962 The American Naturalist. [November, 
TRENTON AND SOMME GRAVEL SPECIMENS COM- 
PARED WITH ANCIENT QUARRY REFUSE 
IN AMERICA AND EUROPE. 
Bx H. C. MERCER. 
The recent Trenton gravel discussion impresses upon us, two 
important points: 
(a) The proved fact that in the fashioning of his larger stone 
blades, the modern North American Indian continually scat- 
tered his quarry sites, with forms like the Trenton forms.’ 
(b) The assertion that the Trenton specimens (see collection 
at Peabody Museum, Cambridge, Mass., Figs. 4 and 5,) may not 
have been found in place, but in talus, or where they had 
* slipped down,” and that if in place, they did not prove a paleo- 
lithic culture, since if, as is possible, they were “ rejects or 
wasters ” dropped at quickly abandoned * workshops" on the 
uninhabitable river shore, the camp-site of the man who made 
them, with his “finished implements” and culture-telling 
traces, would probably have existed elsewhere higher up the 
ank. 
In the demand for renewal of evidence which has grown 
out of the argument, we not only ask whether the Trenton 
objects are rently found in place, whether they are “ finished 
implements,” and whether the old river shores are analogous 
to modern quarries where the gravel man would leave no 
more definite trace of himself than a * waster;” but, turning 
to Europe, whence the discussion has drawn its first inspira- 
tion, we wonder what effect the study of American Indian 
l For a study of the “unfinished implements" made by modern Indians, at 
Flint Ridge, Licking Co., Ohio, see a paper by Gerard Fowke in the Smithsonian 
Report for 1884, and papers by W. H. Holmes upon the aboriginal quarries at Piney 
Branch, D. C.; and in Garland County, Arkansas, in: American Anthropologist for 
Jan. 1890 and Oct. 1891. The Unpublished Report for 1892 of the Department 
of Archaeology of the University of Pennsylvania contains a discussion of similar 
facts discovered in the summers of 1891 and 1892 at Durham, Saucon Creek, Vera 
Cruz, and Macungie, in Eastern Pennsylvania. 
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