PREHISTORIC JASPER MIRES. 671 



son's mouth to Oregon, and while the Niagara River yet tumbled 

 its cataract into Lake Ontario at the site of Lewiston. 



At first, as we take up these shapes from the quarry (Fig. 5), 

 rude as the rudest from Trenton, yet geologically an affair of yes- 

 terday, doubts assail us on all sides. What if the Trenton speci- 

 mens, after all, are modern too ? Did they slip downward into the 

 drift through the fissures of earthquakes, root-holes, the cavities 

 left by upheaved trees, or by the deceptive readjustments of strata 

 that sometimes puzzle geologists on the face of bluffs and banks ? 

 The supposed lapse of ages between them and the Trenton imple- 

 ments seems to fade away. We are almost startled. The doors of 

 archaeology's wonder chamber have been thrown open, its treasures 

 displaced, and the strange form of palaeolithic man, slipping out of 

 our grasp, seems ready to vanish into the limbo of chimeras. 



But pondering long over the work of the quarries, and compar- 

 ing it diligently with the workshop refuse on the pebbly shores of 

 the Delaware and Susquehanna (see Fig. 8), where argillite " tur- 

 tlebacks " (Nos. 2, 3, 4, and 0) are often found at Indian village 

 sites, ideas suggest themselves that may well efface all bias from 

 our minds, and effectually disincline us for a premature conclusion. 



What if these modern stones (Fig. 5) do resemble "palaeoliths ?" 

 What if the Trenton forms like these were only steps in the pro- 

 cess of fashioning blades not yet found ? What if the Trenton 

 " palaeolith " were not a finished implement, as has been declared ? 



What if glacial man, in a word, was not a " palaeolithic " man 

 at all, ignorant of the art of stone-polishing, but the equal in cul- 

 tivation of even the modern Indian ? 



Is he any the less old ? Is he any the less interesting because 

 we can no longer pick up a stone, like the American specimens in 

 Fig. 8, on the surface and say, " This is a palaeolith " ? Is he any 

 the less a glacial inhabitant because modern Indians have dupli- 

 cated one of his stone relics, and we are obliged to reform our 

 American definition of the word " palaeolithic " ? * 



As we tread the rough, hilly roads and clamber the rocky 

 slopes that often lead to the jasper mines, nothing strikes us more 

 forcibly than that man must have been a long time a dweller in 

 the Delaware Valley before he discovered them, and that his first 



* We speak in America of " palaeoliths " and " true palaeolithic implements," as if the 

 terms could mean nothing but the rude forms here discussed. But the cave men of France, 

 who, it is said, did not polish stone, though they polished bone and produced realistic ani- 

 mal carvings superior to anything done in the bronze age, were no less palaeolithic than the 

 drift savage who made Fig. 8, No. 1 . And if Sir John Lubbock's definition means anything, 

 the delicate blades of chipped flint from Solutre and the caves of Laugerie Haute, Gorge 

 d'Enfer, Grotte de l'Eglise, etc., skillfully worked as the beautiful obsidian knives of Cali- 

 fornia, Tennessee, .and Mexico, are true " palaeoliths." (See De Mortillet, Musee Prehis- 

 torique, classification.) 



