a race of glacial age, that, in the scale of culture had 
never risen above the use of rude stone tools, I examined 
carefully these specimens and visited the Piney Branch sites 
and soon reached the conclusion that this was all wrong, and 
that these chipped stones were not implements at all, but 
rejectage of the difficult chipping process, the failures of 
the Indian blade maker, left on the quarry sites as simple 
refuse. The successful blades, not one in twenty attempts, 
were carried to the villages and finished to serve as weapons 
of war and the chase, and in the various primitive arts. 
For a score of years controversy over this interpretation 
raged, but there is today, so far as I know, not in any 
museum of the world, a single American shaped stone of any 
kind labelled as belonging to the glacial period or to a 
stone age culture corresponding with that of the Old World, 
Investigations carried on in Piney Branch 
thus resulted in settling one of the most important questions 
involved in the aboriginal history of America, For cogent 
reasons, both historical and scientific, this site, in the 
midst of the city of Washington, should, with its forested 
slopes and beds of chipped stones, be preserved and marked. 
Such a memorial would have a unique interest today and an 
interest that would grow as the centuries and the millenniums 
pass • 
