APPENDIX. 373 



extreme antiquity of man are of three kinds, viz. : 1. Doubts 

 as to the Pliocene age of the gravels — they may be early 

 Quaternary. 2. Doubts as to the authenticity of the finds — 

 no scientist having seen any of them in situ. 3. Doubts as 

 to the undisturbed conditions of the gravels, for auriferous 

 gravels are especially liable to disturbance. The character 

 of the implements said to have been found gives peculiar 

 emphasis to this last doubt, for they are not Paleolithic, 

 but Neolithic." * The question has been raised whether this 

 archaeological objection is applicable to the stone mortars, 

 numerous examples of which have been found in the gravels, 

 some of them quite recently.! If the evidence brought for- 

 ward by Professor Whitney and others were limited to 

 these mortars, it might very well be claimed that they are 

 neither Palaeolithic nor Neolithic ; that the smoothness of 

 their surface is owing to their having been hollowed out of 

 pebbles that have been polished and worn by natural forces. 

 But Professor Whitney has cited numberless instances of 

 "spear-heads," "arrow-heads," "discoidal stones," "stone 

 beads," and "a hatchet" that have been found under pre- 

 cisely similar conditions as the mortars. So Mr. Becker has 

 recently produced an affidavit of a certain Mr. Neale that 

 in a tunnel run into the gravel in 1877 " between two hun- 

 dred and three hundred feet beyond the edge of the solid 

 lava, he saw several spear-heads nearly one foot in length." J 

 Now it cannot be questioned that such objects as these clearly 

 belong to the Neolithic period, which does not imply that all 

 the objects used at that time were polished, but that together 

 with chipped implements " polished stone implements were 

 also used."* No archaeologist will believe that, while Pa- 

 laeolithic man has not yet been discovered in the Tertiary 

 deposits of western Europe, the works of Neolithic man have 



* Le Conte, op. cit., p. 614. 



f Professor George Frederick Wright, Prehistoric Man on the 

 Pacific Coast, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1891, p. 512 ; Table Mount- 

 ain Archaeology , Nation, May 21, 1891, p. 419. 



% Antiquities from under Tuolome Table Mountain in California, 

 Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, vol. ii, p. 192. 



# Le Conte, op. cit., p. 607= 



