up of extinct species,” we may well insist, with Dawkins, that the
human remains should not be regarded as standing upon a different basis
from those of the horse, since both occur under similar conditions.
Dr. Leidy reports the finding of remains of four different species of
fossil _Equus_. But among them “we may note the skull of a mustang,
identical with that of Mexico and California, which could not have been
buried in the gravels of Sierra County before the time of the Spanish
Conquest, when the living race of horses was introduced.” Professor
Jeffries Wyman says of the Calaveras skull: “Any conclusions based upon
a single skull are liable to prove erroneous, unless we have sufficient
grounds for the belief that such a skull is a representative one of the
race to which it belongs.... We have no sufficient reason for assuming
in the present instance that the skull is a representative one.... The
skull presents no signs of having belonged to an inferior race. In its
breadth it agrees with the other crania from California, except those
of the Diggers, but surpasses them in the other particulars in which
comparisons have been made.”[1530] As, therefore, what appear to be
the skulls of a California Indian and that of a Mexican mustang have
been found to occur in the same deposits, this circumstance, instead
of proving that man was an inhabitant of pliocene America, would seem
to the writer to imply either that these deposits are comparatively
recent, or that the fossil bones found in them are so commingled that
arguments based upon purely palæontological considerations can be
regarded as entitled to very little weight.

But although some American palæontologists are inclined to argue that
these deposits belong to the Pliocene, on account of the character of
the vertebrate fossils found in them, it must not be forgotten that
geologists generally prefer to refer them to the Pleistocene. They
believe that even the superimposition of lava beds upon the gravels
does not establish a very high antiquity for them, and question whether
the time that has elapsed since the outflow of the lava, as measured
by the amount of erosion that has taken place in the gravels, is to
be regarded as much greater than can properly be assigned to the
Pleistocene period elsewhere. Professor Whitney himself admits the
difficulty of distinguishing whether “deposits have been accumulated in
the place where we find them previous to the cessation of the period
of volcanic activity. The gravels which have not been protected by a
capping of basalt, or only thinly or not at all covered by erupted
materials, may in some places have been overlain by recent deposits
in such a way that the line between volcanic and post-volcanic cannot
be distinctly drawn.... It must not unfrequently have happened that
fossils have been washed out of the less coherent detrital beds
belonging to the volcanic series, carried far from their original
resting-place, and deposited in such a position that they seem to
belong to the present epoch.”[1531] In one of the reports of Hayden’s
survey can be seen a plate representing “Modern Lake Deposits capped
with Basalt.”[1532] There is sufficient ground for believing that the
volcanic activity of the regions of the Sierras has continued down to
very recent times, geologically speaking, and that there is no such
great difference of age between the lava-cappings and the other beds
as Professor Whitney supposes. Hayden thinks “the main portion of the
volcanic material of the West has been thrown out at a comparatively
modern date.”[1533] Undoubtedly the amount of erosion that has taken
place in these river gravels implies a great lapse of time, but so
do the other facts of physical geography which have been employed
as chronometers by which to measure the time since the close of the
quaternary period. To carry this erosion back to the tertiary times,
and to assign man his place in the world then on that ground, in face
of the arguments to the contrary drawn from archæology, palæontology,
and geology, in view of the essential weakness of the testimony upon
which the arguments in its favor are based, would seem to be a most
hazardous assumption. It is only equalled by the statement that “the
discoveries made in Europe, which have already obtained general
credence, carry man close to the verge of the tertiary; if not,
indeed, a little the other side of the line.”[1534] In the writer’s
opinion, this is the belief of only a small number of the most extreme
evolutionists in Europe, while the great body of cautious and critical
observers think that it has not been proved, and a few are willing to
hold their judgment in suspense.

Professor Whitney’s conclusions, however, are supported by Mr. Wallace
in the article quoted at the beginning of this chapter, in his
character as an evolutionist of the most advanced school. He says:
“Believing that the whole bearing of the comparative anatomy of man and
of the anthropoid apes, together with the absence of indications of any
essential change in his structure during the quaternary period, lead to
the conclusion that he _must_ have existed, as man, in pliocene times,
and that the intermediate forms connecting him with the higher apes
probably lived during the early pliocene or the miocene period, it is
urged that all such discoveries ... are in themselves probable and such
as we have a right to expect.”[1535] In such a frame of mind it is very
easy for him to wave aside every objection raised by the archæologist
to the character of the evidence brought forward to sustain the alleged
discoveries. To the objection that the objects accompanying the human
remains, for which such a great antiquity is claimed, are too similar
to those of comparatively recent times, he has a ready answer: “The
same may be said of the most ancient bow and spear-heads and those
made by modern Indians. The use of the articles has in both cases
been continuous, and the objects themselves are so necessary and so
comparatively simple that there is no room for any great modification
of form.” The writer can only state here that no archæologist holds
this opinion, and will refer for a detailed statement of his reasons
for the contrary view to an article by him upon _The Bow and Arrow
unknown to Palæolithic Man_.[1536]

It is not easy to believe that so vast a difference in age can be
attributed to the deposits upon the opposite sides of the chain of the
Sierra Nevada, as would follow if we are to hold that the auriferous
gravels belong to the tertiary, while the Lahontan deposits belong to
the quaternary period. Far more reasonable does it seem to suppose
that they both fall within the two divisions into which we have seen
that the pleistocene has been divided. To the writer it appears, from
what study he has made of the evidences alleged of man’s existence
in North America in early times, that proof is wanting that he made
his appearance here earlier than in interglacial times. Dr. Abbott’s
discoveries seem to be worthy of all the importance which has been
assigned to them, and the more so from the fact that they are in accord
with similar discoveries made in the Old World. The evidence adduced
appears to be altogether too fragmentary and strained to warrant the
conclusion that has been drawn that there is no proper correlation
between the geological calendars of the two hemispheres.

Besides the numerous palæolithic implements which the Trenton gravels
have yielded, there have been found in them three human crania, more
or less complete, and portions of others.[1537] Professor Putnam is
inclined to the opinion that these may be veritable remains of the
makers of the palæolithic implements. But it is difficult to conceive
how such fragile objects as human skulls, in this period and at this
locality, could have survived the destructive forces to which they must
have been subjected. We must recollect that the bones of man are very
seldom met with in the river gravels of the Old World, and such crania
as are accepted as belonging to these deposits are dolichocephalic, and
not, like these, brachycephalic.[1538] The circumstances under which
these three have been found are not reported with sufficient detail
to enable us to account satisfactorily for their presence, nor can we
admit that the fact that they “are not of the Delaware Indian type”
affords any adequate criterion for our judgment. It is well established
that “in America we find extreme brachycephaly, as well among the
prehistoric as among the historic peoples from British America to
Patagonia. At the same time, dolichocephaly is found, besides among the
Eskimos, throughout the American Indian tribes from north to south; but
it cannot be considered an American craniologic characteristic.”[1539]
The various forms of skulls, moreover, are found to be so intermingled
that they have been compared to “what might be looked for in a
collection made from the potter’s field of London or New York.”[1540]
The problem is still further complicated by the widespread custom
among the American tribes of altering the natural shape of the skull,
sometimes by flattening it, sometimes by making it as round as
possible.[1541] Taking all these matters into consideration, we are
compelled to regard craniology by itself as an insufficient guide.

We have now passed in review such evidences of man’s early existence in
North America as seem to be sufficiently substantiated by satisfactory
proof, and have intentionally left out of consideration many former
examples, which were accustomed to be cited before the science of
prehistoric archæology had formulated her laws and established her
general conclusions, as well as some more recent ones in which the
evidence seems to be weak.

It only remains for the writer to express his own conclusions on the
question. But first let him draw attention to the state of public
opinion upon this subject as it is well expressed by an English writer:
“The evidence for the existence of palæolithic man in America has been
more fiercely contested even than in Europe, and the problem there
is certainly more complicated. In Europe we can test the age of the
remains not merely by their actual character, but also by the presence
or absence of associated domestic animals. In America this test is
absent, for there were virtually no domestic animals save the dog
known to the pre-European inhabitants. We are therefore remitted to
less direct evidence, namely, the provenance of the remains from beds
of distinctly Pleistocene age, the fabric of the remains, and their
association with animals, we have reason to believe, become extinct at
the termination of that period.”[1542]

As an example of the spirit in which this “fierce contest” is waged in
America, it will be sufficient to quote a few passages from a work by
one of her most eminent men of science. He is speaking of “what seems
to be a village site in Europe, of far greater antiquity than the Swiss
lake-villages, and which may be a veritable ‘Palæolithic’ antediluvian
town. It occurs at Solutré, near Mâcon, in eastern France, and has
given rise to much discussion and controversy, as described by Messrs.
De Ferry and Arcelin.... It destroys utterly the pretension that the
men of the mammoth age were an inferior race, or ruder than their
successors in the later stone age.... Lastly, many of the flint weapons
of Solutré are of the palæolithic type characteristic of the river
gravels, ... while other implements and weapons are as well worked as
those of the later stone age. Thus this singular deposit connects these
two so-called ages, and fuses them into one.”[1543] The only comment
the writer will make upon this statement is to say that he has twice
visited the station at Solutré in company with M. Arcelin; that he has
examined the collection of the late M. De Ferry at his house; and that
he has before him the work which is supposed to be quoted from,[1544]
and he accordingly feels warranted in asserting with confidence that
not one “flint implement of the palæolithic type characteristic of the
river gravels” was ever found at Solutré. A note appended to Sir J. W.
Dawson’s rash statement adds: “Recent discoveries by M. Prunières, in
caves at Beaumes Chaudes, seem to show that the older cave-men were
in contact with more advanced tribes, as arrow-heads of the so-called
neolithic type are found sticking in their bones, or associated with
them. This would form another evidence of the little value to be
attached to the distinction of the two ages of stone.” The writer
has already indicated his conviction that palæolithic man had not
advanced sufficiently to invent the bow and arrow, and he wishes to
add here that “arrow-heads of the so-called neolithic type” continued
to be ordinary weapons employed during the Age of Bronze. He is only
surprised that Dr. Prunières’ discoveries are not quoted to prove that
there is no distinction between the Age of Stone and the Age of Bronze.

Tested by the canons of prehistoric archæology, superposition,
association, and style, in the judgment of the writer the fact of the
existence of palæolithic man upon this continent, and the distinction
between the rude palæolithic implement and the skilfully chipped
obsidian objects which belong to what is called in Europe the Solutré
type (a development of the later period in the early stone age, which
cannot be overlooked in discussing the question of the antiquity of
man), are truths as firmly established as any taught by modern science.
The small minority who refuse to admit the last stated proposition are
laggards in her march, and the few doubters who still question the
genuineness of the palæolithic implements from the Trenton gravels are
not entitled by their knowledge of the processes of manufacturing stone
implements to have much weight attached to their opinions.

Regarding, then, the existence of palæolithic man as established by
the finding of four hundred of his relics in the Delaware valley near
Trenton, we have next to inquire whether there is evidence that in
that region man made any progress towards the neolithic condition.
For an answer to this question we have only to study the immense
collection of objects gathered by Dr. Abbott, and now deposited in
the Peabody Museum at Cambridge. This seems to warrant a conclusion
exactly the opposite to Professor Whitney’s, who states that “so far
as California is concerned ... the implements, tools, and works of
art obtained are throughout in harmony with each other, all being the
simplest and least artistic of which it is possible to conceive;” and
his further statement that the “rude tools required but little more
skill than is indicated by the chipped obsidian implements which are
now, and have been from all time, in use among the aborigines of this
continent.”[1545]

We have already seen that Professor Whitney’s inferences about the
relics of man occurring in the gravels of California are not at all
justified by the facts relating to their discovery as reported by him;
and as he offers no proof of his other assertion that “chipped obsidian
implements have been _for all time_ in use among the aborigines of
this continent,” we will venture to question its accuracy, even should
he argue that his loose statement was intended to apply only to the
aborigines of California. Consequently we are somewhat at a loss
to understand why Dr. Abbott should feel called upon to refute his
conclusions. He does this, however, successfully in his _Primitive
Industry_, which is so largely based upon this great collection as
to answer satisfactorily as a catalogue for it. In his own words,
“the careful and systematic examination of the surface geology of New
Jersey, of itself, it is believed, shows as abundant and unmistakable
evidence of the transition from a true palæolithic to a neolithic
condition as is exhibited in the traces of human handiwork found in
the valley of any European river.”[1546] The arguments upon which
this conclusion is based are drawn from each of the three canons of
prehistoric archæology. A certain class of objects, superior in form
and finish to the rude palæolithic implement, but decidedly inferior
in every respect to the common types of Indian manufacture, with
which collectors of such objects all over our country are perfectly
familiar, is found occurring _principally_ in deposits which occupy a
position intermediate between the drift gravels, from which come the
palæolithic implements, and the cultivable surface-soil, in which the
former implements of the Indians are constantly brought to light by the
ordinary operations of agriculture. In other instances, where these
peculiar objects are found on or near the surface, not only do they not
always occur there in association with the common Indian relics, but
the material of which they are made, argillite, is the same as that out
of which all the four hundred palæolithic implements are fabricated,
with the exception of “two of quartz, one of quartzite, and one made
from a black chert pebble.”[1547] This peculiar material occurs _in
place_ only a few miles north of Trenton, and as the ice-sheet withdrew
it afforded “the first available mineral for effective implements other
than pebbles, and these were largely covered with water, and not so
readily obtained as at present; while the dry land of that day, the
Columbia gravel, contained almost exclusively in this region small
quartzite pebbles an inch or two in length.”[1548] The objects thus
referred to exhibit only a few simple types. There is a rudely chipped
spear-head, about three or four inches in length and from one to two
in breadth, characterized by the same kind of decomposition of the
surface which is seen upon the palæolithic implements. These occur in
large numbers; “as many as a thousand have been found in an area of
fifty acres.... A peculiarity ... is their frequent occurrence ... at
a depth that suggests that they were lost when the face of the country
was different from what it now is.”[1549] An implement is often found
which was probably used as a knife, also very rudely chipped, and
shaped somewhat like a spear-head, but never having a sharp point.
The argillite, of which these are made, “is very hard and susceptible
of being brought to a very sharp edge,” but they are now all much
decomposed upon the surface, and “are frequently brought to light
through land-slides and the uprooting of trees from depths greater than
it is usual to find jasper implements”[1550] of the Indians.

The most common object of all, however, and one that occurs in
very large numbers, is a slender argillite spear-point, about three
inches in length, of nearly uniform size, and having little or no
finish at the base. These are found at various depths up to five
feet, principally in the alluvial mud that has accumulated upon the
meadows skirting the Delaware River, that are liable to be overflowed
occasionally by the tide. From this circumstance, in addition to
their shape, Dr. Abbott has conjectured that they were used as
fish-spears.[1551] “This deposit of mud is of a deep blue-black color,
stiff in consistency, and almost wholly free from pebbles. It is
composed of decomposed vegetable matter and a large percentage of very
fine sand. It varies in depth from four to twenty feet, and rests on
an old gravel of an origin antedating the river gravels that contain
palæolithic implements. This mud is the geological formation next
succeeding the palæolithic implement-bearing gravels.... A careful
survey of this mud deposit, made at several distant points, leads
to the conclusion that its formation dates from the exposure of the
older gravel upon which it rests, through the gradual lessening of
the bulk of the river, until it occupied only its present channel....
The indications are that the present volume and channel of the river
have been essentially as they now are for a very long period; and the
character of the deposit is such that its accumulation, if principally
from decomposition of vegetable matter, must necessarily be very
gradual. Since its accumulation to a depth sufficient to sustain tree
growth, forests have grown, decayed, and been replaced by a growth
of other timber. While so recent in origin that it seems scarcely
to warrant the attention of the geologist, its years of growth are
nevertheless to be numbered by centuries, and the traces of man found
at all depths through it hint of a distant, shadowy past that is
difficult to realize.

“The same objection, it may be, will be urged in this instance as in
others where the comparative antiquity of man is based upon the depth
at which stone implements are found,—that all these traces have been
left upon the present surface of the ground, and subsequently have
gotten, by unexplained means, to the various depths at which they now
occur. It is, indeed, difficult to realize how some of these argillite
spear-points have finally sunk through a compact peaty mass until they
have reached the very base of the deposit. For those who urge that this
sinking process explains the occurrence of implements at great depths,
it remains to demonstrate that the people who made these argillite
fish-spears either made only these, or were careful to take no other
evidences of their handicraft with them when they wandered about these
meadows; for certainly nothing else appears to have shared the fate
of sinking deeply into the mud. In fact, the objection mentioned is
met in this case, as in that of the palæolithic implements, that if
these fish-spears are of the same age and origin as the ordinary Indian
relics of the surface, then all alike should be found at great depths.
This, we know, is not the case. Furthermore, the character of the
deposit is not that of a loose mud or quicksand, but more like that of
peat. It has a close texture, is tough and unyielding to a degree, and
offers decided resistance to the sinking of comparatively light objects
deeply into it. This is, of course, lessened when the deposit is
subject to tidal overflows, and in the immediate vicinity of springs,
which, bubbling through it, have caused a deposit of quicksand. While
here an object sinks instantly out of sight, it is not here that we
must judge of the character of the formation as a whole; and over the
greater portion of its area we find no evidence of objects disappearing
beneath the surface at a more rapid rate than the accumulation of
decomposing vegetable matter would explain. Efforts have been made to
determine the rate of progress of this growth of mould, but they are
not wholly satisfactory; nevertheless the indications are sufficient to
warrant our belief that the rate is so gradual as to invest with great
archæological interest the characteristic traces of man found in these
alluvial deposits.”

Although these argillite spear-points seem _principally_ to occur, as
has been stated, in the alluvial mud along the banks of the Delaware,
yet they are often found upon the surface, and associated with objects
of Indian origin. This circumstance Dr. Abbott attempts to explain by
the following considerations: “One marked result of the deforesting of
the country and its constant cultivation has been to remove in great
part the many inequalities of the surface and to dry up many of the
smaller brooks. The hillocks have been worn down, the valleys filled
up, and this of course has resulted in bringing to the surface, on the
higher ground, the argillite implements which were at considerable
depths, and in burying in the valleys the more recent jasper and quartz
implements of Indian origin that were left upon the soil when lost or
discarded by the red man. In the remnants of forests still remaining,
where no such disturbance of the soil has occurred, the relative depths
at which argillite and jasper respectively occur indicate the greater
age of the former.”[1552]

He recurs to this subject in another place:[1553] “The telling fact
with reference to these argillite spear-points is that they are not,
in the same sense as jasper arrow-heads, surface-found implements.
They occur also, and even more abundantly, beneath the surface-soil.
The celebrated Swedish naturalist, Peter Kalm, travelled throughout
central and southern New Jersey in 1748-50, and in his description of
the country remarks: ‘We find great woods here, but when the trees in
them have stood a hundred and fifty or a hundred and eighty years, they
are either rotting within or losing their crown, or their wood becomes
quite soft, or their roots are no longer able to draw in sufficient
nourishment, or they die from some other cause. Therefore, when storms
blow, which sometimes happens here, the trees are broken off either
just above the roots, or in the middle, or at the summit. Several trees
are likewise torn out with their roots by the power of the winds....
In this manner the old trees die away continually, and are succeeded
by a younger generation. Those which are thrown down lie on the ground
and putrefy, sooner or later, and by that means increase the _black
soil_, into which the leaves are likewise finally changed, which drop
abundantly in autumn, are blown about by the winds for some time, but
are heaped up and lie on both sides of the trees which are fallen
down. It requires several years before a tree is entirely reduced to
dust.’[1554] This quotation has a direct bearing on that which follows.
It is clear that the surface-soil was forming during the occupancy of
the country by the Indians. The entire area of the State was covered
with a dense forest, which century after century was increasing the
_black soil_ to which Kalm refers. If, now, an opportunity occurs to
examine a section of virgin soil and underlying strata, as occasionally
happens on the bluffs facing the river, the limit in depth of this
black soil may be approximately determined. An average derived from
several such sections leads me to infer that the depth is not much
over one foot, and the proportion of vegetable matter increases as
the surface is approached. Of this depth of superficial soil probably
not over one half has been derived from decomposition of vegetable
growths. While no positive data are determinable in this matter beyond
the naked fact that rotting trees increase the bulk of top-soil, one
archæological fact that we do derive is that _flint implements_ known
as Indian relics belong to this superficial or ‘black soil,’ as Kalm
terms it. Abundantly are they found on the surface; more sparingly are
they found near the surface; more sparingly still the deeper we go;
while at the base of this deposit of soil the _argillite_ implements
occur in greatest abundance. Here, then, we have the whole matter in
a nut-shell. The two forms were dissociated until by the deforesting
of the country and subsequent cultivation of the soil, except in a few
instances, they became commingled.”

A further argument in respect to the relation which argillite
implements bear to those made of jasper and quartz is derived from
the relative proportion in which they occur in localities which are
believed to have been occupied first by the users of argillite, and
subsequently by the Indians. “Of a series of twenty thousand objects
gathered in Mercer County, New Jersey, forty-four hundred were of
argillite, and of such rude forms and in such limited varieties as
would be expected of the productions of a less cultured people than
the Indian of the stone age. Of this series of forty-four hundred, two
hundred and thirty-three are well-designed drills or perforators and
scrapers; the others being spear-points, fishing-spears, arrow-heads,
and knife-like implements.”[1555] This is supplemented by negative
evidence drawn from “the character of the sites of arrow-makers’
open-air workshops, or those spots whereon the professional chipper
of flint pursued his calling. In the locality where I have pursued my
studies several such sites have been discovered and carefully examined.
In no one of these workshop sites has there been found any trace of
argillite mingled with the flint-chips that form the characteristic
feature of such spots. On the other hand, no similar sites have been
discovered, to my knowledge, where argillite was used exclusively.
The absence of this mineral cannot be explained on the ground that it
was difficult to procure, for such is not the case. It constitutes,
in fact, a considerable percentage of the pebbles and boulders of the
drift from which the Indians gathered their jasper and quartz pebbles
for working into implements and weapons. If the absence of argillite
from such heaps of selected stones is explained by the assertion that
the Indians had recognized the superiority of jasper, then the belief
that argillite was used prior to jasper receives tacit assent. If,
however, it was the earlier _Indians_ who used argillite, and gradually
discarded it for the various forms of flint, then we ought to find
workshop sites older than the time of _flint_-chipping, and others
where the two minerals are associated. This, as has been stated, has
not been done.”[1556]

Professor Putnam has found a confirmation of these views of Dr. Abbott
in the contents of a great shell-heap at Keyport, in New Jersey,
investigated over thirty years ago by Rev. Samuel Lockwood, and now
placed in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge. “As the shell-heap at
Keyport, once covering a mile or more in length along a narrow strip
bordered upon one side by the ocean and on the other by Raritan Bay, is
entirely obliterated, it is of importance that the materials obtained
from it are now in the museum for comparison with our very extensive
collections from the shell-heaps of New England. The fact that at
certain places on this narrow strip between the bay and the sea the
prevailing implements were of argillite and of great antiquity has a
peculiar significance in connection with those from Trenton, and again
points to an intermediate period between the palæolithic and the late
Indian occupation of New Jersey.”[1557]

To these various arguments the writer wishes to add the statement
that to his personal knowledge argillite spear-points, and especially
those of the fish-spear type, are occasionally found in other parts
of our country besides New Jersey. In his own researches, which have
been principally carried on upon the seacoast of New England, he has
_never_ found an example of them in the shell-heaps proper, which are
universally recognized by archæologists as relics of the Indians. The
few which he has found himself, or has obtained from others, have come
from meadows by the side of rivers or ponds, where they might very well
have been used as fish-spears.

A further confirmation of Dr. Abbott’s opinions in regard to the
descendants of palæolithic man is derived from certain discoveries
made by Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson in the alluvial deposits at Naaman’s
Creek, in Delaware. These were first made known in November, 1887,
by a letter to the editor of the American Antiquarian. “In 1870, a
fisherman living in the village of Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, gave me
some spear and arrow heads flaked from a dense argillite, as well as
other rude implements of a prehistoric people, which he had found on
some extensive mud flats near the mouth of Naaman’s Creek, a small
tributary of the Delaware. The finder stated that while fishing ... he
had noticed here and there the ends of logs or stakes protruding from
the mud, and that they seemed to him to have been placed in rows....
A visit made a few days afterward to the place ... disclosed the ends
of much-decayed stakes or piles protruding here and there above the
mud.... On my return from France in 1880 I again visited the spot....
While abroad I studied in spare moments many archæological collections,
especially those from the Swiss Lake Dwellings, and visited the
various lake stations of Switzerland. The rude dressings of the ends
of the piles in some places were evidently made with blunt stone
implements, and recalled those I had seen on the ends of the posts in
the Delaware River marshes. Since 1880 I have quietly examined the
remains, excavating what pile ends remained _in situ_ (preserving a
few that did not crumble to pieces), preserving careful notes of the
dredging and excavations (at low tides), carried on principally by
myself, aided at times by interested friends. The results so far seem
to indicate that the ends of the piles imbedded in the mud, judging
from the implements and other débris scattered around them, once
supported shelters of early man that were erected a few feet above the
water,—the upper portion of the piles having disappeared in the long
lapse of time that must have ensued since they were placed there. (The
flats are covered by four and one half feet of water on the flood tide;
on the ebb the marsh is dry, and covered with slimy ooze several feet
in depth, varying in different places.) Three different dwellings have
been located, all that exist in the flats referred to, after a careful
examination within the last four years of nearly every inch of ground
carefully laid off and examined in sections. The implements found in
two of ‘the supposed river dwelling sites’ are very rude in type, and
generally made of dense argillite, not unlike the palæoliths found by
my friend Dr. C. C. Abbott in the Trenton gravels. The character of
the implements from the other or third supposed river dwelling on the
Delaware marshes is better finished objects made of argillite.”[1558]

The greater portion of the objects obtained by Mr. Cresson has been
placed in the Peabody Museum, to which he is at present attached as a
special assistant; but he has also kindly sent to the writer a small
illustrative collection from each site, for his study.

The writer would hesitate to draw the inference from this single
discovery that the custom of living in pile-dwellings ever prevailed
in North America, although there is evidence that such a practice was
not unknown in South America. This is to be found in the account of the
voyage of Alonso de Ojeda along the north coast of that country, in the
year 1499, in which he was accompanied by Vespucius.[1559] I will quote
the language of Washington Irving: “Proceeding along the coast, he
arrived at a vast, deep gulf resembling a tranquil lake, entering which
he beheld on the eastern side a village whose construction struck him
with surprise. It consisted of twenty large houses, shaped like bells,
and built on piles driven into the bottom of the lake, which in this
part was limpid and of but little depth. Each house was provided with
a drawbridge, and with canoes by which the communication was carried
on. From these resemblances to the Italian city, Ojeda gave to the bay
the name of the Gulf of Venice, and it is called at the present day
Venezuela, or Little Venice.”[1560] There is no inherent improbability
that such a custom may have prevailed upon the shores of Delaware Bay,
and for the same reason that has caused it to be followed elsewhere.
“It has been stated that the natives living near Lake Maracaybo, in
South America, erect pile dwellings over the lake, to which they resort
in order to escape from the mosquitoes which infest the shore. Lord
also mentions that the Indians of the Suman prairie, British Columbia,
on the subsidence of the annual floods in May and June, build pile
dwellings over a lake there, to which they retire to escape from the
mosquitoes which at that period infest the prairie in dense clouds, but
will not cross the water.”[1561]

But it would be safer, probably, to consider these discoveries of Mr.
Cresson’s as marking the site of ancient aboriginal fish-weirs, such as
are described by Captain Ribault and other early explorers as made by
the natives.[1562] The writer agrees with Professor Putnam in thinking
that “the fact that at only one station pottery occurs, and, also, that
at this station the stone implements are largely of jasper and quartz,
with few of argillite, while at the two other stations many rude stone
implements are associated with chipped points of argillite, with few of
jasper and other flint-like material, is of great interest.”[1563]

Still further confirmation of the progress of the palæolithic man in
this region is afforded by discoveries made in a rock-shelter near
the headwaters of Naaman’s Creek, as early as 1866, for an account
of which, and the preservation of the objects then found, we are
also indebted to Mr. Cresson: “The remains of the Naaman’s Creek
rock-shelter luckily fell into hands that have preserved them.... To
give a detailed account of _how_ the rock-shelter was discovered would
consume too much time. Let us rather consider briefly the ... contents
of the shelter’s various layers.... Fortunately careful drawings of
the shelter were made during its excavation between the years 1866 and
1867.... A glance shows the outcrop of the rock as it appeared before
the excavations were begun in 1866. The trees show that the ground
was then covered by a thick wood.... From the point that marks the
innermost edge of the outcrop, overhanging the hollow, a perpendicular
line dropped to the ground would measure five and one eighth feet,
the height of the projection of the rock above the ground before the
excavations were commenced.

“Twenty-two feet eight inches from the outcrop, measured from its
inner face, there is still another outcrop.... This marks the opposite
side of the hollow.... It is evident how admirably the place was
adapted to the wants of the early hunters of the Delaware valley,
whether it be as a shelter, or as a place of defence against their
enemies.... Let us look at the layers of earth that filled it, these
being intermingled with rude implements, broken bones, and charcoal,
indicating that man at times had resorted to the spot.

“Layer C [the lowest]. This was composed of schist, resting on the
bedrock of the shelter. A layer of aqueous gravel, of the same type
as that underlying Philadelphia, rested on the decomposed schist. The
greatest depth of the red gravel layer was four feet two and one fourth
inches, measured from the layer of decomposed schist. Least depth of
gravel observed, one foot three inches....

“Layer A [next above]. This was a layer of grayish-white brick clay
mixed with yellow clay, similar to that underlying Philadelphia, on
top of which was a layer mixed with sand.... Stone implements were
discovered in this layer. They were but few in number and very rude,
exclusively of argillite, and palæolithic in type. Greatest depth of
layer, two feet one and one half inches. No implements of bone were
found....

“Layer T [next above]. This was of reddish gravel, intermingled with
decomposed schist, cinders, and broken bones of animals. Fragments of a
human skull were found ... in this layer. A fragment of a human rib was
also preserved. The fragments of the skull are covered here and there
by dendritic incrustations. Rude spears and implements of argillite
were found in this layer. Depth of layer, thirteen to eighteen inches.

“Layer D [next above]. Composed of reddish-yellow clay. Depth, two feet
three inches. No implements.

“Layer M [next above]. In this layer were numerous implements of
argillite and some of bone, intermingled with rude implements of
quartzite and jasper and fragments of rude pottery, with charcoal.
Greatest depth, one foot one and one half inches. Least depth, three
inches.

“Layer R [next above]. Yellow clay. Greatest depth, two feet one and
one half inches; least depth, eight inches. No implements.

“Layer W [next above]. This contained chipped implements; those made
of jasper and quartzite predominating over those of argillite. In the
lowest part of this layer were fragments of rude pottery. In the upper
portion of the layer were potsherds decidedly superior in decoration
and technique to those from the lower portion. Geological composition
of this layer, yellow clay loam. Greatest depth, three feet four
inches. Least depth, two and one half inches.

“Layer L [top]. This consists of leaf mould seven inches thick,
converted into swamp muck by decomposing action of water from springs.
No implements.... No remains of extinct animals were found.”[1564]

Professor Putnam thus proceeded to comment upon these discoveries: “We
have a series of objects, taken from the several layers of the shelter,
giving us a chronology of the utmost importance, as each period of
occupation of the shelter was followed by a natural deposition,
separating the different periods of occupation. The stone implements
... are taken from the lowest layer, indicating the earliest period of
occupation of the rock-shelter; and ... they correspond in shape and
rudeness of execution with those taken from the gravel-bed at Trenton;
and like most of the latter they are all of argillite. The specimens
from the second period are of argillite, and while many are chipped
into slender points, they are still of very rude forms; and these in
turn correspond with the argillite points found by Dr. Abbott deep
down in the black soil, or resting upon the gravel, at Trenton. In
the upper layers of the cave we observe ... the gradual introduction
of implements chipped from jasper and quartz, and corresponding in
form with those found upon the surface throughout the valley. And as a
further indication of this later development, it was only in the upper
layers that pottery, bone implements, and ornaments were found; the
three distinct periods of occupation of the Delaware valley are thus
distinctly shown; and this cave-shelter is a perfect exemplification of
the results which Dr. Abbott had obtained from a study of the specimens
which he has collected upon the surface, deep in the black soil, and in
the gravel, at Trenton.”

From the accumulative force of these various lines of reasoning, the
writer thinks that there is a strong probability that here, on the
waters of the Delaware, man developed from the palæolithic to the
neolithic stage of culture. But we cannot follow Dr. Abbott in his
further conclusion (if, indeed, he still holds to it) that we are to
seek the descendants of this primitive population in the Eskimos,
driven north after contact with the Indians. We have failed to discover
the slightest evidence to sustain this position. The hereditary enmity
existing between the Eskimos and the Indians may be equally well
explained upon the theory that the former are later comers to this
continent, and are therefore hated by the Indian races as intruders.
The two races are certainly markedly unlike.

In the absence of any evidence tending to show the development of the
argillite-using people into the Indian races, with their perfected
implements and weapons of the age of polished stone, it seems more
reasonable to hold with Professor Dawkins that the earlier and ruder
race perished before or were absorbed by a people furnished with a
better equipment in the struggle for the “survival of the fittest.” The
palæolithic man of the river gravels of Trenton and his argillite-using
posterity the writer believes to be completely extinct.[1565]

It only remains for the writer to express his regret that he has
been prevented from setting forth in detail, at the present time, the
grounds upon which he has come to other conclusions which were briefly
indicated at the beginning of this chapter. He can only repeat here
his belief that the so-called Indians, with their many divisions into
numerous linguistic families, were later comers to our shores than the
primitive population, whose development he has attempted to trace; that
the so-called “moundbuilders” were the ancestors of tribes found in the
occupation of the soil; and that the Pueblos and the Aztecs were only
peoples relatively farther advanced than the others.

The writer further thinks that these are propositions capable, if not
of being demonstrated, at least of being made to appear in a very high
degree probable by means of authorities which will be found amply
referred to in other chapters of this volume.

[Illustration: Signature]

THE PROGRESS OF OPINION RESPECTING THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN
AMERICA.

BY THE EDITOR.

THE literature respecting the origin and early condition of the
American aborigines is very extensive; and, as a rule, especially
in the earlier period, it is not characterized by much reserve in
connecting races by historical analogies.[1566] Few before Dr.
Robertson, in discussing the problem, could say: “I have ventured to
inquire without presuming to decide.”

The question was one that allured many of the earlier Spanish writers
like Herrera and Torquemada. Among the earlier English discussions is
that of Wm. Bourne in his _Booke called the Treasure for Travellers_
(London, 1578), where a section is given to “The Peopling of America.”
The most famous of the early discussions of the various theories
was that of Gregorio Garciá, a missionary for twenty years in South
America, who reviewed the question in his _Origen de los Indios de
el Nuevo Mundo_ (Valencia, 1607).[1567] He goes over the supposed
navigations of the Phœnicians, the identity of Peru with Solomon’s
Ophir, and the chances of African, Roman, and Jewish migrations,—only
to reject them all, and to favor a coming of Tartars and Chinese.
Clavigero thinks his evidences the merest conjectures. E. Brerewood,
in his _Enquiries touching the diversity of languages and religions_
(London, 1632, 1635), claimed a Tartar origin. In New England, where
many were believers in the Jewish analogies, it is somewhat amusing to
find not long after this the quizzical Thomas Morton, with what seems
like mock gravity, finding the aboriginal source in “the scattered
Trojans, after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.”[1568] The
reader, however, is referred to other sections of the present volume
for the literature bearing upon the distinct ethnical connections of
the early American peoples.

The chief literary controversy over the question began in 1642,
when Hugo Grotius published his _De Origine Gentium Americanarum
Dissertatio_ (Paris and Amsterdam, 1642).[1569] He argued that all
North America except Yucatan (which had an Ethiopian stock) was peopled
from the Scandinavian North; that the Peruvians were from China, and
that the Moluccans peopled the regions below Peru. Grotius aroused an
antagonist in Johannes de Laet, whose challenge appeared the next year:
_Joannis de Laet Antwerpiani notae ad dissertationem Hugonis Grotii
de origine gentium Americanarum: et observationes aliquot ad meliorem
indaginem difficillimæ illius quæstionis_ (Amsterdam, 1643).[1570]
He combated his brother Dutchman at all points, and contended that
the Scythian race furnished the predominant population of America.
The Spaniards went to the Canaries, and thence some of their vessels
drifted to Brazil. He is inclined to accept the story of Madoc’s
Welshmen, and think it not unlikely that the people of the Pacific
islands may have floated to the western coast of South America, and
that minor migrations may have come from other lands. He supports his
views by comparisons of the Irish, Gallic, Icelandic, Huron, Iroquois,
and Mexican tongues.

To all this Grotius replied in a second _Dissertatio_, and De Laet
again renewed the attack: _Ioannis de Laet Antwerpiani responsio
ad dissertationem secundam Hvgonis Grotii, de origine gentium
Americanarum. Cum indice ad utrumque libellum_ (Amsterdam, 1644).[1571]

De Laet, not content with his own onset, incited another to take part
in the controversy, and so George Horn (Hornius) published his _De
Originibus Americanis, libri quatuor_ (Hagæ Comitis, _i. e._ The Hague,
1652; again, Hemipoli, _i. e._ Halberstadt, 1669).[1572] His view was
the Scythian one, but he held to later additions from the Phœnicians
and Carthaginians on the Atlantic side, and from the Chinese on the
Pacific.

For the next fifty years there were a number of writers on the
subject, who are barely names to the present generation;[1573]
but towards the middle of the eighteenth century the question was
considered in _The American Traveller_ (London, 1741), and by
Charlevoix in his _Nouvelle France_ (1744). The author of an _Enquiry
into the Origin of the Cherokees_ (Oxford, 1762) makes them the
descendants of Meshek, son of Japhet. In 1767, however, the question
was again brought into the range of a learned and disputatious
discussion, reviving all the arguments of Grotius, De Laet, and Horn,
when E. Bailli d’Engel published his _Essai sur cette question: Quand
et comment l’America a-t-elle été peuplée d’hommes et d’Animaux?_ (5
vols., Amsterdam, 1767, 2d ed., 1768). He argues for an antediluvian
origin.[1574] The controversy which now followed was aroused by C.
De Pauw’s characterization of all American products, man, animals,
vegetation, as degraded and inferior to nature in the old world, in
an essay which passed through various editions, and was attacked and
defended in turn.[1575] An Italian, Count Carli, some years later,
controverted De Pauw, and using every resource of mythology, tradition,
geology, and astronomy, claimed for the Americans a descent from the
Atlantides.[1576] It was not till after reports had come from the Ohio
Valley of the extensive earthworks in that region that the question
of the earlier peoples of America attracted much general attention
throughout America; and the most conspicuous spokesman was President
Stiles of Yale College, in an address which he delivered before the
General Assembly of Connecticut, in 1783, on the future of the new
republic.[1577] In this, while arguing for the unity of the American
tribes and for their affinity with the Tartars, he held to their being
in the main the descendants of the Canaanites expelled by Joshua,
whether finding their way hither by the Asiatic route and establishing
the northern Sachemdoms, or coming in Phœnician ships across the
Atlantic to settle Mexico and Peru.[1578] Lafitau in 1724 (_Mœurs de
Sauvages_) had contended for a Tartar origin. We have examples of the
reasoning of a missionary in the views of the Moravian Loskiel, and of
a learned controversialist in the treatise of Fritsch, in 1794 and 1796
respectively.[1579]

[Illustration: BENJAMIN SMITH BARTON.]

The earliest American with a scientific training to discuss the
question was a professor in the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin
Smith Barton, a man who acquired one of the best reputations in his
day among Americans for studies in this and other questions of natural
history. His father was an English clergyman settled in America,
and his mother a sister of David Rittenhouse. It was while he was a
student of medicine in Edinburgh that he first approached the subject
of the origin of the Americans, in a little treatise on American
Antiquities, which he never completed.[1580] His _Papers relating
to certain American Antiquities_ (Philad., 1796) consists of those
read to the Amer. Philos. Soc., and printed in their _Transactions_
(vol. iv.). They were published as the earnest of his later work on
American Antiquities. He argues against De Pauw, and contends that the
Americans are descended—at least some of them—from Asiatic peoples
still recognized. The _Papers_ include a letter from Col. Winthrop
Sargent, Sept. 8, 1794, describing certain articles found in a mound
at Cincinnati, and a letter upon them from Barton to Dr. Priestley.
He in the end gave more careful attention to the subject, mainly on
its linguistic side, and went farther than any one had gone before him
in his _New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America_
(Philad., 1797; 2d ed., enlarged, 1798).[1581] The book attracted
much notice, and engaged the attention in some degree of European
philologists, and made Barton at that time the most conspicuous student
on these matters in America. Jefferson was at that time gathering
material in similar studies, but his collections were finally burned in
1801. Barton, in dedicating his treatise to Jefferson, recognized the
latter’s advance in the same direction. He believed his own gathering
of original MS. material to be at that time more extensive than any
other student had collected in America. His views had something of the
comprehensiveness of his material, and he could not feel that he could
point to any one special source of the indigenous population.

During the early years of the present century old theories and new were
abundant. The powerful intellect and vast knowledge of Alexander von
Humboldt were applied to the problem as he found it in Middle America.
He announced some views on the primitive peoples in 1806, in the _Neue
Berlinische Monatsschrift_ (vol. xv.); but his ripened opinions found
record in his _Vues de Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de
l’Amérique_ (Paris, 1816), and the Asiatic theory got a conservative
yet definite advocate.

Hugh Williamson[1582] thought he found traces of the Hindoo in the
higher arts of the Mexicans, and marks of the ruder Asiatics in the
more northern American peoples. A conspicuous littérateur of the day,
Samuel L. Mitchell, veered somewhat wildly about in his notions of
a Malay, Tartar, and Scandinavian origin.[1583] Meanwhile something
like organized efforts were making. The American Antiquarian Society
was formed in 1812.[1584] Silliman began his _Journal of Arts and
Sciences_ in 1819, and both society and periodical proved instruments
of wider inquiry. In the first volume published by the Antiquarian
Society, Caleb Atwater, in his treatise on the Western Antiquities,
gave the earliest sustained study of the subject, and believed in a
general rather than in a particular Asiatic source. The man first to
attract attention for his grouping of ascertained results, unaided
by personal explorations, however, was Dr. James H. McCulloh, who
published his _Researches on America_ at Baltimore in 1816. The book
passed to a second edition the next year, but received its final shape
in the _Researches, philosophical and antiquarian, concerning the
aboriginal history of America_ (1829), a book which Prescott[1585]
praised for its accumulated erudition, and Haven[1586] ranked high for
its manifestations of industry and research, calling it encyclopædic in
character. McCulloh examines the native traditions, but can evolve no
satisfactory conclusion from them as to the origin of the Americans.
The public mind, however, was not ripe for scholarly inquiry, and there
was not that in McCulloh’s style to invite attention; and greater
popularity followed upon the fanciful and dogmatic confidence of
John Haywood,[1587] upon the somewhat vivid if unsteady speculations
of C. S. Rafinesque,[1588] and even upon the itinerant Josiah
Priest, who boasted of the circulation of thousands of copies of his
popular books.[1589] John Delafield’s _Inquiry into the Origin of
the Antiquities of America_ (N. Y., 1839) revived the theory, never
quite dormant, of the descent of the Mexicans from the riper peoples
of Hindostan and Egypt; while the more barbarous red men came of the
Mongol stock. The author ran through the whole range of philology,
mythology, and many of the customs of the races, in reaching this
conclusion. A little book by John McIntosh, _Discovery of America and
Origin of the North American Indians_, published in Toronto, 1836, was
reissued in N. Y. in 1843, and with enlargements in 1846, _Origin of
the North American Indians_, continued down to 1859 to be repeatedly
issued, or to have a seeming success by new dates.[1590]

When Columbus, approaching the main land of South America, imagined
it a large island, he associated it with that belief so long current
in the Old World, which placed the cradle of the race in the Indian
Ocean,—a belief which in our day has been advocated by Haeckel,
Caspari and Winchell,—and imagined he was on the coasts, skirting an
interior, where lay the Garden of Eden.[1591] No one had then ventured
on the belief that the doctrine of Genesis must be reconciled with
any supposed counter-testimony by holding it to be but the record of
the Jewish race. Columbus was not long in his grave when Theophrastus
Paracelsus, in 1520, and before the belief in the continuity of North
America with Asia was dispelled, and consequently before the question
of how man and animals could have reached the New World was raised,
first broached the heterodox view of the plurality of the human
race. All the early disputants on the question of the origin of the
American man looked either across the Atlantic or the Pacific for the
primitive seed; nor was there any necessary connection between the
arguments for an autochthonous American man and a diversity of race,
when Fabricius, in 1721, published his _Dissertatio Critica_[1592] on
the opinions of those who held that different races had been created.
From that day the old orthodox interpretation of the record in Genesis
found no contestant of mark till the question came up in relation
to the American man, it being held quite sufficient to account for
the inferiority or other distinguishing characteristics of race by
assigning them to the influence of climate and physical causes.[1593]

[Illustration: LOUIS AGASSIZ.

After a photograph, hanging in the Somerset Club, Boston; suggested to
the editor by Mr. Alexander Agassiz as a satisfactory likeness.]

The strongest presentation of the case, in considering the American
man a distinct product of the American soil, with no connection with
the Old World[1594] except in the case of the Eskimos, was made when
S. G. Morton, in 1839, printed his _Crania Americana, or a comparative
view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North and South
America_, of which there was a second edition in 1844.[1595] Here
was a new test, and applied, very likely, in ignorance of the fact
that Governor Pownal, in 1766, in Knox’s _New Collection of Voyages_,
had suggested it.[1596] Dr. Morton had gathered a collection of near
a thousand skulls from all parts of the world,[1597] and based his
deductions on these,—a process hardly safe, as many of his successors
have determined.[1598] The views of Morton respecting the autochthonous
origin of the Indian found an able upholder when Louis Agassiz,
taking the broader view of the independent creation of higher and
inferior races,[1599] gave in his adhesion to the original American
man (_Christian Examiner_, July, 1850, vol. xlix. p. 110). These
views got more extensive expression in a publication which appeared
in Philadelphia in 1854, in which some unpublished papers of Morton
are accompanied by a contribution from Agassiz, and all are grouped
together and augmented by material of the editors, Dr. Josiah Clark
Nott[1600] of Mobile, and Mr. George R. Gliddon, long a resident in
Cairo. The _Types of Mankind, or Ethnological Researches_ (Philad.,
1854, 1859, 1871), met with a divided reception; the conservative
theologians called it pretentious and false, and there was some color
for their detraction in some rather jejune expositions of the Hebrew
Scriptures contained in the book. The physiologists thought it brought
new vigor to a question which properly belonged to science.[1601] Other
fresh material, with some discussions, made up a new book by the same
editors, published three years later, _Indigenous Races of the Earth,
or New Chapters of Ethnological Inquiry_ (Philad. and London, 1857; 2d
ed., 1857).[1602]

The theological attacks were not always void of a contempt that ill
befitted the work of refutation. The most important of them were John
Bachman’s _Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race_ (Charleston, S. C.,
1850), with his _Notice of the Types of Mankind_ (Charleston, 1854-55);
and Thomas Smyth’s _Unity of the Human Race proved by Scripture, Reason
and Science_ (N. Y., 1850).[1603]

[Illustration: SAMUEL FOSTER HAVEN.

After a photograph. A heliotype of a portrait by Custer is in the
_Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc._, Ap., 1879. Haven’s _Annual Reports_, as
librarian of the Amer. Antiq. Soc., furnish a good chronological
conspectus of the progress of anthropological discovery.]

The scientific attack on Morton and Agassiz, and the views they
represented, was an active one, and embraced such writers as Wilson,
Latham, Pickering, and Quatrefages.[1604] The same collection of skulls
which had furnished Morton with his proofs yielded exactly opposite
evidence to Dr. J. A. Meigs in his _Observations upon the Cranial Forms
of the American Aborigines_ (Philad., 1866).[1605] Two of the most
celebrated of the evolutionists reject the autochthonous view, for
Darwin’s _Descent of Man_ and Haeckel’s _Hist. of Creation_ consider
the American man an emigrant from the old world, in whatever way the
race may have developed.[1606]

[Illustration: SIR DANIEL WILSON, LL. D., F.R.S.E.

From a photograph kindly furnished, on request, by Professor Wilson’s
family.]

Of the leading historians of the early American peoples, Prescott,
dealing with the Mexicans, is inclined to agree with Humboldt’s
arguments as to their primitive connection with Asia.[1607] Geo.
Bancroft, in the third volume of his _Hist. of the United States_
(1840), surveying the field, found little in the linguistic affinities,
little in what Humboldt gathered from the Mexican calendars and from
other developments, nothing from the Western mounds, which he was sure
were natural earth-knobs and water-worn passages,[1608] and decides
upon some transmission by the Pacific route from Asia, but so remote
as to make the American tribes practically indigenous, so far as their
character is concerned.

In 1843 another compiler of existing evidence appeared in Alexander W.
Bradford in his _American Antiquities, or Researches into the origin
and history of the Red Race_. His views were new. He connects the
higher organized life of middle America with the corresponding culture
of Southern Asia, the Polynesian islands probably furnishing the avenue
of migrations; while the ruder and more northern peoples of both shores
of the Pacific represent the same stock degraded by northern migrations.

In 1845 the American Ethnological Society began its publications, and
in Albert Gallatin it had a vigorous helper in unravelling some of
these mysteries. A few years later (1853) the United States government
lent its patronage and prestige to the huge conglomerate publication of
Schoolcraft, his _Indian Tribes of the United States_, which leaves the
bewildered reader in a puzzling maze,—the inevitable result of a work
undertaken beyond the ambitious powers of an untrained mind. The work
is not without value if the user of it has more systematic knowledge
than its compiler, to select, discard, and arrange, and if he can weigh
the importance of the separate papers.[1609]

In 1856 Samuel F. Haven, the librarian and guiding spirit of the
American Antiquarian Society, summed up, as it had never been done
before, for comprehensiveness, and with a striking prescience, the
progress and results of studies in this field, in his _Archæology of
the United States_ (_Smithsonian Contributions_, viii., Washington,
1856).

[Illustration: EDWARD B. TYLOR.

After a photograph.]

In 1851 Professor Daniel Wilson, in his _Prehistoric Annals of
Scotland_, first brought into use the designation “prehistoric” as
expressing “the whole period disclosed to us by means of archæological
evidence, as distinguished from what is known through written records;
and in this sense the term was speedily adopted by the archæologists
of Europe.”[1610] Eleven years later he published his _Prehistoric
Man: Researches into the origin of civilization in the old and new
world_.[1611] The book unfortunately is not well fortified with
references, but it is the result of long study, partly in the field,
and written with a commendable reserve of judgment. It is in the main
concerned with the western hemisphere, which he assumes with little
hesitation “began its human period subsequent to that of the old world,
and so started later in the race of civilization.” While thus in effect
a study of early man in America, its scope makes it in good degree a
complement to the _Origin of Civilization_ of Lubbock.

The comparative study of ethnological traces, to enable us to depict
the earliest condition of human society, owes a special indebtedness
to Edward B. Tylor, among writers in English. It is nearly twenty-five
years since he first published his _Researches into the Early History
of Mankind and the Development of Civilization_,[1612] the work
almost, if not quite, of a pioneer in this interesting field, and he
has supplied the reader with all the references necessary to test his
examples. Max Müller (_Chips_, ii. 262) has pointed out how he has
vitalized his vast accumulation of facts by coherent classifications
instead of leaving them an oppressive burden by simple aggregation, as
his precursors in Germany, Gustav Klemm[1613] and Adolf Bastian, had
done; and it is remarked that while thus classifying, he has not been
lured into pronounced theory, which future accession of material might
serve to modify or change. He shortly afterwards touched a phase of the
subject which he had not developed in his book in a paper on “Traces of
the Early Mental Condition of Man,”[1614] and illustrated the methods
he was pursuing in another on “The Condition of Prehistoric Races as
inferred from observations of modern tribes.”[1615]

The postulate of which he has been a distinguished expounder, that man
has progressed from barbarism to civilization, was a main deduction
to be drawn from his next sustained work, _Primitive Culture:
researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion,
art, and custom_.[1616] The chief points of this further study of
the thought, belief, art, and custom of the primitive man had been
advanced tentatively in various other papers beside those already
mentioned,[1617] and in this new work he further acknowledges his
obligations to Adolf Bastian’s _Mensch in der Geschichte_ and Theodor
Waitz’s _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_.[1618] He still pursued his
plan of collecting wide and minute evidence from the writers on
ethnography and kindred sciences, and from historians, travellers, and
missionaries, as his foot-notes abundantly testify.

[Illustration: THEODOR WAITZ.

After a likeness in Otto Caspari’s _Urgeschichte der Menschheit_, 2d
ed., vol. i. (Leipzig, 1877).]

These studies of Professor Tylor abundantly qualified him to give
a condensed exposition of the science of anthropology, which he had
done so much to place within the range of scientific studies, by a
primary search for facts and laws; and having contributed the article
on that subject to the ninth edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_,
he published in 1881 his _Anthropology: an Introduction to the study
of man and civilization_ (London and N. Y., 1881 and 1888). He maps
out the new science, which has now received of late years so many new
students in the scientific method, without references, but with the
authority of a teacher, tracing what man has been and is under the
differences of sex, race, beliefs, habits, and society.[1619] Again,
at the Montreal meeting (August, 1884) of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science, he set down in an address the bounds of the
“American Aspects of Anthropology.”[1620]

[Illustration: SIR JOHN LUBBOCK.

After a photograph.]

Closely following upon Tylor in this field, and gathering his material
with much the same assiduity, and presenting it with similar beliefs,
though with enough individuality to mark a distinction, was another
Englishman, who probably shares with Tylor the leading position in
this department of study. Sir John Lubbock, in his _Prehistoric Times
as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of
modern savages_,[1621] gathered the evidence which exists of the
primitive condition of man, embracing some chapters on modern savages
so far as they are ignorant of the use of metals, as the best study
we can follow, to fill out the picture of races only archæologically
known to us. This study of modern savage life, in arts, marriages,
and relationships, morals, religion, and laws, is, as he holds, a
necessary avenue to the knowledge of a condition of the early man,
from which by various influences the race has advanced to what is
called civilization. His result in this comparative study—not indeed
covering all the phases of savage life—he made known in his _Origin
of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man_.[1622] While
referring to Tylor’s _Early Hist. of Mankind_ as more nearly like
his own than any existing treatise, but showing, as compared with
his own book, “that no two minds would view the subject in the same
manner,” he instanced previous treatments of certain phases of the
subject, like Müller’s _Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen_,
J. F. M’Lennan’s _Primitive Marriage_,[1623] and J. J. Bachofen’s _Das
Mutterrecht_ (Stuttgart, 1861); and even Lord Kames’ _History of Man_,
and Montesquieu’s _Esprit des Lois_, notwithstanding the absence in
them of much of the minute knowledge now necessary to the study of the
subject. These data, of course, are largely obtained from travellers
and missionaries, and Lubbock complains of their unsatisfactory extent
and accuracy. “Travellers,” he adds, “find it easier to describe the
houses, boats, food, dress, weapons, and implements of savages than to
understand their thoughts and feelings.”

[Illustration: SIR JOHN WILLIAM DAWSON.

After a photograph.]

The main controversial point arising out of all this study is the one
already adverted to,—whether man has advanced from savagery to his
present condition, or has preserved, with occasional retrogressions,
his original elevated character; and this causes the other question,
whether the modern savage is the degenerate descendant of the same
civilized first men. “There is no scientific evidence which would
justify us,” says Lubbock (_Prehist. Times_, 417), “in asserting that
this kind of degradation applies to savages in general.”[1624] The
most distinguished advocate of the affirmative of this proposition is
Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, both in his _Political Economy_
and in his lecture on the _Origin of Civilization_ (1855), in which
he undertook to affirm that no nation, unaided by a superior race,
ever succeeded in raising itself out of savagery, and that nations
can become degraded. Lubbock, who, with Tylor, holds the converse of
this proposition, answered Whately in an appendix to his _Origin of
Civilization_, which was originally given as a paper at the Dundee
meeting of the British Association.[1625] The Duke of Argyle, while
not prepared to go to the extent of Whately’s views, attacked, in his
_Primeval Man_, Lubbock’s argument,[1626] and was in turn reviewed
adversely by Lubbock, in a paper read at the Exeter meeting of the
same association (1869), which is also included in the appendix of his
_Origin of Civilization_. Lubbock seems to show, in some instances at
least, that the duke did not possess himself correctly of some of the
views of his opponents.

[Illustration: MIGRATIONS.

A sketch map given in Dawson’s _Fossil Men_, p. 48, showing his view
of the probable lines of migration and distribution of the American
tribes. Morgan (_Ancient Society_) makes what he calls three centres
of subsistence, whence the migration proceeded which overran America.
Cf. Hellwald in _Smithsonian Rept._, 1866, p. 328. The question is
more or less discussed in Latham’s _Man and his migrations_ (London,
1851); Chas. Pickering’s _Men and their geog. distribution_; and Oscar
Peschel’s _Races of Man_ (Eng. transl., London, 1876). On the passage
from the valley of the Columbia to that of the Missouri, see Humboldt’s
_Views of Nature_, 35. Morgan (_No. Am. Rev._, cix.) supposes the
valley of the Columbia River to be the original centre where the
streams diverged, and (_Systems of Consanguinity_, 251) says there
are reasons for believing that the Shoshone migration was the last
which left the Columbia valley, and that it was pending at the epoch
of European colonization. Morgan’s papers in the _No. Am. Rev._, Oct.
1868 and Jan. 1870, are reprinted in Beach’s _Indian Miscellany_, p.
158. On a general belief in a migration from the north, see _Congrès
des Amér_. (1877), ii. 50, 51. L. Simonin, in “L’homme Américain, notes
d’ethnologie et de linguistique sur les indiens des Etats-Unis,” gives
a map of the tribes of North America in the _Bull. de la Soc. de Géog._
Feb. 1870.]

In the researches of Tylor and Lubbock, and of all the others
cited above, the American Indian is the source of many of their
illustrations. Of all writers on this continent, Sir John Wm. Dawson
in his _Fossil Men_, and Southall in his _Recent Origin of Man_, are
probably the most eminent advocates of the views of Whately and Argyle,
however modified, and both have declared it an unfounded assumption
that the primitive man was a savage.[1627] Morgan, in his _Ancient
Society_ (N. Y., 1877), has, on the other hand, sketched the lines of
human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization.

One of the defenders of the supposed Bible limits best equipped by
reading, if not in the scientific spirit, has been a Virginian, James
C. Southall, who published a large octavo in 1875, _The Recent Origin
of Man as illustrated by geology and the modern science of prehistoric
archæology_ (Philad., 1875). Three years later,—leaving out some
irrelevant matters as touching the antiquity of man, condensing his
collations of detail, sparing the men of science an attack for what in
his earlier volume he called their fickleness, and somewhat veiling
his set purpose of sustaining the Bible record,—he published a more
effective little book, _The Epoch of the Mammoth and the Apparition of
Man upon Earth_ (Philad., 1878). Barring its essentially controversial
character, and waiving judgment on its scientific decisions, it is one
of the best condensed accumulations of data which has been made. His
belief in the literal worth of the Bible narrative is emphatic. He
thinks that man, abruptly and fully civilized, appeared in the East,
and gave rise to the Egyptian and Babylonian civilization, while the
estrays that wandered westward are known to us by their remains, as
the early savage denizens of Europe. To maintain this existence of the
hunter-man of Europe within historic times, he rejects the prevailing
opinions of the geologists and archæologists. He reverses the judgment
that Lyell expresses (_Student’s Elements of Geology_, Am. ed., 162)
of the historical period as not affording any appreciable measure
for calculating the number of centuries necessary to produce so many
extinct animals, to deepen and widen valleys, and to lay so deep
stalagmite floors, and says it does. He contends that the stone age is
not divided into the earlier and later periods with an interval, but
that the mingling of the kinds of flints shows but different phases of
the same period,[1628] and that what others call the palæolithic man
was in reality the quaternary man, with conditions not much different
from now.[1629] The time when the ice retreated from the now temperate
regions he holds to have been about 2000 b.c., and he looks to the
proofs of the action of which traces are left along the North American
great lakes, as observed by Professor Edmund Andrews[1630] of Chicago,
to confirm his judgment of the Glacial age being from 5,300 to 7,500
years ago.[1631] He claims that force has not been sufficiently
recognized as an element in geological action, and that a great lapse
of time was not necessary to effect geological changes (_Ep. of the
M._, 194).[1632] He thinks the present drift of opinion, carrying
back the appearance of man anywhere from 20,000 to 9,000,000 years,
a mere fashion. The gravel of the Somme has been, he holds, a rapid
deposit in valleys already formed and not necessarily old. The peat
beds were a deposit from the flood that followed the glacial period,
and accumulated rapidly (_Ep. of the M._, ch. 10). The extinct animals
found with the tools of man in the caves simply show that such beasts
survived to within historic times, as seems everywhere apparent as
regards the mastodon when found in America. The stalagmites of the
caves are of unequal growth, and it is an assumption to give them
uniformly great age. The finely worked flints found among those called
palæolithic; the skilfully free drawings of the cave-men; the bits of
pottery discovered with the rude flints, and the great similarity of
the implements to those in use to-day among the Eskimos; the finding
of Roman coin in the Danish shell heaps and an English one in those of
America (_Proc. Philad. Acad. Nat. Sci._, 1866, p. 291),—are all parts
of the argument which satisfies him that the archæologists have been
hasty and inconclusive in their deductions. They in turn will dispute
both his facts and conclusions.[1633]

Southall’s arraignment of the opinions generally held may introduce us
to a classification of the data upon which archæologists rely to reach
conclusions upon the antiquity of man, and over some of which there is
certainly no prevailing consensus of opinion. We may find a condensed
summary of beliefs and data respecting the antiquity of man in J. P.
Maclean’s _Manual of the Antiquity of Man_ (Cincinnati, revised ed.,
1877; again, 1880).[1634] The independent view and conservative spirit
are placed respectively in juxtaposition in J. P. Lesley’s _Origin and
Decline of Man_ (ch. 3), and in Dawson’s _Fossil Men_ (ch. 8).[1635]
The opinions of leading English archæologists are found in Lubbock’s
_Prehistoric Times_ (ch. 12), Wallace’s _Tropical Nature_ (ch. 7), and
Huxley’s “Distribution of Races in Relation to the Antiquity of Man,”
in _Internat. Cong. of Prehist. Archæol. Trans._ (1868). Dawkins has
given some recent views in _The Nation_, xxvi. 434, and in _Kansas City
Review_, vii. 344.[1636] Not to refer to special phases, the French
school will be found represented in Nadaillac’s _Les Premiers Hommes_
(ii. ch. 13); in Gabriel de Mortillet’s _La préhistorique antiquité
de l’homme_ (Paris, 1883); Hamy’s _Précis de paléontologie humaine_;
Le Hon’s _L’homme fossile_ (1867); Victor Meunier’s _Les Ancêtres
d’Adam_ (Paris, 1875); Joly’s _L’homme avant métaux_ (Eng. transl.
_Man before Metals_, N. Y., 1883); _Revue des Questions historiques_
(vol. xvi.). The German school is represented in Haeckel’s _Natürliche
Schöpfungsgeschichte_; Waitz’s _Anthropologie_; Carl Vogt’s _Lectures
on Man_ (Eng. transl., Lond., 1864); and L. Büchner’s _Der Mensch und
seine Stellung in der Natur_ (2d ed., Leipzig, 1872; or W. S. Dallas’s
Eng. translation, Lond., 1872). The history of the growth of geological
antagonism to the biblical record as once understood, and the several
methods proposed for reconciling their respective teaching, is traced
concisely in the article on geology in M’Clintock and Strong’s
_Cyclopædia_, with references for further examination. The views there
given are those propounded by Chalmers in 1804, that the geological
record, ignored in the account of Genesis, finds its place in that book
between the first and second verses,[1637] which have no dependence on
one another, and that the biblical account of creation followed in six
literal days. What may be considered the present theological attitude
of churchmen may be noted in _The Speaker’s Commentary_ (N. Y. ed.,
1871, p. 61).

The question of the territorial connection of America with Asia under
earlier geological conditions is necessarily considered in some of the
discussions on the transplanting of the American man from the side of
Asia.

Otto Caspari in his _Urgeschichte der Menschheit_ (Leipzig, 1873), vol.
i., gives a map of Asia and America in the post-tertiary period, as he
understands it, which stretches the Asiatic and African continents over
a large part of the Indian Ocean; and in this region, now beneath the
sea, he places the home of the primeval man, and marks the lines of
migration east, north, and west. This view is accepted by Winchell in
his _Preadamites_ (see his map). Haeckel (_Nat. Schöpfungsgeschichte_,
1868, 1873; Eng. transl. 1876) calls this region “Lemuria” in his map.
Caspari places large continental islands between this region and South
America, which rendered migration to South America easy. The eastern
shore of the present Asia is extended beyond the Japanese islands,
and similar convenient islands render the passage by other lines of
immigration easy to the regions of British Columbia and of Mexico. (Cf.
Short, 507; Baldwin, App.) Howorth, _Mammoth and the Flood_, supposes a
connection at Behring’s Straits. The supposed similarity of the flora
of the two shores of the Pacific has been used to support this theory,
but botanists say that the language of Hooker and Gray has been given a
meaning they did not intend. It is opposed by many eminent geologists.
A. R. Wallace (_Journal Amer. Geog. Soc._, xix.) finds no ground to
believe that any of the oceans contain sunken continents. (Cf. his
_Geographical Distribution of Animals_ and his _Malay Archipelago_.)
James Croll in his _Climate and Cosmology_ (p. 6) says: “There is no
geological evidence to show that at least since Silurian times the
Atlantic and Pacific were ever in their broad features otherwise than
they now are.”[1638] Hyde Clarke has examined the legend of Atlantis in
reference to protohistoric communication with America, in _Royal Hist.
Soc. Trans._, n. s., iii. p. 1.[1639]

The arguments for the great antiquity of man[1640] are deduced in the
main from the testimony of the river gravels, the bone caves, the peat
deposits, the shell heaps, and the Lacustrine villages, for the mounds
and other relics of defence, habitation, and worship are very likely
not the records of a great antiquity. The whole field is surveyed with
more fullness than anywhere else, and with a faith in the geological
antiquity of the race, in Sir Charles Lyell’s _Geological Evidences of
the Antiquity of Man_.[1641] With as firm a belief in the integrity of
the biblical record, and in its not being impugned by the discoveries
or inductions of science, we find a survey in Southall’s _Recent Origin
of Man_. These two books constitute the extremes of the methods,
both for and against the conservative interpretation of the Bible.
The independent spirit of the scientist is nowhere more confidently
expressed than by J. P. Lesley (_Man’s Origin and Destiny_, Philad.,
1868, p. 45), who says: “There is no alliance possible between Jewish
theology and modern science.... Geologists have won the right to be
Christians without first becoming Jews.” Southall[1642] interprets
this spirit in this wise: “I do not recollect that the _Antiquity of
Man_ ever recognizes that the book of Genesis is in existence; and yet
every one is perfectly conscious that the author has it in mind, and
is writing at it all the time.”[1643] The entire literature of the
scientific interpretation shows that the canons of criticism are not
yet secure enough to prevent the widest interpretations and inferences.

The intimations which are supposed to exist in the Bible of a race
earlier than Adam have given rise to what is called the theory of
the Preadamites, and there is little noteworthy upon it in European
literature back of Isaac de La Peyrère’s _Praeadamitae_ (Paris and
Amsterdam, 1655), whose views were put into English in _Man before
Adam_ (London, 1656).[1644] The advocates of the theory from that day
to this are enumerated in Alexander Winchell’s _Preadamites_ (Chicago,
1880), and this book is the best known contribution to the subject by
an American author. It is his opinion that the aboriginal American,
with the Mongoloids in general, comes from some descendant of Adam
earlier than Noah, and that the black races come from a stock earlier
than Adam, whom Cain found when he went out of his native country.[1645]

The investigations of the great antiquity of man in America fall far
short in extent of those which have been given to his geological
remoteness in Europe; and yet, should we believe with Winchell that the
American man represents the pre-Adamite, while the European man does
not, we might reasonably hope to find in America earlier traces of the
geological man, if, as Agassiz shows, the greater age of the American
continent weighs in the question.[1646]

The explicit proofs, as advanced by different geologists, to give a
great antiquity to the American man, and perhaps in some ways greater
than to the European man,[1647] may now be briefly considered in detail.

Oldest of all may perhaps be placed the gold-drift of California, with
its human remains, and chief among them the Calaveras skull, which is
claimed to be of the Pliocene (tertiary) age; but it must be remembered
that Powell and the government geologists call it quaternary. It
was in February, 1866, that in a mining shaft in Calaveras County,
California, a hundred and thirty feet below the surface, a skull
was found imbedded in gravel, which under the name of the Calaveras
skull has excited much interest. It was not the first time that human
remains had been found in these California gravels, but it was the
first discovery that attracted notice. It was not seen _in situ_ by a
professional geologist, and a few weeks elapsed before Professor Josiah
Dwight Whitney, then state geologist of California, visited the spot,
and satisfied himself that the geological conditions were such as to
make it certain that the skull and the deposition of the gravel were
of the same age. The relic subsequently passed into the possession of
Professor Whitney, and the annexed cut is reproduced from the careful
drawing made of it for the _Memoirs of the Museum of Comp. Zoölogy_
(Harvard University), vol. vi. He had published earlier an account in
the _Revue d’Anthropologie_ (1872), p. 760.[1648] This interesting
relic is now in Cambridge, coated with thin wax for preservation, but
this coating interferes with any satisfactory photograph. The volume of
_Memoirs_ above named is made up of Whitney’s _Auriferous Gravels of
the Sierra Nevada of California_ (1880), and at p. ix he says: “There
will undoubtedly be much hesitancy on the part of anthropologists and
others in accepting the results regarding the Tertiary Age of man, to
which our investigations seem so clearly to point.” He says that those
who reject the evidence of the Calaveras skull because it was not seen
_in situ_ by a scientific observer forget the evidence of the fossil
itself; and he adds that since 1866 the other evidence for tertiary
man has so accumulated that “it would not be materially weakened by
dropping that furnished by the Calaveras skull itself.”

[Illustration: CALAVERAS SKULL. (_Front and side view._)]

What Whitney says of the history and authenticity of the skull will
be found in his paper on “Human remains and works of art of the
gravel series,” in _Ibid._ pp. 258-288. His conclusions are that it
shows the existence of man with an extinct fauna and flora, and under
geographical and physical conditions differing from the present,—in
the Pliocene age certainly. This opinion has obtained the support of
Marsh and Le Conte and other eminent geologists. Schmidt (_Archiv
für Anthropologie_) thinks it signifies a pre-glacial man. Winchell
(_Preadamites_, 428) says it is the best authenticated evidence of
Pliocene man yet adduced. On the contrary, there are some confident
doubters. Dawkins (_No. Am. Rev._, Oct., 1883) thinks that all but a
few American geologists have given up the Pliocene man, and that the
chances of later interments, of accidents, of ancient mines, and the
presence of skulls of mustang ponies (introduced by the Spaniards)
found in the same gravels, throw insuperable doubts. “Neither in the
new world nor the old world,” he says, “is there any trace of Pliocene
man revealed by modern discovery.” Southall and all the Bible advocates
of course deny the bearing of all such evidence. Dawson (_Fossil
Men_, 345) thinks the arguments of Whitney inconclusive. Nadaillac
(_L’Amérique préhistorique_, 40, with a cut, and his _Les Premiers
Hommes_, ii. 435) hesitates to accept the evidence, and enumerates the
doubters.[1649]

Footprints have been found in a tufa bed, resting on yellow sand, in
the neighborhood of an extinct volcano, Tizcapa, in Nicaragua. One of
the prints is shown in the annexed cut, after a representation given
by Dr. Brinton in the _Amer. Philosoph. Soc. Proc._ (xxiv. 1887, p.
437). Above this tufa bed were fourteen distinct strata of deposits
before the surface soil was reached. Geologists have placed this yellow
sand, bearing shells, from the post-Pliocene to the Eocene. The seventh
stratum, going downwards, had remains of the mastodon.[1650]

Some ancient basket work discovered at Petit Anse Island, in Louisiana,
has been figured in the _Chicago Acad. of Sciences, Transactions_ (i.
part 2). Cf. E. W. Hilgard, in _Smithsonian Contributions_, no. 248.

Foster rather strikingly likens what we know of the history of the
human race to the apex of a pyramid, of which we know neither the
height nor extent of base. Our efforts to trace man back to his
beginning would be like following down the sides of that pyramid till
it reaches a firm base, we know not where. Many geologists believe
in a great ice-sheet which at one time had settled upon the northern
parts of America, and covered it down to a line that extends across
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and westerly in a direction of some variableness.
There are some, like Sir William Dawson,[1651] who reject the evidence
that persuades others. Prof. Whitney (_Climatic Changes_, 387) holds
that it was a local phenomenon confined in America to the northeastern
parts. The advocates look to Dr. James Geikie[1652] as having
correlated the proofs of the proposition as well as any, while writers
like Howorth[1653] trace the resulting phenomena largely to a flood.

[Illustration: ANCIENT FOOTPRINT FROM NICARAGUA.]

How long ago this was, the cautious geologist does not like to
say;[1654] nor is he quite ready to aver what it all means.[1655]
Perhaps, as some theorize, this prevailing ice showed the long winter
brought about by the precession of the equinoxes, as has long been a
favorite belief, with the swing of ten thousand years, more or less,
from one extreme to the other.[1656]

Others believe that we must look back 200,000 years, as James
Croll[1657] and Lubbock do, or 800,000 and more, as Lyell did at first,
and find the cause in the variable eccentricity of the earth’s orbit,
which shall account for all the climatic changes since the dawn of
what is called the glacial epoch, accompanying the deflection of ocean
currents, as Croll supposes, or the variations in the disposition of
sea and land, as Lyell imagines.[1658] This great ice-sheet, however
extensive, began for some reason to retreat, at a period as remote,
according as we accept this or the other estimate, as from ten thousand
to a hundred thousand years.

That the objects of stone, shaped and polished, which had been observed
all over the civilized world, were celestial in origin seems to have
been the prevalent opinion,[1659] when Mahudel in 1723 and even when
Buffon in 1778 ventured to assign to them a human origin.[1660]

In the gravels which were deposited by the melting of this more or
less extended ice-sheet, parts of the human frame and the work of
human hands have been found, and mark the anterior limit of man’s
residence on the globe, so far as we can confidently trace it.[1661]
Few geologists have any doubt about the existence of human relics in
these American glacial drifts, however widely they may differ about the
age of them.[1662]

[Illustration: FROM DAWSON’S FOSSIL MEN.

The outer outline is that of the skull found in the cave of Cro-magnon,
in France, belonging, as Dawson says, p. 189, to one of the oldest
human inhabitants of western Europe, as shown in Lartet and Christy’s
_Reliquiae Aquitanicae_. The second outline is that of the Enghis
skull; the dotted outline that of the Neanderthal skull. The shaded
skull is on a smaller scale, but preserving the true outline, and is
one of the Hochelaga Indians (site of Montreal). Cuts of the Enghis
and Neanderthal skulls are given in Lubbock’s _Prehistoric Times_,
pp. 328, 329. Dawkins (_Cave Hunters_, 235) thinks the Enghis skull
of doubtful age. On the Neanderthal skull see Quatrefages and Hamy,
_Crania Ethnica_ (Paris, 1873-75), and Dawkins (p. 240). Huxley gives
it a great antiquity, and says it is the most ape-like one he ever
saw. Quatrefages, _Hommes fossiles_, etc. (1884), says it is not below
some later men. Southall (_Epoch of the Mammoth_, 80) says it has the
average capacity of the negro, and double that of the gorilla, and
doubts its antiquity.]

It was in the _American Naturalist_ (Mar. and Ap., 1872) that Dr.
C. C. Abbott made an early communication respecting the discovery of
rude human implements in the glacial gravels[1663] of the Delaware
valley, and since then the Trenton gravels have been the subject of
much interest. The rudeness of the flints has repeatedly raised doubts
as to their artificial character; but Wilson (_Prehistoric Man_, i.
29) says that it is impossible to find in flints broken for the road,
or in any other accumulation of rocky débris, a single specimen that
looks like the rudest implement of the drift. Experts attest the exact
correspondence of these Trenton tools with those of the European river
drift. Abbott has explained the artificial cleavages of stone in the
_American Antiquarian_ (viii. 43). There are geologists like Shaler
who question the artificial character of the Trenton implements. From
time to time since this early announcement, Dr. Abbott has made public
additional evidence as he has accumulated it, going to show, as he
thinks, that we have in these deposits of the glacial action the signs
of men contemporary with the glacial flow, and earlier than the red
Indian stock of historic times.[1664] He summarizes the matter in his
“Palæolithic implements of a people on the Atlantic coast anterior to
the Indians,” in his _Primitive Industry_ (1882).[1665]

Some discoveries of human bones in the loess or loam of the Mississippi
Valley have not been generally accepted. Lyell (_Second Visit_, ii.
197; _Antiq. of Man_, 203) suspends judgment, as does Joseph Leidy in
his _Extinct Mammalia of North America_ (p. 365).

The existence of man in western Europe with extinct animals is a
belief that, from the incredulity which accompanied the discovery by
Kemp in London, in 1714, of a stone hatchet lying in contiguity to some
elephant’s teeth,[1666] has long passed into indisputable fact, settled
by the exploration of cave and shell heaps.[1667] In North America,
this conjunction of man’s remains with those of the mastodon is very
widely spread.[1668] The geological evidence is quite sufficient
without resorting to what has been called an Elephant’s head in the
architecture of Palenqué, the so-called Elephant Mound in Wisconsin,
and the dubious if not fraudulent Elephant Pipe of Iowa.[1669] The
positions of the skeletons have led many to believe that the interval
since the mastodon ceased to roam in the Mississippi Valley is not
geologically great. Shaler (_Amer. Naturalist_, iv. 162) places it at
a few thousand years, and there is enough ground for it perhaps to
justify Southall (_Recent Origin, etc._, 551; _Ep. of the Mammoth_, ch.
8) in claiming that these animals have lived into historic times.

A human skeleton was found sixteen feet below the surface, near New
Orleans—(which is only nine feet above the Gulf of Mexico), and under
four successive growths of cypress forests. Its antiquity, however,
is questioned.[1670] The belief in human traces in the calcareous
conglomerate of Florida seems to have been based (Haven, p. 87) on a
misconception of Count Pourtalès’ statement (_Amer. Naturalist_, ii.
434), though it has got credence in many of the leading books on this
subject. Col. Whittlesey has reported some not very ancient hearths in
the Ohio Valley (_Am. Ass. Arts and Sciences, Proc., Chicago, 1868,
Meeting_, vol. xvii. 268).

The testimony of the caves to the early existence of man has never had
the importance in America that it has had in Europe.

It was in 1822 that Dr. Buckland, in his _Reliquiae diluvianae_ (2d
ed., 1824), first made something like a systematic gathering of the
evidence of animal remains, as shown by cave explorations; but he was
not prepared to believe that man’s remains were as old as the beasts.
He later came to believe in the prehistoric man. In 1833-34, Dr.
Schmerling found in the cave of Enghis, near Liége, a highly developed
skull, and published his _Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles
découverts dans les cavernes de la province de Liége_.[1671]

In 1841, Boucher de Perthes began his discoveries in the valley of
the Somme,[1672] and finally discovered among the animal remains some
flint implements, and formulated his views of the great antiquity of
man in his _Antiquités Celtiques_ (1847), rather for the derision than
for the delectation of his brother geologists. In 1848, the Société
Ethnographique de Paris ceased its sessions; but Boucher de Perthes had
aroused a new feeling, and while his efforts were still in doubt his
disciples[1673] gathered, and amid much ridicule founded the Société
d’Anthropologie de Paris, which has had so numerous a following in
allied associations in Europe and America.

He tells us of the struggles he endured to secure the recognition of
his views in his _De l’homme antédiluvien et de ses œuvres_ (Paris,
1860), and his trials were not over when, in 1863, he found at Moulin
Quignon a human jaw-bone,[1674] which, as he felt, added much strength
to the belief in the man of the glacial gravels.[1675]

The existence of man in the somewhat later period of the caves[1676]
was also claiming constant recognition, and the new society was
broad enough to cover all. In 1857, Dr. Fuhlrott had discovered the
Neanderthal skull in a cave near Düsseldorf.

In 1858, the discovery of flint tools in the Brixham cave, in
Devonshire, was more effective in turning the scientific mind to the
proofs than earlier discoveries of much the same character by McEnery
had been. In March, 1872, Emile Rivière investigated the Mentone caves,
and found a large skeleton, unmistakably human, and the oldest yet
found, supposed to be of the palæolithic period. (Cf. _Découverte d’un
Squelette humain de l’Epoque paléolithique_, Paris, 1873.) All this
evidence is best set forth in the collection of his periodical studies
on the mammals of the Pleistocene, which were collected by William Boyd
Dawkins in his _Cave Hunting: researches on the evidence of caves,
respecting the early inhabitants of Europe_ (London, 1874),[1677] a
book which may be considered a sort of complement to Lyell’s _Antiquity
of Man_ and Lubbock’s _Prehistoric Man_; Dawkins (ch. 9, and _Address_,
Salford, 1877, p. 3) and Lubbock (_Scientific Lectures_, 150) unite
in holding the modern Eskimos to be the representative of this cave
folk. No argument is quite sufficient to convince Southall that the
archæologists do not place the denizens of the caves too far back
(_Recent Origin of Man_, ch. 13), and he rejects a belief in the steady
slowness of the formation of stalagmites (_Epoch of the Mammoth_, 90),
upon which Evans, Geikie, Wallace, Lyell, and others rest much of their
belief in the great antiquity of the remains found beneath the cave
deposits.[1678]

The largest development of cave testimony in America has been made
by Dr. Lund,[1679] a Danish naturalist, who examined several hundred
Brazilian caves, finding in them the bones of man in connection with
those of extinct animals.[1680] The remains of a race, held to be
Indians, found in the caves of Coahuila (Mexico) are described by
Cordelia A. Studley in the _Peabody Mus. Reports_, xv. 233. Edward D.
Cope has studied the contents of a bone cave in the island of Anguilla
(West Indies), in the _Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge_, no.
489 (1883). J. D. Whitney describes a cave in Calaveras County, in the
_Smithsonian Rept._ (1887), and Edward Palmer one in Utah (_Peab. Mus.
Rept._, xi. 269). Putnam explored some in Kentucky (_Ibid._ viii.).
Putnam’s first account of his cave work in Kentucky, showing the use
of them as habitations and as receptacles for mummies, is in the
_Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist._, xvii. 319. J. P. Goodnow made similar
explorations in Arizona (_Kansas City Rev_., viii. 647); E. T. Elliott
in Colorado (_Pop. Sci. Mo._, Oct., 1879), and Leidy in the Hartman
cave, in Pennsylvania (_Philad. Acad. Nat. Sci. Proc._, 1880, p. 348).
Cf. also Haldeman in the _Am. Philos. Soc. Trans._ (1880) xv. 351. Col.
Charles Whittlesey has discussed the “Evidences of the antiquity of
man in the United States,” in describing some cave remains of doubtful
age.[1681] W. H. Dall’s _On the remains of later prehistoric man
obtained from caves in the Catherine archipelago, Alaska territory, and
especially from the caves of the Aleutian islands_ (Washington, 1878)
is included in the _Smithsonian contributions to knowledge_, xxii.

Throughout the world, naturalists have found on streams and on the
seacoast, heaps of the refuse of the daily life of primitive peoples.
Beneath the loam which has covered them there are found the shells of
edible mollusks and other relics of food, implements, ornaments and
vessels, of stone, clay, and bone. Sometimes it happens that natural
superposed accumulations will mark them off in layers, and distinguish
the usages of successive periods.[1682]

[Illustration: OSCAR PESCHEL.

From the engraving in the 1877 ed. of his _Gesch. des Zeitalters der
Entdeckungen_. His _Abhandlungen zur Erd-und Völker-Kunde_, continuing
his contributions to _Das Ausland_ and other periodicals, and edited
by J. Löwenberg, was published at Leipzig, in 3 vols. in 1877-79, the
preface containing an account of Peschel’s services in this field.]

In the Old World such heaps upon the Danish coast have attracted the
most attention under the name of Kjœkkenmœddinger, or Kitchen-middens,
and their teachings have enlivened the recitals of nearly all the
European archæologists who have sought to picture the condition of
these early races.

It seems to be the general opinion that in the Old World this
shell-heap folk succeeded, if they do not in part constitute the
contemporaries of, the men of the caves.[1683]

[Illustration: JEFFRIES WYMAN.

From a photograph taken in 1868, furnished by his family. The portrait
in the _Peabody Museum Report_, no. viii., represents him somewhat
later in life, with a beard. He died Sept. 4, 1874. There are accounts
of Wyman in the same _Report_, by Asa Gray, who also made an address
on Wyman before the Boston Society of Nat. Hist. (cf. _Pop. Science
Monthly_, Jan., 1875), with commemorations by O. W. Holmes (_Atlantic
Monthly_, Nov., 1874, and _Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, xiv. 4), by F. W.
Putnam in the _Proc. Amer. Acad._ with a list of his publications; by
Packard in the _Mem. Nat. Acad._, and B. G. Wilder (_Old and New_,
Nov., 1874).]

These accumulations are known usually in America as shell heaps, and
it is generally characteristic of them that, while they contain pottery
and bone implements, the stone instruments are far less numerous,
and generally occur in the upper layers in those of Florida, but
they are scattered through all the layers in those of New England.
Professor Jeffries Wyman, whose name is in this country particularly
associated with shell-heap investigations, could not find[1684] that
any one had in the scientific spirit called attention to the subject
in America earlier than Caleb Atwater in the _Archæologia Americana_
(vol. i., 1820), who had observed such deposits on the Muskingum River
in Ohio. They had not passed unnoticed, however, by some of the early
explorers. Putnam (_Essex Inst. Bulletin_, xv. 86) notes that J. T.
Ducatel observed those on the Chesapeake in 1834. The earliest more
particular mention of the inland mounds seem to have been made in
Prinz Maximilian’s _Travels in the United States_.[1685] Foster, in
his _Prehistoric Races of the U. S._ (ch. 4,—a special survey of the
American heaps), says that Professor Vanuxem was the first to describe
the sea-side mounds in 1841, in the _Proc. Amer. Asso. Geologists_ (i.
22).[1686]

[Illustration: SHELL HEAPS ON CAPE COD.]

There has been as yet little found in America from which to develop
the evidence of early man from any lake or river dwellings, while
so much has been done in Europe.[1687] In some parts of Florida the
Indians are reported to have built houses on piles; and in South
America tree-houses and those on platforms are well known. Mr. Hilborne
T. Cresson has reported (_Peabody Mus. Rept_., xxii. for 1888) the
discovery of pile ends in the Delaware River, and has shown that two of
these river stations are earlier than the third, as is evident from the
rude implements of argillite found in the two when compared with those
discovered in the third, where implements of jasper and quartz and
fragments of pottery were associated with those of argillite.

[Illustration: PUEBLO REGION.

From a map, “Originalkarte der Urwohnsitze der Azteken und Verwandten
Pueblos in New Mexico, zusammengestellt von O. Loew,” in Petermann’s
_Mittheilungen über wichtige neue Erforschungen auf dem Gesammtgebiete
der Geographie_, xxii. (1876), table xii. The small dotted circles
stand for inhabited pueblos; those with a perpendicular line
attached are ruins; and when this perpendicular line is crossed it
is a Mexicanized pueblo. See the map in Powell’s _Second Rept. Bur.
Ethnol._ (1880-81) p. 318, which marks the several classes: inhabited,
abandoned, ruined pueblos, cavate houses, cliff houses, and tower
houses.]

The earliest discoveries of the cliff houses of the Colorado region
were made by Lieut. J. H. Simpson, and his descriptions appeared in his
_Journal of a Military Reconnoissance_, in 1849.[1688] No considerable
addition was made to our knowledge of the cliff dwellers till in
1874-75, when special parties of the Hayden Geological Survey were
sent to explore them (_Hayden’s Report_, 1876), whence we got accounts
of those of southwestern Colorado by W. H. Holmes, including the
cavate-houses and cliff-dwellers of the San Juan, the Mancos, and the
ruins in the McElmo cañon.[1689] W. H. Jackson gives a revised account
of his 1874 expedition in the _Bulletin_ of the Survey (vol. ii. no.
1), adding thereto an account of his explorations of 1875. Jackson also
gives a chapter on the ruins of the Chaco cañon.[1690]

In coming to the class of ruins lying in a few instances just within,
but mostly to the north of, the Mexican line, we encounter the Pueblo
race, whose position in the ethnological chart is not quite certain,
be their connection with the Nahuas and Aztecs,[1691] or with the
moundbuilders,—red Indian if they be,—or with the cliff-dwellers, as
perhaps is the better opinion. Their connection with savage nations
farther north is not wholly determinable, as Morgan allows, on physical
and social grounds, and perhaps not as definitely settled by their
architecture as Cushing seems to think.[1692]

The Spaniard early encountered these ruins,[1693] and perhaps the
best summary of the growth of our knowledge of them by successive
explorations is in Bancroft’s _Nat. Races_, iv. ch. 11.[1694] In the
century after the Spanish conquest, we have one of the best accounts
in the _Memorial_ of Fray Alonso Benavides, published at Madrid in
1630.[1695] The most famous of the ruins of this region, the Casa
Grande of the Gila Valley in Arizona,[1696] is supposed to have been
seen (1540) by Coronado, then in a state of ruin; but we get no clear
description till that given by Padre Mange, who accompanied Padre Kino
to see the ruins in 1697.[1697]

There are few descriptions[1698] of the antiquities of this country
previous to the military examination of it which was made during the
Mexican War. Such is recorded in W. H. Emory’s _Notes of a Military
Reconnoissance from Fort Leavenworth in Missouri to San Diego in
California_,[1699] which gives us some of the earliest representations
of these antiquities, including the ruins of Pecos.[1700] In 1849,
Col. Washington, the governor of New Mexico, organized an expedition
against the Navajos, and Lieut. James H. Simpson gives us the first
detailed account of the Chaco cañon in his _Journal of a Military
Reconnoissance_ (Philad., 1852).[1701] He also covered (p. 90), among
the other ruins of this region, the old and present habitations of the
Zuñi, but these received in some respects more detailed examination
in Capt. L. Sitgreave’s _Report of an Expedition down the Zuñi and
Colorado rivers_ (Washington, 1853),[1702] accompanied by a map and
other illustrations.[1703] New channels of information were opened
when the United States government undertook to make surveys (1853) for
a trans-continental line of railways; and a great deal of material is
embodied in Whipple’s report on the Indian tribes in the _Pacific R. R.
Reports_, vol. iii. The running of the boundary line between the United
States and Mexico also contributed to our knowledge. The commissioner
during 1850-53 was John Russell Bartlett, who, on the failure of the
government promptly to publish his report, printed his _Personal
narrative of explorations and incidents_ (N. Y., 1854), and made in
some parts of it an important contribution to our knowledge of the
antiquities of this region.[1704]

No considerable advance was now made in this study for about a score
of years. Major Powell first published his account of his adventurous
exploration (1869) of the Colorado cañon in _Scribner’s Monthly_ (Jan.,
Feb., Mar.) in 1875, and it was followed by his official _Exploration
of the Colorado River_ (Washington, 1875), making known the existence
of ruins in the cañon’s gloomy depths. The _Reports_ of the U. S.
Geological Survey, including the accounts by W. H. Jackson and W. H.
Holmes, give much valuable and original information; and a good deal of
what has been included in the _Reports of the Chief of Engineers_ (U.
S. Army) for 1875 and 1876 will also be found in the seventh volume,
edited by F. W. Putnam, of _Wheeler’s Survey_,[1705] including the
pueblos of Acoma, Taos, San Juan, and the ruin[1706] on the Animas
River.

The latest examinations of these Pueblo remains, of which we have
published accounts, are those made by A. F. Bandelier for the
Archæological Institute of America. He has given his results in his
“Historical introduction to studies among the sedentary Indians of New
Mexico,” and in his “Report on the ruins of Pecos,” which constitutes
the initial volume of _Papers, American series_, of the Institute
(Boston, 1881).[1707] He believes Pecos to be Cicuye, visited by
Alvarado in 1541,—a huge pile with 585 compartments, finally abandoned
in 1840. In October, 1880, he examined the region west of Santa Fé
(_Second Rept. Archæol. Inst._). His explorations also determined
the eastern limits of the sedentary occupation of New Mexico (_Fifth
Report_). He renewed his studies in 1882 (_First Bull. Archæol. Inst._,
Jan., 1883), and thought the ruins showed successive occupiers, and
divides them into cave dwellings, cliff houses, one-story buildings,
and those of more than one, with each higher one retreating from the
front of the next lower.

[Illustration: THE PUEBLO REGION.

A reduction of the map accompanying Bandelier’s report on his
investigations in New Mexico, in the _Fifth Rept. of the Archæological
Institute of America_ (Cambridge, 1884).]

The most essential sources of information have thus been enumerated,
but there is not a little fugitive and comprehensive treatment of
the subject worth the student’s attention who follows a course of
investigation.[1708]

The literature of the moundbuilders, and of the controversies arising
out of the mysterious relics of their life, is commensurate with the
very wide extent of territory covered by their traces.[1709] It was
long before any intelligent notice was taken of the mounds by those who
traversed the wilderness. De Soto, in 1540, could get no traditions
concerning them beyond the assurances that the peoples he encountered
had built them, or some of them. We read of them also in Garcilasso
de la Vega, Biedma and the Knight of Elvas, on the Spanish side; but
on the French at a later day we learn little or nothing from Joutel,
Tonti, and Hennepin, though something from Du Pratz, La Harpe and some
of the missionaries. Kalm,[1710] the Swede, in 1749, was about the
first to make any note of them. Carver found them near Lake Pepin in
1768. In 1772 the missionary David Jones[1711] made observations upon
those in Ohio. Adair did not wholly overlook them in his _American
Indians_ in 1775. Prof. James Dunbar, of Aberdeen, in his _Essays on
the history of mankind in rude and uncultivated ages_ (Lond., 1780),
uses what little Kalm and Carver afforded. Jefferson in his _Notes on
Virginia_ (1782) speaks of them as barrows “all over the country,” and
“obvious repositories of the dead.”[1712] Arthur Lee makes reference
to them in 1784. A map of the Northwest Territory, published by John
Fitch about 1785, places in the territory which is now Wisconsin the
following legend: “This country has once been settled by a people
more expert in the art of war than the present inhabitants. Regular
fortifications, and some of these incredibly large, are frequently
to be found. Also many graves and towers like pyramids of earth.” In
1786 Franklin thought the works at Marietta might have been built
by De Soto; and Noah Webster, in a paper in Roberts’ _Florida_,
assented.[1713] B. S. Barton, in his _Observations in some parts of
Natural History_ (London, 1787), credited the Toltecs with building
them, whom he considered the descendants of the Danes.

As the century draws to a close, we find occasional and rather
bewildered expression of interest in the _Observations on the Ancient
Mounds_ by Major Jonathan Heart;[1714] in the _Missions_ of Loskiel;
in the _New Views_ of Dr. Smith Barton; in the _Carolina_ of William
Bartram; and in the travels of Volney. In 1794 Winthrop Sargent
reported in the _Amer. Philos. Soc. Trans._, iv., on the exploration of
the mounds at Cincinnati. The present century soon elicited a variety
of observations, but there was little of practical exploration. A New
England minister, Thaddeus Mason Harris, passed judgment upon those in
Ohio, when he journeyed thither in 1803.[1715] The commissioner of the
United States to run the Florida boundary, Andrew Ellicott, describes
some near Natchez in his _Journal_ (1803). Bishop Madison communicated
through Professor Barton some opinions about those in Western Virginia,
which appear in the _Transaction_ of the American Philosophical
Society, taking different grounds from Dr. Harris, who had thought them
works of defence. The explorations of Lewis and Clark (1804-6) up the
Missouri, and of Pike (1805-7) up the Mississippi, produced little.
Robin, the French naturalist, in 1805,[1716] Major Stoddard[1717]
and Breckenridge[1718] later, saw some in Louisiana, Missouri, and
Illinois. A leading periodical, _The Portfolio_, contributed something
to the common stock in 1810 and 1814, giving plans of some of the
mounds. Those in Ohio were again the subject of inquiry by F. Cuming in
his _Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country_ (Pittsburg, 1810), and
by Dr. Daniel Drake in his _Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Valley_
(Cinn., 1815). John Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary, accounted for
the ancient fortifications through the traditions of the Delawares,
who professed once to have inhabited this country, but it has been
suspected that the worthy missionary was imposed upon.[1719] DeWitt
Clinton, in 1811, before the New York Historical Society, and again in
1817, before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York, had
given some theories in which the Scandinavians figured as builders of
the mounds in that State.

It was thus at a time when there was much speculation and not much
real experimental knowledge respecting these remains that, under the
auspices of the then newly founded American Antiquarian Society,
Mr. Caleb Atwater, of Ohio, was employed to explore and survey a
considerable number of these works. He embodied his results in the
initial volume of the publication of that society, the _Archæologia
Americana_.[1720] After pointing out scattered evidences of the traces
of European peoples, found in coins and other relics throughout the
country, Atwater proceeds to his description of the earthworks, mainly
of Ohio; and beside giving many plans,[1721] he enters into the
question of their origin, and expresses a belief in the Asiatic origin
of their builders, and in their subsequent migration south to lay, as
he thinks, the foundations of the Mexican and Peruvian civilizations.

[Illustration: COL. CHARLES WHITTLESEY.

After a photograph kindly furnished by the Hon. C. C. Baldwin, of
Cleveland, Ohio, who has printed a memorial of his friend with a list
of his writings in _Tract 68 of the Western Reserve Hist. Soc._]

During the next twenty-five years there cannot be said to have been
much added to a real knowledge of the subject. Yates and Moulton in
their _Hist. New York_ (1824) borrowed mainly from Kirkland (1788)
the missionary. Humboldt had no personal contact with the remains to
give his views any value (1825). Warden in his _Recherches_ (1827)
gave some new plans and rearranged the old descriptions. There was
some sober observation in M’Culloh’s _Researches_ (3d ed., 1829); some
far from sober in Rafinesque (1838); some compiled descriptions with
worthless comment in Josiah Priest’s _American Antiquities_ (Albany,
1838); something like scientific deductions in S. G. Morton’s study of
the few moundbuilders’ skulls then known, in his _Cranea Americana_
(1839); with an attempt at summing up in Delafield (1839) and Bradford
(1841). This is about all that had been added to what Atwater did, when
E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis eclipsed all labors preceding theirs, and
began the series of the _Smithsonian Contributions_ with their _Ancient
Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_ (Washington, 1847 and 1848).[1722]
During the preceding two years they had opened over two hundred mounds,
and explored about a hundred earthwork enclosures, and had gathered a
considerable collection of specimens of moundbuilders’ relics.[1723]
They had begun their work under the auspices of the American
Ethnological Society, but the cost of the production of the volume
exceeded the society’s resources, and the transfer was made to the
Smithsonian Institution. The work took a commanding position at once,
and still remains of essential value, though some of the grounds of its
authors are not acceptable to present observers; and indeed in his work
on the mounds of New York, which the Smithsonian Institution included
in the second volume of their _Contributions_, Squier found occasion to
alter some of his opinions in his earlier work, or at least to ascribe
the mounds of that State to the Iroquois. The third volume of the same
_Contributions_ (1852) introduces to us one of the ablest of the local
investigators in a paper by Charles Whittlesey, of “Descriptions of
Ancient Works in Ohio,”—the forerunner of numerous papers which he has
given to the public in elucidation of the mounds.[1724] Three years
later (1855), in the seventh volume of the _Smithsonian Contributions_,
a new field in the emblematic and animal mounds of the northwest
was for the first time brought to any considerable extent to public
attention in the paper by Increase A. Lapham, on the “Antiquities of
Wisconsin.” Lapham had made his explorations under the auspices of the
American Antiquarian Society,[1725] and his manuscript had been revised
by Haven, when it was decided to consign it for publication to the
Smithsonian Institution.

[Illustration: INCREASE A. LAPHAM.

Engraved from a photograph dated 1863, kindly furnished by his friend,
Prof. J. D. Whitney. Lapham died in 1875. Cf. _Amer. Journal of
Science_, x. 320; xi. 326, 333; _Trans. Wisc. Acad. Science_, iii. 264.]

The animal mounds had been indeed earlier mentioned, and the great
serpent mound of Ohio had long attracted attention; but it was in the
territory now known as Wisconsin that these mounds were found chiefly
to abound. Long, in 1823, speaks of mounds in this region; but the
forest coverings seem to have prevented any observer detecting their
shapes till Lapham first noted this peculiarity in 1836. In April,
1838, R. C. Taylor was the earliest to figure them in the _Amer.
Journal of Science_ (Silliman’s), and again they were described by S.
Taylor in _Ibid._, 1842. Prof. John Locke referred to them in a _Report
on the mineral lands of the United States_, made to Congress in 1844.
William Pidgeon, who had been a trader among the Indians, published in
his _Traditions of De-coo-dah, and Antiquarian researches: comprising
extensive exploration, surveys and excavations of the Mound Builders in
America; the traditions of the last Prophet of the Elk Nation, relative
to their origin and use, and the evidences of an ancient population
more numerous than the present Aborigines_ (N. Y., 1853; again 1858)
what he pretended was in large part the results of his intercourse
with an Indian chief, involving some theories as to the symbolism of
the mounds. The book contained so many palpable perversions, not to
say undisguised fictions, that the Smithsonian Institution refused to
publish it;[1726] and the book has never gained any credit, though some
unguarded writers have unwittingly borrowed from it.[1727]

In the eighth volume of the _Smithsonian Contributions_,[1728] Haven,
the librarian of the Amer. Antiq. Soc., summed up the results of mound
exploration as they then stood. The steady and circumspect habit of
Haven’s mind was conspicuous in his treatment of the mounds. It is
to him that the later advocates of the identity of their builders
with the race of the red Indians look as the first sensibly to affect
public opinion in the matter.[1729] He argued against their being a
more advanced race (p. 154), and in his _Report_ of the Am. Antiq.
Soc., in 1877 (p. 37), he held that it might yet be proved that the
moundbuilders and red Indians were one in race, as M’Culloh had already
suggested.

At the time when Haven was first intimating (1856) that this view
might yet become accepted, it was doubtless held to be best established
that those who built the mounds were quite another race from those
who lived among them when Europeans first knew the country. The fact
that the Indians had no tradition of their origin was held to be
almost conclusive, though it is alleged that the southern Indians in
later times retained no recollections of the expedition of De Soto,
and Dr. Brinton thinks that it is common for Indian traditions to die
out.[1730] It is not till recent years that any considerable number of
moundbuilder skulls have been known, and from the scant data which the
early craniologists had, their opinion seems to have coincided with
those in favor of a vanished race.[1731] It was a favorite theory, not
yet wholly departed, that they were in some way connected with the more
southern peoples, the Pueblo Indians, the Aztecs, or the Peruvians;
either that they came from them, or migrated south and became one with
them.[1732] The bolder theory, that we see their descendants in the red
Indians, is perhaps gaining ground, and it has had the support of the
Bureau of Ethnology and some able expounders.[1733]

[Illustration: THE GREAT SERPENT MOUND.

This follows a survey given in Squier’s _Serpent Symbol_ (N. Y.,
1851), p. 137. It is criticised by Putnam in _Peabody Museum Reports_,
xviii. 348, and _Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc._, Oct., 1883. Putnam has
recently purchased over sixty acres about the effigy, which is to
be held by the trustees of the Peabody Museum as a park (_Repts._,
xxi. 14); and his recent explorations show that the projections in
the side of the head (shaded dark in the cut) are not a part of the
construction. He also finds two distinct periods of occupation in this
region, to the oldest of which he attributes this work (_Peab. Mus.
Rept._ 1888). W. H. Holmes made a survey in 1886 (_Amer. Antiquarian_,
May, 1887, ix. 141; _Science_, viii. 624, Dec. 31, 1886). Cf. J. P.
MacLean, in _Amer. Antiquarian_, vii. 44, and his _Moundbuilders_, p.
56; Baldwin’s _Anc. America_, 29. T. H. Lewis describes a snake mound
in Minnesota (_Science_, ix. 393). On the serpent symbol see S. D.
Peet, in _Amer. Antiquarian_, viii. 197; ix. 13, where he manifests a
somewhat omnivorous appetite.]

Of the opposing theory of a disappeared race, Capt. Heart in reply to
Barton (_Amer. Philolog. Asso. Proc._ iii.) gave, as Thomas thinks,
“the earliest clear and distinct expression,” but Squier and Davis may
be considered as first giving it definite meaning; and though Squier
does not seem to have actually revoked this judgment as respects the
mounds in the Mississippi valley, he finally reached the conclusion
that those in New York were really the work of the Iroquois.[1734]
This ancient-race theory, sometimes amounting to a belief in their
autochthonous origin, has impressed the public through some of the
best known summaries of American antiquities, like those of Baldwin,
Wilson, and Short,[1735] and has been adopted by men of such reputation
as Lyell.[1736] The position taken by Professor F. W. Putnam, the
curator of the Peabody Museum of Archæology at Cambridge, is much like
that taken earlier by Warden in his _Recherches_, that both views
are, within their own limitations, correct, and, as Putnam expresses
it, “that many Indian tribes built mounds and earthworks is beyond
doubt; but that all the mounds and earthworks of North America are
by these same tribes, or their immediate ancestors, is not thereby
proved.”[1737] Thomas (_Fifth Report, Bureau Ethnol._) holds this
statement to be too vague. It is certainly shown in the whole history
of archæological study that uncompromising demarcations have sooner or
later to be abandoned.

Morgan finds it difficult to dissociate the mounds with his favorite
theory of communal life.[1738] There is no readier way of marking the
development of opinion on this question than to follow the series
of the _Annual Reports_ of the Smithsonian Institution, as hardly
a year has passed since 1861 but these _Reports_ have had in them
contributions on the subject.[1739] Among periodicals, the more
constant attention to the mounds is conspicuous in the _American
Antiquarian_.[1740]

The basis for estimating the age of the mounds is threefold. In the
first place, there are very few found on the last of the river terraces
to be reclaimed from the stream. In the second place, the decay of the
skeletons found in them can be taken as of some indication, if due
regard be had to the kind of earth in which they are buried. Third,
the age of trees upon them has been accepted as carrying them back a
certain period, at least, though this may widely vary, if you assume
their growth to be subsequent to the abandonment of the mounds, or
if, as Brinton holds,[1741] the trees were planted immediately upon
the building. The dependence upon counting the rings is by no means a
settled opinion as to all climes; but in the temperate zone the best
authorities place dependence upon it. Unfortunately it cannot carry us
back much over 600 years.[1742]