882 The American Naturalist. [November,. 
“ All forms found in the workshop other than the thin blades 
accidentally lost are mere waste; * * * this spot isa great 
workshop where tools were shaped or rather roughed out, and 
these things are the failures.” P. 14. 
This is the precise question, decided so dogmatically and 
with such an ex cathedra opinion, which is the point of the dis- 
cussion ; for it has been contended by those who believe in the 
probability of a paleolithic period in America, that whatever 
these implements were, they were not failures, not waste or 
debris, but were intentionally made, and whether they were or 
were not implements of the paleolithic man, they correspond 
in a remarkable degree with undoubted paleolithic implements 
found in nearly every country of Europe. 
Mr. Holmes admits, p. 17, “ that to a limited extent (he might 
- well have said unlimited) the rude forms—the turtle-back and 
its near relatives—are also found scattered over the Potomac Valley 
outside the shop on the hills.” He might have added that they 
were to be found practically all over the United States. I pro- 
pose to show that they are even more plentifully scattered over 
the surface of the hills and fields in the neighborhood of Mt. 
Vernon than around Washington. “ This (the above) would 
seem to conflict with my former statement that all these are 
failures and were left upon the factory sites,” and he adds “ It 
is time therefore, that I should define a stone-age workshop.” 
Mark the adroitness with which he confines the implements 
within a workshop and yet accounts for their general dispersion 
throughout the country. He accomplishes it by defining a 
workshop to extend all over the country. “It (a workshop) is 
any spot where an individual desiring to make an implement, 
picks up one or more boulders or bits of stone, proceeds to 
shape what he desires. 
His definition of a workshop is on a par with his other argu- 
ment. This definition leads him into reasoning in a circle: 
(1) all turtle-backs are the failures of the workman; (2) this is 
proved by all the failures being left in the workshops as debris ; 
(3) wherever you find a turtle-back was made, there was a 
workshop; (4) wherever you find it in a workshop, it was left 
among the debris. Can any process of reasoning be more 
