shown by a strong
distinctness in the character of the worked stones forming the weapons
and implements of each people in respect to both material and degree of
perfection. Considering further the probability (from known evidence)
that the Innuit (Eskimos) once occupied all the interior of the
continent, together with the ascertained fact that on the Atlantic
coast this people quite recently extended as far south as Cape Cod, and
comparing the drift-implements with the exceeding rudeness of the stone
implements possessed by the Eskimos when first seen by the whites, Dr.
Abbott concludes that in the palaeolithic men we have the ancestors of
the Innuit, who were driven to Arctic fastnesses by a new and more
powerful race of invaders, who retained possession of the great mass of
the continent, and whose descendants remain among us yet.

Now, to examine what the Old World has to show, if anything, similar to
these rudiments of civilization, we must go to the opposite gallery,
where we shall find, in the collections from the river-drift of England
and Southern France, implements equally rude and old-looking, but made
of flint instead of the inferior argillite with which the American
autochthones contented themselves. Next, a little better on the whole
than these, we shall see the relics of stone and bone--the latter not
only whittled and broken, but often ornamentally carved--which came from
caves in England and Southern Europe: some have been dug from beneath
thick layers of stalagmite.

In Europe, then, palaeolithic man is separately considered as the
River-drift man and the Cave man, the former believed to be much the
older people, and known by the series of simplest patterns of stone
implements found in the late Pleistocene river-beds. This River-drift
man wandered over the greater part of Europe and Asia, leading a
nomadic, feral life,--a hunter of very low order, like the modern
Australian. The Cave man, on the contrary, seems to have been restricted
in his range, which of itself is considered indicative of different age
and race, and he was far in advance of the River-drift man in the
variety and workmanship of his weapons and implements. Between both, or
rather between the era of the latter and that of the men who made
implements of polished stone and chipped flint, there is just such a
broad distinction as obtains in the United States between the traces of
palaeolithic and those of neolithic man.

The exact paral