Discoveries at a Village of the Stone Age. 
27 
chalcedony and the other of agate, shewed quite a deep weather- 
ing and must have been for a long time exposed on the surface of 
the ground. Nevertheless, the tools of felsite, which are more 
easily affected by the weather, do not give indications by the 
condition of their surface of very great antiquity ; and the two 
scrapers of chalcedony and agate may have been the implements 
of an earlier people found and used by the later dwellers at Bocabec. 
An inference regarding the antiquity of this village site may 
also be drawn from the covering of vegetable mould which has 
gathered on the surface of the shell -heaps to a greater or less 
depth in different parts. In the hollows, and especially over the 
hut bottoms this mould has attained a considerable depth, in 
some places as much as a foot or eighteen inches. 
But while on the one hand these conditions point to a period 
anterior to the discovery of America, or at least of the region of 
Acadia, by the “ White Race,” as the time when the shores of the 
Bocabec ceased to be occupied by the people whose remains we 
have examined ; on the other hand, their sojourn on its banks, 
when compared with the whole period of the Stone Age, was 
both recent and short. 
In the Old World, as you know, the Stone Age has been 
divided into two great periods — the Palaeolithic, or the time 
when mankind used implements and weapons of chipped stone 
only, and the later Neolithic, when weapons of ground stone were 
also employed. The time embraced in the earlier of these periods 
is very great. Since its beginning the river valleys in Western 
Europe have been very much deepened, and the courses of the 
rivers in some cases changed. Man, who at first hunted the 
Siberian elephant, the rhinoceros, the cave bear and other large 
animals now extinct, used at first large and roughly made axes of 
chipped stone. Subsequently he found his large game chiefly in 
the horse and reindeer, and the stone-pointed spear became 
more prominent as a weapon of offence. In later times, but still 
while using no stone implements but those made by chipping, he 
hunted various wild animals more nearly like those which existed 
in Europe in the times of the ancient Romans. His weapons 
now were made smaller and lighter. Such in outline was the 
condition of rnan in the Palaeolithic Age, 
D 
