352 The American Geologist. May. isa-j 
lication, as the American Antiqwxnan, which has from time to time 
contained much of the contents of this volume, put into printed shape 
the steps of the investigation, that some contradictions and some repe- 
titions are apparent on comparing the various "papers." We come, 
then, in the chapter devoted to "Mound Builders and Indian relics," to 
a direct statement like the following : 
"The Mound Builders changed to the Indian merely by contact with 
the white man (p. 273). * * * We maintain that the Mound 
Builder was a better specimen of the Indian than the native Indian is 
himself (p. 27(5)." 
Yet while admitting the probable conversion of the Mound Builders 
to the Indian, the author sustains the propriety of a distinction between 
them. The Indian has degenerated from the partial civilization of the 
Mound Builders, while the Mound builder maintained some traces of a 
civilization still higher, suggesting an origin from some Old World races 
who in historical records are called civilized. 
In an appendix Mr. Peet mentions the recent evidences that some of 
the tokens considered to show paleolithic men are unreliable. The in- 
terest of the reader increases toward the end of the volume, pari passu 
with the approach of the author to sound conclusions and to the con- 
sideration of live topics. 
The volume is clumsily put together, as a literary structure, and as a 
specimen of typography. Also much or most of the matter is old and 
familiar. Still the author is to be congratulated on the several new 
ideas which he brings forward, and especially on the skill with which 
he adjusts the Mound Builders with the Indians, and his final conclu- 
sion that generically they are the same people. 
It is to be regretted that he makes no mention of Lapham's import- 
ant work on the earthworks of Wisconsin, for Lapham was the first scien- 
tist to announce the very conclusion to which the author finally ar- 
rives as to the identity of the Mound Builders and the Indians, and in 
that he stood alone for many years. 
On the Continuity of the PaleoUtliic and XeoUthic Periods. By 
Jno. Allen Bkowx, F. G. S. (Journal of the Anthropological Insti- 
tute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. XXII, pp. (56-95, with four plates: 
November, 1892). The author's collections of stone implements have 
been chiefly near Eastbourne in Sussex, on the south coast of England 
in a district of high chalk hills with many ravines. The nodules of flint 
in the chalk furnished early man with abundant material for his work, 
and in many places the valleys and slopes of the hills are literally strewn 
with flakes and broken refuse from the manufacture of implements, 
mingled also with naturally fractured flints. Instead of the somewhat 
indefinite two-fold classification of the stages of progress in stone-working 
as paleolithic and neolithic, the author recognizes four stages, which he 
thinks to have been a continuous series. In analogy with the great 
eras of geologic time, he gives the following names to these stages of 
advancing human skill and culture: 1. Eolithic, represented by rough- 
ly hewn pebbles and nodules, showing work with a thick ochreous 
