34 The American Geologist. January, 1903. 
of Ohio by Wright, Mills, Claypole, and others, and in the 
upper Mississippi floodplain of the end of the Glacial period 
at Little Falls, Minn., by Winchell and Brower; which, in their 
tnni, antedate the prehistoric hearth in New York under a 
beach of the glacial Lake Iroquois, reported by Gilbert, and 
the artificial flakes of stone noted by Tyrrell in a beach on the 
northwestern shore of lake Agassiz. These all belong, how- 
ever, to the closing stages of the Ice age, probably ranging 
from 9,000 to 7,000 years ago. The men of Lansing, and of 
these later modified drift and lacustrine deposits, were very 
near our own times in comparison with the antiquity well 
known for man in Europe. In the Old World man has existed 
at least 100,000 years, and not improbably even twice as long. 
In America he may have had 50.000 or 100,000 years for the 
origin of the physical characters of the American race. There- 
fore the resemblance of the Lansing skeleton to the average 
type of our American aborigines, called Indians, appears in 
no degree surprising to one who believes that the creation of 
plants and animals has proceeded by the gradual methods of 
generic and specific development which are collectively termed 
evolution. 
NOETLING ON THE MORPHOLOGY OF THE 
PELECYPODS.* 
By Rudolf Ruede.uann, Albany, N. Y. 
PLATE III. 
The most recent of Mr. Noetling's papers on the pele- 
cypods introduces an element so novel and promising of useful- 
ness into the morphology of the pelecypods, that we wish to 
aid in making it known to the American students of paleon- 
tology. 
The author admits that he owes the incentive to his investi- 
gation to Jackson's suggestive work on the "Phylogeny of 
the Pelecypoda," in which Jackson establishes the peculiar fact 
of the torsion of the hinge line in reference to the body of 
certain pelecypods, but, as Noetling claims, fails to recognize 
the importance of the discovery, and also considers the axis 
* Fritz NoftlinG: Beitrpge zur Morphologic der PelecYpoden. Neues 
Jahrbuch fur Min. Geol. & Pal. XV Bcilage-Bd. 1902. 
