ideal leaf-shaped form, and which in their ruder stages resemble the famous implements or objects from Trenton and Ohio known as "turtle-backs" and "paleoliths."

Our attention is further called to the facts that there are few, very few, arrowheads at these spots, and as yet no traces of pottery, no banner stones, net sinkers, gorgets, or grooved axes; that, in a word, these remote places, buried in the forest inconveniently far from water and arable land, were not fit for village sites. They were quarries, nothing more, nothing less whither the jasper-using modern Indian as known to Capt. John Smith, Campanius and Kalm, resorted, must have resorted, to quarry his material, knock it into portable shape and carry it away to the distant village.

By a few blows of the pebble hammer the weathered surface of the nodule is chipped away and the thick block takes a pointed shape. A series of further blows, more careful and probably struck with the small hammers, produce a serrated cutting edge around the whole fragment which now well marked with the secondary chipping that unmistakably proclaims the handiwork of man, though still rude, clumsy and an inch or two thick in the middle, has become the typical "turtle-back” of Madisonville, Ohio, or Trenton. It may be that a final series of flakings, whether due still to the hammer or to pressure, results in a quite symmetrical blade, lightened to the desired weight and ready for transport.

There the quarryman's work seems to have stopped, if it always went so far. and the hoard of blank blades ready to be finished or specialized by some local arrowhead maker into perforators, arrowheads, spears or knives, as the case may be, is carried away. When for a time its owner is compelled to part company with it he buries it in the ground for safe keeping or to render the material softer for future work, and there for a dozen reasons it may remain for long years, to be discovered at last by a surprised ploughman.

Such a cache of hitherto "inexplicable" leaf shape implements consisting of 116 yellowish argillite blades we found in 1891 on Ridges Island, on the Delaware, another of 107 of blue argillite was obtained for us by Mr. Doan, at Bridge Valley, Bucks county, Pa., last May and another of 9 blanks of chert was found by us in June of this year, on an island in the Susquehanna.

The story of the Lehigh jasper quarries thus glanced at, but soon to be fully and carefully studied, is thus far a corroboration in main of the recent researches of Mr. W. H. Holmes at Piney Branch in the Indian Territory, and in Garland county, Arkansas. Is it the story of all jasper quarries in the United States? Is it the story as well of the argillite sandstone and quartzite quarry sites and the obsidian workings not yet studied? In a word-are we

right in supposing that this process of passing from the shapeless block to the "turtle-back," and from the "turtle-back” to the thin leaf-shaped blank, and thence to the spear or finished implement represents the necessary steps, through which all peoples in an age of stone have passed, in the fashioning of their rock hewn tools?

Thirty years ago Indians were chipping arrowheads of obsidian and quartz on the shores of the Sacramento. Hundreds of them still live in the United States and Canada who can explain the whole matter, and their opinion has been asked and their work described, but the accounts of their questioners have been vagne, contradictory and unsystematic. None of them explain the quarry, the turtle-back or the cache implement.

Caleb Lyon, who saw an arrowhead maker at work, refers only a slab of obsidian one-fourth of an inch thick, split from a pebble and flaked by blows. T. R. Peale speaks of Shastas hammering a mass of jasper, agate or chert with a round-faced stone and finishing up the edges with a notched bone, as a glazier chips glass. Schoolcraft saw an anvil of wood or some hard substance placed on the thigh, upon which a piece of jasper was held at rest to be hammered by something undescribed. Captain John Smith tells how the Indian "quickly maketh an arrowhead of splints of stone in the form of a heart. with a little bone, which he ever weareth at his braceept." Torquemada and Hernandez briefly describe seeing Mexicans sending off long flakes of obsidian, with which certain Spaniards had their beards shaved, by pressing a wooden punch on a nucleus of obsidian held between the feet.

Admiral Sir E. Belcher saw Esquimaux, California Indians and Sandwich Islanders fracturing chert blocks with slight taps of nephrite hammers, and then flaking the splinters wedged in a spoon shaped cavity in a log, with a point of deer horn.* And so on. Lieutenant E. J. Beckwith and Catlin tell of flaking small pieces and thin slabs of quartz and obsidian, by direct pressure and indirect pounding upon a bone punch. And certain white men have recently made arrowheads out of curiosity or to palm them off upon collectors. but neither the conflicting accounts nor the amateur experiments explain the quarry, the turtle-back or the leaf-shaped form of the cach. Evidently some of the chief underlying features of the first and greatest of man's primæval arts have not yet been grasped. The living Indians who remember the process must be questioned again.

Turning back to the quarries and refuse heaps, and passing by the many questions of deep archæological interest that they suggest, suffice it here to say that for one fact already mentioned they claim attention among the foremost flelds of American research.

Here at a distance of about forty miles from Trenton are scores of jasper specimens exactly resembling the forms found there buried 15 and 20 feet in the glacial gravels, imitations in other words of the so-called "paleolith," or implement of the savage ice man, who 7,000 years ago chipped river pebbles on the freshet swept banks of the Delaware.

We have been told that this object from Trenton and Madisonville is a finished implement, a type of an epoch, that the savage who fashioned it was little better than an ape in culture, ignorant even of the use of the bow and a slayer of his prey with clubs and stones. And science has willingly stolen into the by-paths of wonder and speculation to suggest his origin and fate. Akin, it was said, to the river drift man of Europe, he crossed the North Atlantic on an isthmus, that in pre-glacial times stretched from Britain to Greenland, to dwell on the cold shores of the Delaware when the great glacier stretched its coping of ice from the Hudson's mouth to Oregon and while the Niagara river yet tumbled its cataract in Lake Ontario at the sight of Lewistown.

At first as we take up these other shapes from the quarry rude as the rudest from Trenton, yet geoloically an affair of yesterday, the supposed lapse of ages between them and the Trenton implements seems to fade away. We are

*See for these narratives except Beckwith (Pacific R. R. Survey Vol. 2, p. 43) E. T. Stevens' Flint Chips, p. 57.

almost startled. The doors of archæology's wonder chamber have been thrown open, its treasures displayed and the strange form of paleolithic man, slipping out of our grasp, seems ready to vanish into the limbo of chimeras. But a few moments' reflection rebalances our thoughts.

What if these modern stones do resemble "paleoliths?" What if the Trenton forms like these were only steps in the process of fashioning blades not yet found in the glacial drift? What if the Trenton "turtle-back" were not a finished implement as has been declared?

Is it any the less old? Is the ice man any the less interesting because we can no longer pick up a stone on the surface and say "This is a paleolith?" Is he any the less a glacial inhabitant because modern Indians have duplicated one of his stone relics, and we are obliged to reform our American definition of the word "paleolith?”

It is well that we have this new light on the great art of arts that most concerned man's life and happiness in the untold ages of his childhood. One source of error and confusion has been cleared away from the subject, and we fully realize that what shall in the future determine the age and nature of these stones is not their form or resemblance to European specimens, but their geological position.

Let us turn now to the Indian who still remembers his past and if we can fully learn the quarryman's secret from him and from careful excavation of the pre-historic pits. Then with the eyes wide open we are ready for another ransacking of the gravel pits of Trenton and Madisonville. More sharply than ever we shall look for a bit of pottery 7,000 years old, a tell-tale arrowhead or grooved axe, and ask the questions: First-Have we been deceived? Have the classic stones slipped down into the gravel through the fissures of earthquakes, the holes left by roots, the cavities formed by upheaved trees, or by the deceptive readjustments of strata that sometimes puzzle geologists on the face of bluffs and banks? And then, where, in these diluvian gravels, are the hammer stones, and the chips, and the signs of use on the "turtle-backs" and the thinned-down blades, which shall prove for what purpose glacial man might have made the leaf-shaped forms, and whether like the modern Indian he treated them only as blocked out types of more specialized tools, or whether still a child in the stone-chipper's art, he halted at the second step in the process, and unskilled to go farther, used the now famous "Turtleback" as a finished implement sufficient for his primitive needs.

DOYLESTON, October 1st, 1892.

PALEOLITHIC MAN IN NORTH AMERICA.

[BY DR. C. C. ABBOTT.]

[Reprinted from Science]

The ghost of palælithic man has arisen to plague the geologists at Washington; and those that look upon them as little gods are all shouting "Me too." As the cause of all this mischief, it is fitting that I should speak in my own defence. The scientific men of Washington claim a monopoly of knowledge

and so occupy a peculiar position, self-assumed, of course. That which is of fered the world independently of them, must be stamped by their approval or condemned, and it is never the former. This condition of affairs really handicaps them at the outset, and not one can enter the field unbiassed. Indeed, they go out instructed to bring in such and such results, and none other. This is pre-eminently so in the question of the antiquity of man in North America. The recent appearance of Wright's book, "Man and the Glacial Period,” has set their tongues wagging, but palæolithic man is not to be downed even by such an array of notables, marshalled to defeat them. Salisbury's cunning argumentation, McGee's shaggy front, Holme's imperious "begone!" and Brinton's persuasive smile do not make him afraid. He returned to earth in his own good time and came to stay!

Of the alleged evidences brought forward by others I have nothing to say, but something to record concerning my own investigations, that may have a bearing on the question. We must admit that, at some given time in the past, man appeared on this continent; but just when, no one has ventured to assert. Certainly in no one communication to scientific or popular literature have I done more than claim the discovery of evidence of his comparatively primitive condition when he did arrive: and now after twenty years of careful and unremitted study of the valley of the Delaware River, I see no reason to change my opinion, but a great deal to substantiate it.

Were the evidences of man's occupancy of this region one associated and confused mass, an attempt made to dissociate its components into rude and more elaborate forms and to say of the former, this is old, and of the latter, not so ancient, then the scientific world might well be up in arms and cry down the apparent absurdidy-but this is not, the case.

Of course, if we claim, as for instance Mr. Holme's practically does, in spite of denial, that every so-called palæolithic implement is a "reject," whether the man who cast it aside lived in Europe or America, the whole subject falls to the ground; but accepting palæolithic man as a one-time feature of other continents, and believing no geological reasons have been brought forward why he might not have lived in North America also, it is justifiable to consider the archæological significance of such objects as the late Wyman said were not distinguishable from European forms, except by the material by which they were made.

Now, as a matter of fact, a considerable number of just such forms have been found in the gravel deposits at Trenton, N. J., and at a significant depth, but, says the geologist, what of the age of this deposit? The whole question hinges on this. Professor Salisbury asserts that since the deposit was originally laid down, it has been reassorted. Grant this, and what then? If the reassortment took place in "Indian" times, how does it happen that only this one form and simple flakes are found entombed? Holmes here steps in and says "easy enough," the Indian went to the river-shore, chipped pebbles, and retired to the back country, leaving his "rejects." But are we to suppose the Indian never went to the water's edge for any other purpose? Did he not take his finished implements to the river to fish and hunt? Did he not cross the river by a raft, canoe or by swimming? Did he necessarily always live back from the stream? Common sense points out that he must have had the whole range of his goods and chattels continually at and on the water, and are we to suppose that never a knife, arrow-point, bead, or pot was lost? It is

too absurd to consider; and this reassortment of the gravel-beds must have buried a great deal more than "rejects." Again, it has been asserted that the assumed palæolithic implements are only in "talus," Carvill Lewis, according to Brinton, says what I held to be undisturbed layers, were recently an "ancient talus. Possibly, but how ancient? In at least a dozen instances this asserted "old talus" was caused by floods having a transporting power equal to piling up layers alternately of sand and gravel, and then, as if to anticipate the present tempest in a tea-pot, placed a bowlder, weighing tons, over it all, for fear that the poor palæolith might run away. Now, when grooved axes and polished celts are found under like conditions, I am willing to leave the field as fast as my short legs will permit, and not before.

Professor Salisbury has asserted that there is need of expert testimony to determine the precise age of the implement bearing gravels, and Dr. Brinton insists that no opinion as to the geological age of a gravel can be received from any but an expert geologist. Grant it; but the trouble is these "expert geologists" are raro aves that were never yet known to agree among themselves, and it becomes a mere matter of personal opinion after all. I lay claim to a smattering of gravel-ology. I have lived on pebbles so long that I have become flinty-hearted so far as criticism is concerned, and when I find gravel stratified and unstratified, I know and assert the difference; and when a palæolithic implement is found in gravel beneath layers of sand and pebbles, beneath huge bowlders (not merely at a lower horizon, but directly beneath them), I do not, and no reasonable person should want another to tell him that the two were laid down together, or the big bowlder was dropped upon the implement, which anticipated its coming. Up pops some "authority” and declaims the possibility that the ground was washed from beneath the big stone and the implement slipped in. Well, we can go on supposing till the crack o'doom, but as to proof, that is another matter. These geological jugglers will prove yet that the Indians bought the Delaware Valley from William Penn.

Certainly too much value is put on this matter of expert testimony. Then, again, in spite of all that has been written and said, the assertion is made that palæolithic implements are found only at the present river-shore. Of course we find them there now, because the gravel is exposed, but not there alone. A full mile back from the river they have been found in digging cellars, sinking wells, and in the cut of the Pennsylvania Railroad, east of Trenton, N. J. All this area may have been "reassorted," but in such delicate fashion that the strata are not broken, and it suggests that the manner of it was like turning over a book from one cover to the other.

Again, it has been objected that no animal remains have been found; but Cook found a mastodon, and I have, more significant yet, a valve of a Unio; and what of human remains, long since reported? There are, too, at the Peabody Museum, three human crania, two of which were taken from the gravel and one found in the bed of a creek, and these three, identical in character, stand alone in a collection of nearly three thousand Indian crania.

It is the weak point of Wright's book that he did not prepare the archæological portion at the Peabody Museum, with my collection under his eyes. If he had, the critics would not have had a leg to stand upon.

The implements, too, speak for themselves. If rejects" as Holmes dogmatically asserts, why is it that they were carried to the high ground, and are