220 W. Upham — Estimates of Geologic lime. 



in Delaware, Mr. Hil borne T. Cresson has found similar 

 palseoliths in glacial gravel belonging to a still earlier part of 

 the lee age, probably deposited during the maximum exten- 

 sion of the ice-sheet. Other localities where paleeoliths have 

 been discovered in glacial gravel and sand beds, formed during 

 the departure of the ice, are Newcomerstown, on the Tus- 

 carawas river, in eastern Ohio; on the Little Miami river at 

 Loveland and Madisonville, in southwestern Ohio ; on the 

 East fork of the White river at Medora, in southern Indiana ; 

 and on the upper Mississippi at Little Falls, in central Minne- 

 sota. Again, in one of the beach ridges of the glacial Lake 

 Agassiz, held in the basin of the Red river of the .North and 

 of Lake Winnipeg by the barrier of the waning ice-sheet, Mr. 

 J. B. Tyrrell has found chipped fragments of quartzite, evi- 

 dently of human workmanship, contemporaneous with the 

 rounded gravel and wave-worn sand of the beach. West of 

 the Rocky Mountains, also, an obsidian spear-head was dis- 

 covered by McGee in the sediment of the Quaternary Lake 

 Lahontan ; and stone mortars, pestles, and even human bones, 

 including the famous Calaveras skull, have been obtained by 

 Whitney, King, Becker, Wright, and others, from the gold- 

 bearing gravels under the lava of Table mountain, California. 

 Though these last are south of the continental drift sheet, they 

 seem referable on sufficient geologic evidences, to the Pleisto- 

 cene or Glacial period. 



At one time the Californian discoveries were believed by 

 some to prove man's presence there during the Pliocene 

 period, far longer ago than the Ice age ; but no indisputable 

 proof, nor even apparently reliable evidence, for so great 

 antiquity of man has been brought to light in any part of the 

 world. Homo sapiens, as Professor LeConte stated in discus- 

 sions of this subject at the meeting of the American Associa- 

 tion last August in Rochester, N. Y., must be regarded, in the 

 present stage of our knowledge, as restricted to the Quater- 

 nary era, although his anthropoid ancestors may have begun as 

 far back as in Pliocene or Miocene time their ascent toward 

 man's present intellectual and spiritual eminence. 



to me to prove indubitably that men were living here contemporaneous with the- 

 ice-sheet, but these men may have possessed the skill to make both rough and 

 polished implements of stone, corresponding with the Neolithic age in Europe. 

 The wide geographic range of the native American race, its differentiation into 

 many divergent branches, and the very remarkable advances of some of them 

 toward civilization before the discovery by Columbus, as in Mexico, Central 

 America, and Peru, indicate that the original peopling of the continent, which 

 was apparently by migration from northeastern Asia, took place before the culmi- 

 nation of the Glacial period, probably during an immediately preceding time of 

 general elevation of northern countries so that land extended across the present 

 areas of Bering Strait and Sea. It may well be true, but probably cannot be 

 proved, that even at that early time the people taking possession of North and 

 South America had attained the stage of culture characterized by the partial use 

 of polished stone implements. 



