ee; Editorial Comment. 53 
VIII, Figs. 1 and 2. Three others were from Old Chickasaw, 
Iowa, and are referred to on page 650, of same volume of the 
Naturalist. Mr. M. W. Davis, of Iowa City, Iowa, has a cranium 
taken from a mound in Johnson county, which exhibits many of 
the same racial characteristics. Skulls of the same type are known 
from Indiana. In fact a low-browed, ape-like race of men was as 
fully developed and as widely distributed in America as in Europe. 
There is reason also to believe that man was present in America 
at as early a period as the first record of his appearance in Europe. 
The arrow points found by professor Aughey in undisturbed beds 
of Loéss* at different points in Nebraska and lowa, attest the 
presence of man in the Missouri valley in close proximity to the 
edge of the retreating glaciers. The human implements found in 
the Lquus beds of the basin region indicate the presence of man in 
Nevada about the time he made his appearance in lowaand Nebraska. 
The early low-browed American had for contemporaries an as- 
semblage of animals similar to those with which the Neanderthal 
man was associated. The Lyuus beds contain remains of two or 
three extinct horses, an elephant similar to the hairy elephant of 
Quaternary Europe, a musk-ox, Ovibos cavifrons Leidy, and 
others for which see the writings of Cope,t Russellf and Gilbert. 2 
Some recent discoveries in South America point to a race even 
more ancestral than that indicated by the flat crania of the 
Mississippi valley. The question may now arise whether man did 
not originate on the American continent. The eastern continent 
received its horses and camels from America; why may it not 
also have received from the same source its earliest stock of  flat- 
skulled men? 
COMPANIONS OF EOZOON. 
The constant recession of the beginning of life to lower and 
lower horizons, is like the constant retreat of the rainbow before 
the boy who follows it in the hope of finding the promised pot of 
gold. Most geologists of middle life can recall the time when 
the lowest fossiliferous strata were those lying about the base of 
the Ordovician or Lower Silurian system. Below this was a chaos, 
*Hayden’s Annual Rept. of the U. S. Geol. & Geog. Survey of the 
Territories for 1874. Washington, 1876. p. 250. 
tBulletin U.S. Geol. & Geog. Survey of the Territories. Vol. V. p. 48. 
Am. Naturalist, Vol. XVI. p. 194. 
{Fourth Ann. Rept. U. 8. Geol. Survey, p. 460. 
SLake Bonneville, U.S. Geol. Survey. Monographs, I. p. 394, 
