278 RELICS OF A HOMESTEAD OF THE STONE AGE. 
bases, and consequently are leaf-shaped arrowpoints of a large 
size. In no one specimen is there any distinct notching of the 
sides, near the base, to facilitate the fastening of a handle; and 
for this reason we have thought that they may have been knives, 
rather than spearpoints or arrowpoints; but it is possible that 
they were intended as war arrowheads, and were to be only slightly 
inserted in the shaft; so that the person shot could not dis- 
lodge the stone point, by drawing the shaft from the wound. It 
seems almost useless to conjecture as to the particular use of these 
or indeed any specimens, which, from their shape and size, show 
that they may have been used for several different purposes. 
A fact, fully as interesting as the presence of any or all of these 
relics, consists in the absence of two common forme of ‘ Indian 
relics,” namely: the ordinary grooved cobble-stone axe, and frag- 
ments of pottery ; no specimen of the former or trace of the latter 
could be found anywhere about the limits of the beaten discolored 
ground that we have called a homestead. 
Now arises the question, whence came the people who once 
occupied this spot, and left these abundant traces of their sojourn 
here? Marking the degree of civilization, or rather, of its absence, 
as estimated by these relics, does it, indeed, seem possible, as 
sketched by Haeckel,* that from hypothetical Lemuria, in the 
Indian ocean, a being worthy then to be called a man, could finally, 
after many ages, reach North-west America, and then cross our 
broad continent, to reach the Atlantic coast, in a state of advance- 
ment only equal to the production of such rude stone implements 
as we have described? We do not doubt the correctness of the 
theory of the evolution of man from creatures not men, but that 
the ancestors of the American red-skin lived nearer home than the 
Indian ocean, we cannot but think ; and we fail, as yet to see, how 
“ the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists can die 
a silent and unobserved death ;” t unless indeed it be by the fi 
victory of the polygenetic school. 
* Reproduced by Chapman in “Evolution of Life,” p. 177. 
t Descent of Man, vol. 1, p. 235. English edition. 
Bares ey ie. 
