1884.] Man in the Tertiaries. 1007 
Carolinas to Greenland. The erosion of all the shores and islands 
along the coast of New England is very marked. Shell heaps 
are everywhere met with, cropping out and crumbling down with 
the decaying banks, and the records of man thus lost can never 
be regained. 
If Saporta’s idea is correct then, of course, the traces of these 
primitive people are buried under paleochrystic ice. Saporta 
suggested the idea that man, originating in the north, had been 
pushed southward by successive waves of people till the primitive 
wave was forced into the extremities of the Southern continents, 
and that the remnants of this ancient wave are seen in the Tas- 
manians, Bushmen and Fuegans. 
That such a wave could be forced the length of the world, 
through such vicissitudes of climate and accompanying condi- 
tions, unmixed and unbroken seems incredible. Far more prob- 
able would it be to assume an antarctic continent under genial 
conditions in which these primitive races lived, I will not say 
originated, and from whence successive waves emanated, becom- 
ing modified by their new surroundings as they receded from 
their point of origin. The submergence of this region leaving 
remnants of these extraordinary, low and uniformly dolichoceph- 
ic types as we recognize them in the Patagonians, Tasmanians, 
Australians, Bushmen, Veddahs and others, and precisely where 
we might expect to find them, If either supposition is true the 
earlier traces of these people are forever buried beyond recovery. 
In the face of all this destruction and effacement must be 
reckoned also the prejudices of man himself, which have caused the 
loss of precious material, or of opportunities which can never be re- 
gained. Ancient skeletons have been exhumed only tobe promptly 
buried again; others encountered in excavations and left undis- 
turbed through superstitious fear. Even at the present time the 
recognition of all evidences bearing on the high antiquity of man 
ts checked by a scrutiny that oftentimes becomes well-nigh ridic- 
ulous, The collection and study of the remains of other fossil 
mammals goes on unchallenged. Material is collected and allotted 
to its proper -horizon without dispute. The archæologist, how- 
ever, is beset by a class who repudiate his facts, look upon his 
evidences as deceptive or fraudulent, and within very recent times 
have not hesitated to apply terms of equal opprobrium to the in- 
vestigators of these things. 
