chronologies * * * and man. and 
beast are ever at work digging and 
boring and preparing the ground for 
abundant crops of misleading ob¬ 
servations and erroneous interpre¬ 
tations, r 
In fine, the writer sees no reason 
to believe-—in the light of our present 
knowledge—-that man found his way 
into America until after the close of 
the glacial period; when the great 
ice-fields, which had covered Canada 
and the Northern States, had finally 
receded, leaving the form of the con¬ 
tinent and its climatic conditions es¬ 
sentially as they are today. He thus 
sums up the case; 
It eannot be allowed that the Ter¬ 
tiary, or even the Pleistocene, oc¬ 
cupancy of the American Continent 
by the race is demonstrated, and 
the writer prefers to favor the view 
* * * that the continent was prob¬ 
ably not. reached and occupied until 
after the final retreat of the glacial 
ice from middle North America. At 
the same time it must be granted 
that there is no apparent reason 
why, if already occupying Northern 
Asia, man should not have reached 
American shores by way of Bering 
Strait during any of the periods of 
mild climate which preceded and in¬ 
terrupted the Ice Age; yet we may 
wisely await the results of further 
research and provide for the appli¬ 
cation to these of the severest tests 
that science can devise. 
Ti ■* passage is characteristic of 
the auth. ~’s attitude throughout. 
As to how the red man, if not 
indigenous, came to enter America, 
and by what route or routes, are 
questions which we have all heard 
discussed at one time or another. 
Did he cross to Alaska from north¬ 
eastern Asia, following the chain of 
Aleutian Isles? Or did he come in 
his dugout in Summer, or over the 
i ice in Winter, across the Bering 
Strait? Or, as even some eminent 
scholars suppose, did man enter the 
continent from the east, following a 
** land bridge,” which is thought to 
have spanned the North Atlantic in 
pre-glacial or glacial times? Or can 
it be that he followed the modern 
Atlantic steamship route—assisted in 
his voyage by • the presence of the 
fabled Atlantis? Or is South Amer¬ 
ica the earliest home of the Indian 
in this hemisphere, a haven reached 
.by*way of the Southern Pacific? 
These and other theories we have ail 
heard supported by arguments. in¬ 
genious or otherwise. 
The possibilities axe examined in 
detail by Mr. Holmes, who, after 
Careful consideration, decides in 
favor of the traditional view, which 
on a priori grounds is undoubtedly 
the most probable, that our first Set¬ 
tlers arrived by way of Bering Strait. 
The Middle Atlantic and the South 
Pacific theories present almost in¬ 
superable difficulties, while the 
North Atlantic view, rational as it 
appears to be in many respects, is 
rendered extremely hazardous—in 
failure of real evidence—from the 
assertion of many geologists that 
there is no valid reason for be¬ 
lieving in the elevation of the bed 
of this ocean in either pre-glacial or 
glacial times. Accepting, therefore, 
the Bering Strait theory, the author 
points out that a vast extent of time, 
in all likelihood, must, have inter¬ 
vened between the migration of man 
from his original home and his ar¬ 
rival in Axnerica. The assumption 
is that the cradle of the human race 
was in the south of Asia, in the 
vicinity of the one hundredth meri¬ 
dian. This, we may observe, is the 
current orthodox view, based, in the 
main, on the discovery of the skull 
of pithecanthropus erectus, or the 
ape-man, in the Island of Java. 
With the acceptance of this as an 
hypothesis, it is easy to see that the 
migration of man to the northeast, 
along the 10,000 miles of rugged 
coast to the shores of Bering Strait, 
must needs have covered a period 
measured, not by thousands, but by 
tens of thousands of years. The 
primitive wanderer may be supposed 
to have followed the southern mar¬ 
gin of the retreating ice fields, the 
rate of his progress being in inverse 
proportion to the distance attained 
from his tropical homeland. Ar¬ 
rived in Alaska, however, conditions 
would be reversed, and upon his 
reaching the great northwestern 
plains of Canada, a relatively rapid 
dispersal of the tribes over the two 
continents may well have followed. 
Passing from the theoretical part 
of ” The Iithic Industries, ’’—the 
author considers his wide field by 
Way of areas or territories, of which 
he enumerates eleven in the United 
States, Canada and Alaska, from the 
“ Arctic Coast Area ” to the ” Arid 
Area ” on the Mexican border. A 
sketch is also presented 6f eleven 
other cultural areas of Middle and 
South America. We have an account 
of the distinguishing features of each 
locality, together with the various 
tribes inhabiting them and their ex¬ 
ternal conditions. From Chapter 12 
to Chapter 27 we have ah elaborate 
description of the aboriginal mines 
and quarries which are to be found 
scattered all over the country, ahd 
which comprise workings in a great 
variety of geological formations. 
The concluding hundred pages of the 
memoir are taken up with a series 
of studies in what we may term 
“ processes;” in other words, the 
primitive methods of working in 
stone and preparing the so-called 
” artifacts.” This section serves as 
a noteworthy contribution not only 
to the archaeology of this country, 
but likewise to that of ail primeval 
cultures. Thus we have the “ frac¬ 
ture processes,” “ crumbling pro¬ 
cesses,” ” abrading processes ” and 
“ incising and piercing processes ” 
explained and portrayed. The results 
are obtained partly by coiijecture, 
| partly by painstaking experiment, 
I and partly by close observation of 
the activities of the modern descen¬ 
dant of the ancient red man. Thd 
whole is rendered doubly instructive 
and illuminating—as indeed is the 
case throughout the entire work—by 
the presence of a large number of 
photographs and other illustrations. 
- The impression left by the perusal 
of such a work as “ The Lithic In¬ 
dustries ” is that we are ” getting 
on ”—as Professor Murray of Oxford 
said a few years ago in reference to 
Homeric studies—in our researches 
in Am erican antiquities. The efforts 
of Mr. Holmes, in the language of 
Fenimore Cooper, have served to’ 
j clear the way of briers. Future ex- 
’plorations in this field will doubtless 
disclose great things, 
