VIII THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN NORTH AMERICA 
439 
change of physical conditions from those now existing, and 
thus of itself implies great antiquity. 1 
These indications of the great antiquity of American man 
are now supported by such a mass of evidence of the same 
character that all the improbability supposed at first to 
attach to them has been altogether removed. As an illustra- 
tion of this evidence I need only refer here to the Report 
on the Loess of Nebraska, by an experienced geologist, Dr. 
Samuel Aughey, who states that this deposit, which is now 
believed by the best American geologists to be of Glacial 
origin, and which covers enormous areas, contains throughout 
its entire extent many remains of mastodons and elephants, 
and that he himself had found an arrow and a spear-head of 
flint at depths of fifteen and twenty feet in the deposit. One 
of these was thirteen feet below a lumbar vertebra of Elephas 
americanus. 
Man in the Glacial Period 
We now take a decided step backwards in time, to relics 
of human industry within or at the close of the Glacial period 
itself. About twenty years ago a well was sunk through the 
drift at Games, a few miles south of Lake Ontario, and at a 
depth of seventeen feet there were found lying on the solid 
rock three large stones enclosing a space within which were 
about a dozen charred sticks, thus closely resembling the cook- 
ing fires usually made by savages. Mr. G. K, Gilbert, of the 
U.S. Geological Survey, obtained the information from the 
intelligent farmer who himself found it, and after a close ex- 
amination of the locality and the drift deposit in its relation 
to the adjacent lakes, comes to the conclusion that the hearth 
must have been used “near the end of the second Glacial 
period/’ and at the time of the separation of Lake Ontario 
from Lake Erie. When Mr. Gilbert gave an account of his 
researches on this matter at the meeting of the Washington 
Anthropological Society, 16th November 1886, two other 
gentlemen reported finds of similar character. Mr. Murdock, 
of the Point Barrow Station, near the extreme north-west 
corner of the continent, in making an excavation for an earth 
thermometer, found an Eskimo snow- goggle beneath more 
1 Foster’s Prehistoric Races of the Uriited States , p. 56, 
