heir time and place as worthy
ancestors as any people could have; and we could well believe this
because the Ohio man has, in all ages, been one of the foremost men.

* Professor G. F. Wright.

Our Ice Folk were sturdy, valiant, and cunning enough to cope with the
fierce brute life and the terrible climate of their day, but all they
have left to prove it is the same kind of stone axes that have been
found in the drift of the glaciers, along the water courses in Northern
France and Southern England.

Our Ice Folk must have dressed like their far-descended children, the
Eskimos, in furs and skins, and like them they must have lived upon fish
and the flesh of wild beasts. The least terrible of these beasts would
have been the white bear; the mammoth and mastodon were among the
animals the Ice Folk hunted for game, and slew without bows or arrows,
for there was no wood to make these of. The only weapon the Ice Folk had
was the stone ax which they may have struck into their huge prey when
they came upon it sleeping or followed in the chase till it dropped with
fatigue. Such an ax was dug up out of the glacial terrace, as the bank
of this drift is called, in the valley of the Tuscarawas, in 1889,
perhaps ten thousand years after it was left there. It was wrought from
a piece of black flint, four inches long and two inches wide; at the
larger end it was nearly as thick as it was wide, and it was chipped
to a sharp edge all round. Within the present year another of the
Ice Folk's axes has been found near New London, twenty-two feet under
ground, in the same kind of glacial drift as the first. But it seems to
have been made of a different kind of stone, and to have been so deeply
rotted by the long ages it had been buried that when its outer substance
was scratched away, hardly anything of the hard green rock was left.

After the glaciers were gone, the Ohio climate was still very cold, and
vast lakes stretched over the state, freezing in the long winters,
and thawing in the short summers. One of these spread upward from the
neighborhood of Akron to the east and west of where Cleveland stands;
but by far the largest flooded nearly all that part of Ohio which
the glaciers failed to cover, from beyond where Pittsburg is to where
Cincinnati is. At the last point a mighty ice dam formed every winter
till as the climate grew warmer and the ice thawed more and more, the
waters burst the dam, and poured their tide down the Ohio