Early Man in Minnesota. — Holmes. 233 
of quartz-working operations. It was unintelligible, for example, 
why an important industry of this sort should have been estab- 
lished at so great a distance from quartz bowlders and quartz- 
bearing rock, especially as convenient plains occur about the 
nearest exposures of this mineral. Again, why should such a 
manufactory have been set up upon a steep hill-side with its ap- 
proaches of such a character that all the material to be handled, 
as also the implements fashioned, would have to be transported 
to and fro, up and down a considerable acclivity? Above all, why 
should this workshop have been relegated to the bottom of a 
natural drain, the solid contents of which were necessarily over- 
whelmed, or swept away bodily, at every considerable rainfall and 
thaw of the year? As an illustration of the superficial distui-bance 
to which the place was subject, I may mention that at the close of 
a long, but b}^ no means exceptionally protracted rain-storm, I 
once collected from the notch, by actual count, about one thousand 
quartzes, all newl}' plowed out of the soil at that one time. Of 
this I was certain, as I had previousl}^ cleared the ground of ever}' 
quartz piece of an}' size from view. 
' ' A final fact, wholly irreconcilable with the h^-pothesis of 
neolithic origin, was the absence of quartzes from the surfaces at 
the superior edges of the notch, and along the terrace-plain ad- 
joining. It was not for a moment to be believed that such re- 
mains would have been thus distributed by aboriginal artificers. 
It was simply impossible that the quartz- workers should have lim- 
ited their manipulations to a strip of sand six or eight feet wide 
and thirty to forty long, less or more, heaping upon this narrow 
defile thousands upon thousands of fragments, yet leaving abso- 
lutely no small splinters nor chips beyond, neither up the slopes 
of the notch nor elsewhere in the vicinity. * * * 
"Prolonged investigation ensued, establishing the hitherto un- 
suspected fact that the notch quartzes could never have been di- 
rectly involved in the terrace surfaces. Had they once been thus 
inhumed, the superficial stratum of adjacent drift would assuredly' 
have been found to contain a greater or less poporrtion of similar 
fragments, scattered throughout its substance. But this was not 
the case. On the contrary, no buried quartzes whatever appeared 
in the superior exposures of the notch; nor within the horizontal 
surfaces at either hand, though such were sought with careful 
scrutiny. * * * 
