DISCOVERIES AT A VILLAGE OF THE STOKE AGE. 27 
to show that he had arrived at a condition of culture equiva- 
lent to the Neolithic Age of the rude inhabitants of Europe. 
Discoveries have, however, lately been made which make it 
highly probable that there was an older and ruder age in 
America as well as in Europe. Dr. Abbot, the pioneer in 
this line of research, has found in the gravel terraces along 
the Delaware River at Trenton in New Jersey, rude stone 
implements which far antedate the occupation of that region 
by the tribes known there when the continent of America was 
discovered. Most of the objects found were very rudely 
chipped, and belonged to a people of very primitive habits. 
Within a year or two a similar discovery, consisting however 
of stone chips only, was made in the terraced deposits of 
Central Minnesota. 
With such buried remains of man’s occupancy of the earth 
our Bocabec relics do not compare, as they rest upon the 
surface, and are unquestionably less ancient. I have already 
referred to some of the geological evidences of the recent ac- 
cumulation of these relics, but I may mention other features 
which stamp these remains as those of a recent Neolithic 
people. At the very bottom of these shell-heaps stone axes 
were found which, though rudely formed, were fashioned by 
grinding ; and although the pottery found with these rude 
implements differed in pattern from that occuring in the 
higher levels of the shell-heaps, in other respects it showed 
nearly the same stage of advancement in the ceramic art. 
It is somewhat surprising that there should be no evidence 
of forest growth on the shore of Bocabec River at the site of 
the village when first it was occupied by these men of the 
Stone Age, for a mere film of vegetable matter is all that 
separates the oldest kitchen-midden from the clay below, 
while the mould above the shell-heaps is from three inches to 
one foot in depth. These people, however, may have been 
driven back by the encroachment of the sea upon land in the 
rear of their former huts, which they had already cleared of 
trees and vegetable mould. 
