538 
THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 
the old times picked up, everything hav¬ 
ing an Indian man or woman once liv¬ 
ing and breathing at the other end. 
The hunt for the Indians is not made 
with a spade and the fingers, but with 
the informed mind. The District of Co¬ 
lumbia Indians were in the stone age, 
and imperishable stone tools left in the 
soil are silent though eloquent of the old 
times. So many of the implements are 
of a stone called quartzite that archeolo¬ 
gists earnestly desired to know what was 
the source. Dr. W. H. Holmes and De 
Lancey Gill, archeologically sleuthing 
here and there over the District, found 
quartzite boulder beds in the once beau¬ 
tiful valley of Piney Branch and saw 
chips and partially worked cobble stones 
lying about. Here, said Dr. Holmes, ap¬ 
pears to be the quarry. Subsequent 
ditching revealed that here was one of 
the greatest Indian quarries discovered 
in the United States. 
Thousands of tons of chips and other 
quarry refuse lay under the tree-covered 
gentle slopes of Piney. Dr. Holmes’ 
trenches showed that the boulder bed 
had, been worked in places to the depth 
of $8 feet. An incredible amount of 
labor had been expended here to fash¬ 
ion by blows of stone upon stone leaf¬ 
shaped blades, the blanks from which 
arrowheads and knives were made in 
far-off camps. In the old days of the 
District of Columbia a temporary camp 
of mat houses would be seen on the 
level tract of Blagden’s, above the 
quarry. This village site was discovered 
by the speaker when the war garden 
bared the soil undisturbed by the plow 
for more than a century. 
The river life of the Potomac in 1608 
must have been very interesting. John 
Smith tells of divers savages in canoes, 
well laden with the flesh of bears, deer 
and other beasts. Some of these dug-out 
canoes are in the Potomac mud no doubt 
now. There were many places to paddle 
not open to-day. Boats could move 
about freely where the new government 
tablishment of their lines accurately 
upon the time signals broadcast from the 
observatory? To show you how ex¬ 
tensive is the use of our time signal, in 
1921 the Naval Observatory broadcasted 
a special time signal upon the request of 
the Australian Boundary Commission, 
buildings are going up, and the Eastern 
Branch was a great river 300 years ago. 
At night, reflected in the undulating 
Potomac, were the lights of the torches 
of fishermen, and over the smouldering 
fires of the primitive gridirons the catch 
was smoked for the winter. Down the 
river and around the coast went canoes 
filled with furs, meat and corn for ab¬ 
original trade. 
Land trails also centered in the Dis¬ 
trict, leading to the Susquehanna and 
on to the West. Braddock used an old 
trail to Cumberland worn deeply in old 
times by Indians in moccasins. Bail- 
roads must follow these old trails in an¬ 
other day, giving little thanks to the 
native road builders. Sometimes among 
the debris of lost villages one comes upon 
a bit of fashioned soapstone, a shard of 
an ancient vessel. Thin, smooth and 
well formed, this bit shows the skill of 
the Indians of the District of Columbia. 
Not satisfied with determining the size 
and shape of a soapstone pot from a 
fragment, Dr. Holmes sought out the 
places where the Indians quarried soap¬ 
stone, finding several small quarries in 
the District where they had worked. 
The story could not be completed here, 
but in a quarry in the old District to¬ 
wards Alexandria he found bosses of 
soapstone worked out on the face of a 
deposit. The bosses were the round bot¬ 
toms of future soapstone pots, the next 
step being to knock these bosses off and 
excavate them with the rude pick chisels 
of stone left about by the workers. Thus 
lightened, the unfinished pots were 
carried to the camps and finished to the 
taste of the cooks who had use for them. 
In its natural conditions or only 
slightly aware of the presence of man, 
the District must have been an ideal 
place for savage life. Every family 
could have a deer a day and not decrease 
the herd; a bear once in a while, wild 
turkey, water birds, fish, roasting ears 
and ripe corn would vary the fare. Not 
too thickly planted by nature for the 
ing telescope. At that time it was the 
largest one in this country. 
Having given you this brief history 
of the U. S. Naval Observatory, the place 
where the time is kept, and the place 
which tells the time to the nation, I will 
now briefly describe how we calculate 
