York Independent, the Scientific 

 American, The Nation, Scribner's Magazine, and the At- 

 lantic Monthly, and in Washington at a meeting of the 

 Geological Society of America in 1890. In the second 

 communication to the Boston Society of Natural History 

 an account was given of a personal visit to the Snake Eiver 

 Valley, largely for the purpose of further investigation of 

 the evidence brought to my notice by Mr. Charles Francis 

 Adams, and of the conditions under which the figurine 

 was found. Among the most important results of this in- 

 vestigation was the discovery of numerous shells under the 

 lava deposits, which Mr. Dall, of the United States Geo- 

 logical Survey, identified for me as either post-Tertiary or 

 late Pliocene ; thus throwing the superficial lava deposits of 

 the region into the Quaternary period, and removing from 

 the evidence the antecedent improbability which would 



