shape to much of the more modern and
finished work in flint. With few exceptions, however, these are made of
argillite, and in many cases they have lost the fineness of edge and
angle by weathering and by attrition against the gravel in which they
were rolled under glacial floods. They bear about the same relation in
their roughness and shapelessness to the carefully-worked relics of the
red Indian found on the surface, or in the accumulation of soil
resulting from the decay of countless generations of forest and herbage
which everywhere covers the old gravels, as the matchlock of the Pilgrim
Fathers bears to our target-rifle. But they are of human origin, and
assert the presence of humanity on the Atlantic coast of America at the
close of the glacial period just as logically as the teeth in the
green-sand argue sharks in the Cretaceous sea.

In these gravels are entombed scattered bones of the mastodon and other
extinct mammals, but it was long before there appeared any relic of a
human frame concerning which there could be no misapprehension. At last,
quite recently, Dr. Abbott exhumed a tooth, worn and washed and sunken
deep in the undisturbed drift,--a tooth of a contemporary of the
mastodon and of one of the makers of the argillite implements that
presupposed him; a man who never got beyond the palaeolithic stage,--the
earliest rudiments of a culture far beneath any savagery of historic
times in the Atlantic States. This silent witness of man's antiquity in
America is among the treasures of this museum which are unique and
priceless.

Who were these earliest men? and what has the museum to show similar to
this from other parts of the world? are questions that naturally present
themselves.

The only attempt at an answer to the first, with which I am acquainted,
is suggested by Dr. Abbott in chapter xxxii. of his "Primitive
Industry." After showing that during the last glacial epoch there were
no climatic conditions southward of the actual ice-cap which would
preclude the existence of men, since they would gradually become used to
the slow change (as did so many surviving forms of animal and vegetable
life), Dr. Abbott further clears the way by demonstrating that a strong
line of demarcation exists between the remains of these people and the
earliest traces of the "red Indian" race which Europeans found in
possession of the body of the continent; this gap is not one of
stratification, or, perhaps, of time, but is