Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 1 (of 8) / Aboriginal America

by Unknown

CHAPTER VI.

THE PREHISTORIC ARCHÆOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA.

BY HENRY W. HAYNES,

Archæological Institute of America.

BY the discovery of America a new continent was brought to light, inhabited by many distinct tribes, differing in language and in customs, but strikingly alike in physical appearance. All that can be learned in regard to their condition, and that of their ancestors, prior to the coming of Columbus, falls within the domain of the prehistoric archæology of America. This recent science of Prehistoric Archæology deals mainly with facts, not surmises. In studying the past of forgotten races, “hid from the world in the low-delved tomb,” her chief agent is the spade, not the pen. Her leading principles, the lamps by which her path is guided, are superposition, association, and style. Does this new science teach us that the tribes found in possession of the soil were the descendants of its original occupants, or does she rather furnish reasons for inferring that these had been preceded by some extinct race or races? The first question, therefore, that presents itself to us relates to the antiquity of man upon this continent; and in respect to this the progress of archæological investigation has brought about a marked change of opinion. Modern speculation, based upon recent discoveries, inclines to favor the view that this continent was inhabited at least as early as in the later portion of the quaternary or pleistocene period. Whether this primitive people was autochthonous or not, is a problem that probably will never be solved; but it is now generally held that this earliest population was intruded upon by other races, coming either from Asia or from the Pacific Islands, from whom were descended the various tribes which have occupied the soil down to the present time.

The writer believes also that the majority of American archæologists now sees no sufficient reason for supposing that any mysterious, superior race has ever lived in any portion of our continent. They find no archæological evidence proving that at the time of its discovery any tribe had reached a stage of culture that can properly be called civilization. Even if we accept the exaggerated statements of the Spanish conquerors, the most intelligent and advanced peoples found here were only semi-barbarians, in the stage of transition from the stone to the bronze age, possessing no written language, or what can properly be styled an alphabet, and not yet having even learned the use of beasts of burden.

By a large and growing school of archæologists, moreover, it is maintained that all the various tribes upon this continent, notwithstanding their different degrees of advancement, were living under substantially similar institutions; and that even the different forms of house construction practised by them were only stages in the development of the same general conceptions. Without attempting to dogmatize about such difficult problems, the object of this chapter is to set forth concisely such views as recommend themselves to the writer’s judgment. He is profoundly conscious of the limitations of his knowledge, and fully aware that his opinions will be at variance with those of other competent and learned investigators. Non nostrum tantas componere lites.

The controversy in regard to the antiquity of man in the old world may be regarded as substantially settled. Scarcely any one now denies that man was in existence there during the close of the quaternary or pleistocene period; but there is a great difference of opinion as to the sufficiency of the evidence thus far brought forward to prove that he had made his appearance in Europe in the previous tertiary period, or even in the earlier part of the quaternary. What is the present state of opinion in regard to the correlative question about the antiquity of man in America? Less than ten years ago the latest treatise published in this country, in which this subject came under discussion, met the question with the sweeping reply that “no truly scientific proof of man’s great antiquity in America exists.”[1477] But we think if the author of that thorough and “truly scientific” work were living now his belief would be different. After a careful consideration of all the former evidence that had been adduced in proof of man’s early existence upon this continent, none of which seemed to him conclusive, he goes on to state that “Dr. C. C. Abbott has unquestionably discovered many palæolithic implements in the glacial drift in the valley of the Delaware River, near Trenton, New Jersey.”[1478] Now a single discovery of this character, if it were unquestionable, or incapable of any other explanation, would be sufficient to prove that man existed upon this continent in quaternary times. The establishment, therefore, of the antiquity of man in America, according to this latest authority, seems to rest mainly upon the fact of the discovery by Dr. Abbott of palæolithic implements in the valley of the Delaware. To quote the language of an eminent European man of science, “This gentleman appears to stand in a somewhat similar relation to this great question in America as did Boucher de Perthes in Europe.”[1479] The opinion of the majority of American geologists upon this point is clearly indicated in a very recent article by Mr. W. J. McGee, of the U. S. Geological Survey: “But it is in the aqueo-glacial gravels of the Delaware River, at Trenton, which were laid down contemporaneously with the terminal moraine one hundred miles further northward, and which have been so thoroughly studied by Abbott, that the most conclusive proof of the existence of glacial man is found.”[1480] It will accordingly be necessary to give in considerable detail an account of the discovery of palæolithic implements by Dr. Abbott in the Delaware valley, and of its confirmation by different investigators, as well as of such other discoveries in different parts of our country as tend to substantiate the conclusions that have been drawn from them by archæologists.

PALÆOLITHIC IMPLEMENT FROM THE TRENTON GRAVELS.

Side and edge view, of natural size. From the Peabody Museum Reports, vol. ii. p. 33.

By the term palæolithic implements we are to understand certain rude stone objects, of varying size, roughly fashioned into shape by a process of chipping away fragments from a larger mass so as to produce cutting edges, with convex sides, massive, and suited to be held at one end, and usually pointed at the other. These have never afterwards been subjected to any smoothing or polishing process by rubbing them against another stone. But it is only when such rude tools have been found buried in beds of gravel or other deposits, which have been laid down by great floods towards the close of what is known to geologists as the quaternary or pleistocene period, that they can be regarded as really palæolithic.[1481] At that epoch which immediately preceded the present period, certain rivers flowed with a volume of water much greater than now, owing to the melting of the thick ice-cap once covering large portions of the northern hemisphere, which was accompanied by a climate of great humidity. Vast quantities of gravels were washed down from the débris of the great terminal moraine of this ice-sheet, and were accumulated in beds of great thickness, extending in some instances as high as two hundred feet up the slopes of the river valleys. In such deposits, side by side with the rude products of human industry we have thus described, and deposited by the same natural forces, are found the fossil remains of several species of animals, which have subsequently either become extinct, like the mammoth and the tichorhine rhinoceros, or, driven southwards by the encroaching ice, have since its disappearance migrated to arctic regions, like the musk-sheep and the reindeer, or to the higher Alpine slopes, like the marmot. Such a discovery establishes the fact that man must have been living as the contemporary of these extinct animals, and this is the only proof of his antiquity that is at present universally accepted.

There has been much discussion among geologists in regard to both the duration and the conditions of the glacial period, but it is now the settled opinion that there have been two distinct times of glacial action, separated by a long interval of warmer climate, as is proved by the occurrence of intercalated fossiliferous beds; this was followed by the final retreat of the glacier.[1482] The great terminal moraine stretching across the United States from Cape Cod to Dakota, and thence northward to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, marks the limit of the ice invasion in the second glacial epoch. South of this, extending in its farthest boundary as low as the 38th degree of latitude, is a deposit which thins out as we go west and northwest, and which is called the drift-area. The drift graduates into a peculiar mud deposit, for which the name of “loess” has been adopted from the geologists of Europe, by whom it was given to a thick alluvial stratum of fine sand and loam, of glacial origin. This attenuated drift represents the first glacial invasion. From Massachusetts as far as northern New Jersey, and in some other places, the deposits of the two epochs seem to coalesce.[1483]

The interval of time that separated the two glacial periods can be best imagined by considering the great erosions that have taken place in the valleys of the Missouri and of the upper Ohio. “Glacial river deposits of the earlier epoch form the capping of fragmentary terraces that stand 250 to 300 feet above the present rivers;” while those of the second epoch stretch down through a trough excavated to that depth by the river through these earlier deposits and the rock below.[1484]

As to the probable time that has elapsed since the close of the glacial period, the tendency of recent speculation is to restrict the vast extent that was at first suggested for it to a period of from twenty thousand to thirty thousand years. The most conservative view maintains that it need not have been more than ten thousand years, or even less.[1485] This lowest estimate, however, can only be regarded as fixing a minimum point, and an antiquity vastly greater than this must be assigned to man, as of necessity he must have been in existence long before the final events occurred in order to have left his implements buried in the beds of débris which they occasioned.

In April, 1873, Dr. C. C. Abbott, who was already well known as an investigator of the antiquities of the Indian races, which he believed had passed from “a palæolithic to a neolithic condition” while occupying the Atlantic seaboard, published an article on the “Occurrence of implements in the river-drift at Trenton, New Jersey.”[1486] In this he described and figured three rude implements, which he had found buried at a depth as great in one instance as sixteen feet in the gravels of a bluff overlooking the Delaware River. He argued that these must be of greater antiquity than relics found on the surface, from the fact of their occurring in place in undisturbed deposits; that they could not have reached such a depth by any natural means; and that they must be of human origin, and not accidental formations, because as many as three had been discovered of a like character. His conclusion is that they are “true drift implements, fashioned and used by a people far antedating the people who subsequently occupied this same territory.”

After two years of further research he returned to the subject, publishing in the same journal, in June, 1876, an account of the discovery of seven similar objects near the same locality. Of these he said: “My studies of these palæolithic specimens and of their positions in the gravel-beds and overlying soil have led me to conclude that not long after the close of the last glacial epoch man appeared in the valley of the Delaware.”[1487]

Most of these specimens were deposited by Dr. Abbott in the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology at Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the curator of that institution, Professor Frederick W. Putnam, in September, 1876, visited the locality in company with Dr. Abbott. Together they succeeded in finding two examples in place. Having been commissioned to continue his investigations, Dr. Abbott presented to the trustees, in November of the same year, a detailed report On the Discovery of Supposed Palæolithic Implements from the Glacial Drift in the Valley of the Delaware River, near Trenton, New Jersey.[1488] In this, three of the most characteristic specimens were figured, which had been submitted to Mr. M. E. Wadsworth of Cambridge, to determine their lithological character. He pronounced them to be made of argillite, and declared that the chipping upon them could not be attributed to any natural cause, and that the weathering of their surfaces indicated their very great antiquity. The question “how and when these implements came to be in the gravel” is discussed by Dr. Abbott at some length. He argued that the same forces which spread the beds of gravel over the wide area now covered carried them also; and he predicted that they will be met with wherever such gravels occur in other parts of the State. He specially dwells upon the circumstances that the implements were found in undisturbed portions of the freshly exposed surface of the bluff, and not in the mass of talus accumulated at its base, into which they might have fallen from the surface; and that they have been found at great depths, “varying from five to over twenty feet below the overlying soil.” He also insisted upon the marked difference between their appearance and the materials of which they are fashioned and the customary relics of the Indians. The conditions under which the gravel-beds were accumulated are then studied in connection with a report upon them by Professor N. S. Shaler, which concludes, from the absence of stratification and of pebbles marked with glacial scratches, that they were “formed in the sea near the foot of the retreating ice-sheet, when the sub-glacial rivers were pouring out the vast quantities of water and waste that clearly were released during the breaking up of the great ice-time.” This view regards the deposits as of glacial origin, and as laid down during that period, but considers that they were subsequently modified in their arrangement by the action of water. In such gravel-beds there have also been found rolled fragments of reindeer-horns, and skulls of the walrus, as well as the relics of man. Dr. Abbott accordingly drew the conclusion that “man dwelt at the foot of the glacier, or at least wandered over the open sea, during the accumulation of this mass of gravel;” that he was contemporary of these arctic animals; and that this early race was driven southward by the encroaching ice, leaving its rude implements behind. Thus it will be seen that Dr. Abbott no longer considers man in this country as belonging to post-glacial, but to interglacial times.

Continuing his investigations, in the following year Dr. Abbott gave a much more elaborate account of his work and its results, in which he announced his discovery of some sixty additional specimens.[1489] To the objection that had been raised, that these supposed implements might have been produced by the action of frost, he replied that a single fractured surface might have originated in that way or from an accidental blow; but when we find upon the same object from twenty to forty planes of cleavage, all equally weathered (which shows that the fragments were all detached at or about the same time), it is impossible not to recognize in this the result of intentional action. Four such implements are described and figured, of shapes much more specialized than those previously published, and resembling very closely objects which European archæologists style stone axes of “the Chellean type,” whose artificial origin cannot be doubted.

THE TRENTON GRAVEL BLUFF.

From a photograph kindly furnished by Professor F. W. Putnam, showing the Delaware and its bluff of gravel, where many of the rude implements have been found.

As some geologists were still inclined to insist upon the post-glacial character of the débris in which the implements were found, Dr. Abbott, admitting that the great terminal moraine of the northern ice-sheet does not approach nearer than forty miles to the bluff at Trenton, nevertheless insists that the character of the deposits there much more resembles a mass of material accumulated in the sea at the foot of the glacier than it does beds that have been subjected to the modifying arrangement of water. He finds an explanation of this condition of things in a prolongation of the glacier down the valley of the Delaware as far as Trenton, at a time when the lower portions of the State had suffered a considerable depression, and before the retreat of the ice-sheet. But besides the comparatively unmodified material of the bluff, in which the greater portion of the palæolithic implements has been found, there also occur limited areas of stratified drift, such as are to be seen in railway cuttings near Trenton, in which similar implements are also occasionally found. These, however, present a more worn appearance than the others. But it will be found that these tracts of clearly stratified material are so very limited in extent that they seem to imply some peculiar local condition of the glacier. This position is illustrated by certain remarkable effects once witnessed after a very severe rainfall, by which two palæolithic implements were brought into immediate contact with ordinary Indian relics such as are common on the surface. This leads to an examination of the question of the origin of this surface soil, and a discussion of the problem how true palæolithic implements sometimes occur in it. This soil is known to be a purely sedimentary deposit, consisting almost exclusively of sand, or of such finely comminuted gravels as would readily be transported by rapid currents of water. But imbedded in it and making a part of it are numerous huge boulders, too heavy to be moved by water. Dr. Abbott accounted for their presence from their having been dropped by ice-rafts, while the process of deposition of the soil was going on. The same sort of agency could not have put in place both the soil and the boulders contained in it, and the same force which transported the latter may equally well have brought along such implements as occur in the beds of clearly stratified origin. The wearing effect upon these of gravels swept along by post-glacial floods will account for that worn appearance which sometimes almost disguises their artificial origin.

In conclusion Dr. Abbott attempted to determine what was the early race which preceded the Indians in the occupation of this continent. From the peculiar nature and qualities of palæolithic implements he argues that they are adapted to the needs of a people “living in a country of vastly different character, and with a different fauna,” from the densely wooded regions of the Atlantic seaboard, where the red man found his home. The physical conditions of the glacial times much more nearly resembled those now prevailing in the extreme north. Accordingly he finds the descendants of the early race in the Eskimos of North America, driven northwards after contact with the invading Indian race. In this he is following the opinion of Professor William Boyd Dawkins, who considers that people to be of the same blood as the palæolithic cave-dwellers of southern France, and that of Mr. Dall and Dr. Rink, who believed that they once occupied this continent as far south as New Jersey. In confirmation of this view he asserts that the Eskimos “until recently used stone implements of the rudest patterns.” But unfortunately for this theory the implements of the Eskimos bear no greater resemblance to palæolithic implements than do those of any other people in the later stone age; and subsequent discoveries of human crania in the Trenton gravels have led Dr. Abbott to question its soundness.[1490]

These discoveries of Dr. Abbott are not liable to the imputation of possible errors of observation or record, as would be the case if they rested upon the testimony of a single person only. As has been already stated, in September, 1876, Professor Putnam was present at the finding in place of two palæolithic implements, and in all has taken five with his own hands from the gravel at various depths.[1491] Mr. Lucien Carr also visited the locality in company with Professor J. D. Whitney, in September, 1878, and found several in place.[1492] Since then Professors Shaler, Dawkins, Wright, Lewis, and others, including the writer, have all succeeded in finding specimens either in place or in the talus along the face of the bluff, from which they had washed out from freshly exposed surfaces of the gravel.[1493] The whole number thus far discovered by Dr. Abbott amounts to about four hundred specimens.[1494] Meanwhile, the problem of the conditions under which the Trenton gravels had been accumulated was made the subject of careful study by other competent geologists, besides Professor Shaler, to whose opinion reference has already been made. In October, 1877, the late Thomas Belt, F. G. S., visited the locality, and shortly afterwards published an account of Dr. Abbott’s discoveries, illustrated by several geological sections of the gravel. His conclusion is, “that after the land-ice retired, or whilst it was retiring, and before the coast was submerged to such a depth as to permit the flotation of icebergs from the north, the upper pebble-beds containing the stone implements were formed.”[1495] The geologists of the New Jersey Survey had already recognized the distinction between the drift gravels of Trenton and the earlier yellow marine gravels which cover the lower part of the State. But it was the late Professor Henry Carvill Lewis, of Philadelphia, who first accurately described the character and limits of the Trenton gravels.[1496] This he had carefully mapped before he was informed of Dr. Abbott’s discoveries, and it has been found (with only one possible very recent exception) that the implements occur solely in these newer gravels of the glacial period.

Professor Lewis’s matured conclusions in regard to the geological character and the age of the Trenton gravel cliff are thus expressed: “The presence of large boulders in the bluff at Trenton, and the extent and depth of the gravel at this place, have led to the supposition that there was here the extremity of a glacial moraine. Yet the absence of ‘till’ and of scratched boulders, the absence of glacial striæ upon the rocks of the valley, and the stratified character of the gravel, all point to water action alone as the agent of deposition. The depth of the gravel and the presence of the bluff at this point are explained by the peculiar position that Trenton occupies relatively to the river, ... in a position where naturally the largest amount of a river gravel would be deposited, and where its best exposures would be exhibited.... Any drift material which the flooded river swept down its channel would here, upon meeting tide-water, be in great part deposited. Boulders which had been rolled down the inclined floor of the upper valley would here stop in their course, and all be heaped up with the coarser gravel in the more slowly flowing water, except such as cakes of floating ice could carry oceanward.... Having heaped up a mass of detritus in the old river channel as an obstruction at the mouth of the gorge, the river, so soon as its volume diminished, would immediately begin wearing away a new channel for itself down to ocean level. This would be readily accomplished through the loose material, and would be stopped only when rock was reached.... It has been thought that to account for the high bank at Trenton an elevation of the land must have occurred.... An increase in the volume of the river will explain all the facts. The accompanying diagram will render this more clear.

Section of bluff two miles south of Trenton, New Jersey. a b, Trenton gravel; Implements—a, fine gray sand (boulder); b, coarse sandy gravel; c, red gravel; d, yellow gravel (pre-glacial); e, plastic clay (Wealden); f, fine yellow sand (Hastings?); g, gneiss; h, alluvial mud; i, Delaware River.

A From a cut in Primitive Industry, p. 535.

“The Trenton gravel, now confined to the sandy flat borders of the river, corresponds to the ‘intervale’ of New England rivers, ... and exhibits a topography peculiar to a true river gravel. Frequently instead of forming a flat plain it forms higher ground close to the present river channel than it does near its ancient bank. Moreover, not only does the ground thus slope downward on retreating from the river, but the boulders become smaller and less abundant. Both of these facts are in accordance with the facts of river deposits. In time of flood the rapidly flowing water in the main channel, bearing detritus, is checked by the more quiet waters at the side of the river, and is forced to deposit its gravel and boulders as a kind of bank.... Having shown that the Trenton gravel is a true river gravel of comparatively recent age, it remains to point out the relation it bears to the glacial epoch.... Two hypotheses only can be applied to the Trenton gravel. It is either post-glacial, or it belongs to the very last portion of the glacial period. The view held by the late Thomas Belt can no longer be maintained.... He fails to recognize any distinction between the gravels. As we have seen, the Trenton gravel is truly post-glacial. It only remains to define more strictly the meaning of that term. There is evidence to support both of these hypotheses.”[1497]

After discussing them both at considerable length, he concludes as follows: “A second glacial period in Europe, known as the ‘Reindeer Period,’ has long been recognized. It appears to have followed that in which the clays were deposited and the terraces formed, and may therefore correspond with the period of the Trenton gravel. If there have been two glacial epochs in this country, the Trenton gravel cannot be earlier than the close of the later one. If there has been but one, traces of the glacier must have continued into comparatively recent times, or long after the period of submergence. The Trenton gravel, whether made by long-continued floods which followed a first or second glacial epoch,—whether separated from all true glacial action or the result of the glacier’s final melting,—is truly a post-glacial deposit, but still a phenomenon of essentially glacial times,—times more nearly related to the Great Ice Age than to the present.”

He then goes on to consider the bearings of the age of this gravel upon the question of the antiquity of man. “When we find that the Trenton gravel contains implements of human workmanship so placed with reference to it that it is evident that at or soon after the time of its deposition man had appeared on its borders, and when the question of the antiquity of man in America is thus before us, we are tempted to inquire still further into the age of the deposit under discussion. It has been clearly shown by several competent archæologists that the implements that have been found are a constituent part of the gravel, and not intrusive objects. It was of peculiar interest to find that it has been only within the limits of the Trenton gravel, precisely traced out by the writer, that Dr. Abbott, Professor F. W. Putnam, Mr. Lucien Carr, and others, have discovered these implements in situ.... At the localities on the Pennsylvania Railroad, where extensive exposures of these gravels have been made, the deposit is undoubtedly undisturbed. No implements could have come into this gravel except at a time when the river flowed upon it, and when they might have sunk through the loose and shifting material. All the evidence points to the conclusion that at the time of the Trenton gravel flood man ... lived upon the banks of the ancient Delaware, and lost his stone implements in the shifting sands and gravel of the bed of that stream.... The actual age of the Trenton gravel, and the consequent date to which the antiquity of man on the Delaware should be assigned, is a question which geological data alone are insufficient to solve. The only clew, and that a most unsatisfactory one, is afforded by calculations based upon the amount of erosion. This, like all geological considerations, is relative rather than absolute, yet several calculations have been made, which, based either upon the rate of erosion of river channels or the rate of accumulation of sediment, have attempted to fix the date of the close of the glacial epoch. By assuming that the Trenton gravel was deposited immediately after the close of this epoch, an account of such calculations may be of interest. If the Trenton gravel is post-glacial in the widest acceptation of the term, a yet later date must be assigned to it.”

After going carefully through them all, he concludes: “Thus we find that if any reliance is to be placed upon such calculations, even if we assume that the Trenton gravel is of glacial age, it is not necessary to make it more than ten thousand years old. The time necessary for the Delaware to cut through the gravel down to the rock is by no means great. When it is noted that the gravel cliff at Trenton was made by a side wearing away at a bank, and when it is remembered that the erosive power of the Delaware River was formerly greater than at present, it will be conceded that the presence of the cliff at Trenton will not necessarily infer its high antiquity; nor in the character of the gravel is there any evidence that the time of its deposition need have been long. It may be that, as investigations are carried further, it will result not so much in proving man of very great antiquity as in showing how much more recent than usually supposed was the final disappearance of the glacier.”

Professor Lewis’s studies of the great terminal moraine of the northern ice-sheet were still further prosecuted in conjunction with Professor George Frederick Wright, of Oberlin, Ohio, whose labors have been of the highest importance in shedding light upon the question of the antiquity of man in America.[1498] Together they traced the southern boundary of the glacial region across the State of Pennsylvania, and subsequently Professor Wright has continued his researches through the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, as far as the Mississippi River and even beyond. He has found that glacial floods similar to those of the Delaware valley have deposited similar beds of drift gravel in the valleys of all the southerly flowing rivers, and he has called attention to the importance of searching in them for palæolithic implements. As early as March, 1883, he predicted that traces of early man would be found in the extensive terraces and gravel deposits of the southern portion of Ohio.[1499] This prediction was speedily fulfilled, and upon November 4, 1885, Professor Putnam reported to the Boston Society of Natural History that Dr. C. L. Metz, of Madisonville, Ohio, had found in the gravels of the valley of the Little Miami River, at that place, eight feet below the surface, a rude implement made of black flint, of about the same size and shape as one of the same material found by Dr. Abbott in the Trenton gravels. This was followed by the announcement from Dr. Metz that he had discovered another specimen (a chipped pebble) in the gravels at Loveland, in the same valley, at a depth of nearly thirty feet from the surface. Professor Wright has visited both localities, and given a detailed description of them, illustrated by a map. He finds that the deposit at Madisonville clearly belongs to the glacial-terrace epoch, and is underlain by “till,” while in that at Loveland it is known that the bones of the mastodon have been discovered. He closes his account with these words: “In the light of the exposition just given, these implements will at once be recognized as among the most important archæological discoveries yet made in America, ranking on a par with those of Dr. Abbott at Trenton, New Jersey. They show that in Ohio, as well as on the Atlantic coast, man was an inhabitant before the close of the glacial period.”[1500] Further confirmation of these predictions was received at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Cleveland, Ohio, in August, 1888, when Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson reported his discovery of a large flint implement in the glacial gravels of Jackson County, Indiana, as well as of two chipped implements made of argillite, which he had found in place at a depth of several feet in the ancient terrace of the Delaware River, in Claymont, Newcastle County, Delaware.[1501]

This discovery of Mr. Cresson’s has assumed a great geological importance, and it is thus reported by him: “Toward midday of July 13, 1887, while lying upon the edge of the railroad cut, sketching the boulder line, my eye chanced to notice a piece of steel-gray substance, strongly relieved in the sunlight against the red-colored gravel, just above where it joined the lower grayish-red portion. It seemed to me like argillite, and being firmly imbedded in the gravel was decidedly interesting. Descending the steep bank as rapidly as possible, the specimen was secured.... Upon examining my specimen I found that it was unquestionably a chipped implement. There is no doubt about its being firmly imbedded in the gravel, for the delay I made in extricating it with my pocket-knife nearly caused me the unpleasant position of being covered by several tons of gravel.... Having duly reported my find to Professor Putnam, I began, at his request, a thorough examination of the locality, and on May 25, 1888, the year following, discovered another implement four feet below the surface, at a place about one eighth of a mile from the first discovery.... The geological formation in which the implement was found seems to be a reddish gravel mixed with schist.”[1502]

Professor Wright thus comments upon these discoveries and their geological situation: “The discovery of palæolithic implements, as described by Mr. Cresson, near Claymont, Del., unfolds a new chapter in the history of man in America. It was my privilege in November last to visit the spot with him, and to spend a day examining the various features of the locality.... The cut in the Baltimore and Ohio railroad in which this implement was found is about one mile and a half west of the Delaware River, and about one hundred and fifty feet above it. The river is here quite broad. Indeed, it has ceased to be a river, and is already merging into Delaware Bay; the New Jersey shore being about three miles distant from the Delaware side. The ascent from the bay at Claymont to the locality under consideration is by three or four well-marked benches. These probably are not terraces in the strict sense of the word, but shelves marking different periods of erosion when the land stood at these several levels, but now thinly covered with old river deposits. Upon reaching the locality of Mr. Cresson’s recent discovery, we find a well-marked superficial water deposit containing pebbles and small boulders up to two or three feet in diameter, and resting unconformably upon other deposits, different in character, and in some places directly upon the decomposed schists which characterize the locality. This is without question the Philadelphia Red Gravel and Brick Clay of Lewis. The implement submitted to us was found near the bottom of this upper deposit, and eight feet below the surface.... As Mr. Cresson was on the ground when the implement was uncovered, and took it out with his own hands, there would seem to be no reasonable doubt that it was originally a part of the deposit; for Mr. Cresson is no novice in these matters, but has had unusual opportunities, both in this country and in the old world, to study the localities where similar discoveries have heretofore been made. The absorbing question concerning the age of this deposit is therefore forced upon our attention as archæologists.... The determination of the age of these particular deposits at Claymont involves a discussion of the whole question of the Ice Age in North America, and especially that of the duality of the glacial epoch. At a meeting of this society on January 19, 1881, I discussed the age of the Trenton gravel, in which Dr. Abbott has found so many palæoliths, and was led also incidentally at the same time to discuss the relative age of what Professor Lewis called the Philadelphia Red Gravel. I had at that time recently made repeated trips to Trenton, and with Professor Lewis had been over considerable portions of the Delaware valley for the express purpose of determining these questions. The conclusions to which we—that is, Professor Lewis and myself—came were thus expressed in the paper above referred to (Proc. Boston Soc. of Nat. Hist., vol. xxi. pp. 137-145), namely, that the Philadelphia Brick Clay and Red Gravel (which are essentially one formation) marked the period when the ice had its greatest extension, and when there was a considerable depression of the land in that vicinity; perhaps, however, less than a hundred feet in the neighborhood of the moraine, though increasing towards the northwest. During this period of greatest extension and depression, the Philadelphia Red Gravel and Brick Clay were deposited by the ice-laden floods which annually poured down the valley in the summer seasons. As the ice retreated towards the headwaters of the valley, the period was marked also by a reëlevation of the land to about its present height, when the later deposits of gravel at Trenton took place. Dr. Abbott’s discoveries at Trenton prove the presence of man on the continent at that stage of the glacial epoch. Mr. Cresson’s discoveries prove the presence of man at a far earlier stage. How much earlier, will depend upon our interpretation of the general facts bearing on the question of the duality of the glacial epoch.

“Mr. McGee, of the United States Geological Survey, has recently published the results of extensive investigations carried on by him respecting the superficial deposits of the Atlantic coast. (See Amer. Jour. of Science, vol. xxxv., 1888.) He finds that on all the rivers south of the Delaware there are deposits corresponding in character to what Professor Lewis had denominated Philadelphia Red Gravel and Brick Clay.... From the extent to which this deposit is developed at Washington, in the District of Columbia, Mr. McGee prefers to designate it the Columbia formation. But the period is regarded by him as identical with that of the Philadelphia Red Gravel and Brick Clay, which Professor Lewis had attributed to the period of maximum glacial development on the Atlantic coast.

“It is observable that the boulders in this Columbia formation belong, so far as we know, in every case, to the valleys in which they are now found.... It is observable also that it is not necessary in any case to suppose that these deposits were the direct result of glacial ice. Mr. McGee does not suppose that glaciers extended down these valleys to any great distance. Indeed, so far as we are aware, there is no evidence of even local glaciers in the Alleghany Mountains south of Harrisburg. But it is easy to see that an incidental result of the glacial period was a great increase of ice and snow in the headwaters of all these streams, so as to add greatly to the extent of the deposits in which floating ice is concerned. And this Columbia formation is, as we understand it, supposed by Mr. McGee to be the result of this incidental effect of the glacial period in increasing the accumulations of snow and ice along the headwaters of all the streams that rise in the Alleghanies. In this we are probably agreed. But Mr. McGee differs from the interpretation of the facts given by Professor Lewis and myself, in that he postulates, largely, however, on the basis of facts outside of this region, two distinct glacial epochs, and attributes the Columbia formation to the first epoch, which he believes to be from three to ten times as remote as the period in which the Trenton gravels were deposited. If, therefore, Dr. Abbott’s implements are, as from the lowest estimate would seem to be the case, from ten thousand to fifteen thousand years old, the implements discovered by Mr. Cresson in the Baltimore and Ohio cut at Claymont, which is certainly in Mr. McGee’s Columbia formation, would be from thirty thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand years old.

“But as I review the evidence which has come to my knowledge since writing the paper in 1881, I do not yet see the necessity of making so complete a separation between the glacial epochs as Mr. McGee and others feel compelled to do. But, on the other hand, the unity of the epoch (with, however, a marked period of amelioration in climate accompanied by extensive recession of the ice, and followed by a subsequent re-advance over a portion of the territory) seems more and more evident. All the facts which Mr. McGee adduces from the eastern side of the Alleghanies comport, apparently, as readily with the idea of one glacial period as with that of two.... Until further examination of the district with these suggestions in view, or until a more specific statement of facts than we find in Mr. McGee’s papers, it would therefore seem unnecessary to postulate a distinct glacial period to account for the Columbia formation.... But no matter which view prevails, whether that of two distinct glacial epochs, or of one prolonged epoch with a mild period intervening, the Columbia deposits at Claymont, in which these discoveries of Mr. Cresson have been made, long antedate (perhaps by many thousand years) the deposits at Trenton, N. J., at Loveland and Madison, Ohio, at Little Falls, Minn., ... and at Medora, Ind.... Those all belong to the later portion of the glacial period, while these at Claymont belong to the earlier portion of that period, if they are not to be classed, according to Mr. McGee, as belonging to an entirely distinct epoch.”[1503]

The objects discovered by both Dr. Metz and Mr. Cresson have been deposited in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, and their artificial character cannot be disputed.

At nearly the same date at which Dr. Abbott published the account of his discoveries, Col. Charles C. Jones, of Augusta, Georgia, recorded the finding of “some rudely-chipped, triangular-shaped implements in Nacoochee valley under circumstances which seemingly assign to them very remote antiquity. In material, manner of construction, and in general appearance, so nearly do they resemble some of the rough, so-called flint hatchets belonging to the drift type, as described by M. Boucher de Perthes, that they might very readily be mistaken the one for the other.”[1504] They were met with in the course of mining operations, in which a cutting had been made through the soil and the underlying sands, gravels, and boulders down to the bedrock. Resting upon this, at a depth of some nine feet from the surface, were the three implements described. But it is plain that this deposit can scarcely be regarded as a true glacial drift, since the great terminal moraine lies more than four hundred miles away to the north, and the region where it occurs does not fall within the drift area. It must be of local origin, and few geologists would be willing to admit the existence of local glaciers in the Alleghanies so far to the south during the glacial period. Consequently these objects do not fall within our definition of true palæolithic implements.

The same thing may be said in a less degree of the implements discovered by C. M. Wallace, in 1876, in the gravels and clays of the valley of the James River.[1505]

A different character attaches to certain objects discovered in 1877 by Professor N. H. Winchell, at Little Falls, Minnesota, in the valley of the Mississippi River.[1506] These consisted mainly of pieces of chipped white quartz, perfectly sharp, although occurring in a water-worn deposit, and they were found to extend over quite a large area. Their artificial character has been vouched for by Professor Putnam, and among them were a few rude implements which are well represented in an accompanying plate. A geological section given in the report shows that they occur in the terrace some sixty feet above the bank of the river, and were found to extend about four feet below the surface. In the words of Professor Winchell: “The interest that centres in these chips ... involves the question of the age of man and his work in the Mississippi Valley.... The chipping race ... preceded the spreading of the material of the plain, and must have been pre-glacial, since the plain was spread out by that flood stage of the Mississippi River that existed during the prevalence of the ice-period, or resulted from the dissolution of the glacial winter.... The wonderful abundance of these chips indicates an astonishing amount of work done, as if there had been a great manufactory in the neighborhood, or an enormous lapse of time for its performance.”

This discovery of Professor Winchell was followed up by researches prosecuted in 1879 in the vicinity of Little Falls by Miss F. E. Babbit, of that place.[1507] She discovered a similar stratum of chipped quartz in the ancient terrace, of a mile or more in width, about forty rods to the east of the river, and elevated some twenty-five feet above it. This had been brought to light by the wearing of a wagon track, leading down a natural drainage channel, which had cut through the quartz stratum down to a level below it. The result of her prolonged investigations showed that “the stratum of quartz chips lay at a level some twelve or fifteen feet lower than the plane of the terrace top.”[1508] While the quartz chips discovered by Professor Winchell were contained in the upper surface of the terrace plain, these were strictly confined to a lower level, and cannot be synchronous with them. They must be older “by at least the lapse of time required for the deposition of the twelve or fifteen feet of modified drift forming the upper part of the terrace plain above the quartz-bearing stratum.”

This conclusion is abundantly confirmed by Mr. Warren Upham, of the U. S. Geological Survey, in his study of “The recession of the ice-sheet in Minnesota in its relation to the gravel deposits overlying the quartz implements found by Miss Babbit at Little Falls, Minnesota.”[1509] The great ice-sheet of the latest glacial epoch at its maximum extension pushed out vast lobes of ice, one of which crossed western and central Minnesota and extended into Iowa. Different stages of its retreat are marked by eleven distinct marginal moraines, and this deposit of modified drift at Little Falls Mr. Upham believes occurred in the interval between the formation of the eighth and the ninth. “It is,” he says, “upon the till, or direct deposit of the ice, and forms a surface over which the ice never re-advanced.” An examination of the terraces and plains of the Mississippi Valley from St. Paul to twenty-five miles above Little Falls shows them to be similar in composition and origin to the terraces of modified drift in the river valleys of New England. In his judgment, “the rude implements and fragments of quartz discovered at Little Falls were overspread by the glacial flood-plain of the Mississippi River, while most of the northern half of Minnesota was still covered by the ice.... It may be that the chief cause leading men to occupy this locality so soon after it was uncovered from the ice was their discovery of the quartz veins in the slate there, ... affording suitable material for making sharp-edged stone implements of the best quality. Quartz veins are absent, or very rare and unsuitable for this, in all the rock outcrops of the south half of Minnesota, that had become uncovered from the ice, as well as of the whole Mississippi basin southward, and this was the first spot accessible whence quartz for implement-making could be obtained.”

According to this view the upper deposit at Little Falls would appear to be more recent than those laid down by the immediate wasting of the great terminal moraine at Trenton and in Ohio; but the occupation of the spot by man upon the lower terrace may well have been at a much earlier time.

Many of the objects discovered by Miss Babbitt have been placed in the Peabody Museum, and as their artificial character has been questioned, the writer wishes to repeat his opinion, formed upon the study of numerous specimens that have been submitted to him, but not the same as those upon which Professor Putnam based his similar conclusions, that they are undoubtedly of human origin.

Implements of palæolithic form have been discovered in several other localities, but as none of them have been found in place, in undisturbed gravel-beds, either those which have been derived from the terminal moraine of the second extension of the great northern ice-sheet, or those which are included within the drift area, they cannot be considered as proved to be true palæolithic implements, although it is highly probable that many of them are such.[1510]

We have now to consider the claim to high antiquity of objects which have been discovered in several places in certain deposits, equally regarded as of glacial origin, which occur in the central and western portions of the United States. These are the so-called “lacustrine deposits,” which are believed to have had their origin from the former presence of vast lakes, now either extinct or represented by comparatively small bodies of water. The largest of such lakes occupied a great depression which once existed between the Rocky Mountains and the chain of the Sierra Nevada during the quaternary period. The existing lakes represent the lowest part of two basins, into which this depression was divided; of these, the western one, represented by certain smaller lakes, has received the name of Lake Lahontan. This never had any communication with the sea, and its deposits consequently register the greater or less amount of rain and snow during the period of its existence. To the eastern the name of Lake Bonneville has been given, and it is at present represented by the Great Salt Lake in Utah. This formerly had an outlet through the valley of the Columbia River. These lakes are believed to have been produced by the melting of local glaciers existing during the quaternary times in the above-named mountains; and similar consequences seem to have followed from the like presence of ancient glaciers in the Wahsatch and Uintah mountains, where no lake now exists.

In the ancient deposits of such an immense fresh-water lake, derived from the melting of glaciers in the last-mentioned mountains, which once existed in southern Wyoming, Professor Joseph Leidy first reported, in 1872, the discovery near Fort Bridger of “mingled implements of the rudest construction, together with a few of the highest finish.... Some of the specimens are as sharp and fresh in appearance as if they had been but recently broken from the parent block. Others are worn and have their sharpness removed, and are so deeply altered in color as to look exceedingly ancient.”[1511] The plates accompanying the report show that some of these objects are of palæolithic form, but as no further information is given in regard to the conditions under which they were discovered, we cannot pronounce them to be really palæolithic.

In 1874, Dr. Samuel Aughey made known the existence in Nebraska of “hundreds of miles of similar lacustrine deposits, almost level or gently rolling.”[1512] To these the name of “loess” has also been given, as well as to the mud deposits derived from the northern drift. Aughey states that these beds are perfectly homogeneous throughout, and of almost uniform color, ranging in thickness from five to one hundred and fifty feet. Generally they lie above a true drift formation derived from glaciers in the Black Hills, and represent “the final retreat of the glaciers, and that era of depression of the surface of the State when the greater part of it constituted a great fresh-water lake, into which the Missouri, the Platte, and the Republican rivers poured their waters.” The Missouri and its tributaries, flowing for more than one thousand miles through these deposits, gradually filled up this great lake with sediment. The rising of the land by degrees converted the lake-bottom into marshes, through which the rivers began to cut new channels, and to form the bluffs which now bound them. “The Missouri, during the closing centuries of the lacustrine age, must have been from five to thirty miles in breadth, forming a stream which for size and majesty rivalled the Amazon.” Many remains of mastodons and elephants are found in this so-called loess, as well as those of the animals now living in that region, together with the fresh-water and land shells peculiar to it. In it Aughey has also discovered an arrow-point and a spear-head, of which he gives well-executed figures. Both are excellent examples of those well-chipped implements which are regarded as typical of the Neolithic age or the age of polished stone, and are absolutely different from the palæolithic implements of which we have hitherto spoken. They were both found in railroad cuttings on the Iowa side of the Missouri River, and within three miles of it. The first lay at a depth of fifteen feet below the top of the deposit. Of the second he says it was “twenty feet below the top of the loess, and at least six inches from the edge of the cut, so that it could not have slid into that place.... Thirteen inches above the point where it was found, and within three inches of being on a line with it, in undisturbed loess, there was a lumbar vertebra of an elephant.”[1513]

This intermingling in these deposits of the bones of extinct and living animals appears to have been brought about by the shifting of the beds of the vast rivers he has described, which have been flowing for ages through the slight and easily moved material. It seems to be analogous to what has taken place in recent times in the valley of the Mississippi and in its delta. The finding, therefore, of arrow-heads of recent Indian type, even in place under twenty feet of loess and below a fossil elephant-bone, cannot be considered as affording any stronger proof of the antiquity of man than the oft-cited instances of the discovery of basket-work and pottery underneath similar fossils at Petite Anse Island in Louisiana, or of pottery and mastodon-bones on the banks of the Ashley River in South Carolina. No such discovery can be considered of consequence as bearing upon the question of palæolithic man.

The late Thomas Belt wrote to Professor Putnam, in 1878, that he had discovered “a small human skull in an undisturbed loess in a railway cutting about two miles from Denver (Colorado). All the plains are covered with a drift deposit of granitic and quartzose pebbles overlaid by a sandy and calcareous loam closely resembling the diluvial clay and the loess of Europe. It was in the upper part of the drift series that I found the skull. Just the tip of it was visible in the cutting about three and one half feet below the surface.”[1514] Not long after this Mr. Belt died, and we are without further information in regard to the locality. It would seem, however, that the loess in which the skull occurred belongs to the latest in the lacustrine series, and consequently does not imply any very great antiquity for it.

OBSIDIAN SPEAR-HEAD

Found in the Lahontan sediments,—from a cut in Russell’s Lake Lahontan, monograph xi. of Powell’s U. S. Geological Survey, p. 247.

In 1882 Mr. W. J. McGee, of the U. S. Geological Survey, obtained from the upper lacustral clays of the basin of the ancient Lake Lahontan, where they are exposed in the walls of Walker River Cañon, a spear-head, made of obsidian, beautifully chipped, and perfectly resembling those found on the surface throughout the southwest. “It was discovered projecting point outwards from a vertical scarp of lacustral clays twenty-five feet below the top of the section, at a locality where there were no signs of recent disturbance.”[1515] This is said to have been “associated in such a manner with the bones of an elephant or mastodon as to leave no doubt of their having been buried at approximately the same time.” But we are also told that these lakes are of very recent date, and that they have “left the very latest of all the complete geological records to be observed in the Great Basin.”[1516] The fossil shells obtained from these deposits all belong to living species; while the mammalian remains, which have been found in only very limited numbers, and all, with a single exception, in the upper beds, “are the same as occur elsewhere in tertiary or quaternary strata.” Mr. McGee says: “If the obsidian implement ... was really in situ (as all appearances indicated), it must have been dropped in a shallow and quiet bay of the saline and alkaline Lake Lahontan, and gradually buried beneath its fine mechanical deposits and chemical precipitates.”[1517]

In Mr. Russell’s opinion, this single implement, although supported by no other finds of a similar character, is sufficient to prove that “man inhabited this continent during the last great rise of the former lake.” But if this last great rise occurred in recent times, the presence of the bones of tertiary mammals in the upper beds shows that great natural forces must have been in operation at that time to have washed these out of their original place of deposit. The principal organic remains found, we are told, are those of living shells, and the intermingling of these with the bones of tertiary mammals could scarcely have taken place in “shallow and quiet bays.” To the writer this discovery seems rather to prove that an Indian spear-head was in some manner washed down and buried in the clays of the Walker River Cañon than that man was the contemporary there of the tertiary or quaternary mammalia. This fairly seems to be a case where, in the language of Dr. Brinton, “Archæology may at times correct Geology.”[1518]

It is almost paralleled by the discovery made by Mr. P. A. Scott, in Kansas, of a broken knife or lance-head, measuring in its present condition two inches and one eighth in length. Sir Daniel Wilson, who reports it, says: “The spot where the discovery was made is in the Blue Range of the Rocky Mountains, in an alluvial bottom, and distant several hundred feet from a small stream called Clear Creek. A shaft was sunk, passing through four feet of rich, black soil, and below this through upward of ten feet of gravel, reddish clay, and rounded quartz. Here the flint was found.... The actual object corresponds more to the small and slighter productions of the modern Indian tool-maker than to the rude and massive drift implement.” But this most careful and conscientious observer goes on to remark, “Under any circumstances it would be rash to build up comprehensive theories on a solitary case like this.”[1519]

If the discovery by Mr. McGee of this spear-head be insisted upon as establishing that man inhabited this continent during the last great rise of the lake, it would be easier to believe that that event occurred in recent and not in quaternary times, than to admit that the distinction between palæolithic and neolithic implements, established by so many discoveries in this country and in Europe, is thereby utterly overthrown.

The only alternative left is to believe that neolithic man was the contemporary of the tertiary mammals. To this conclusion we are asked to come by Professor Josiah D. Whitney, on account of the discovery of the remains of man and of his works in the auriferous gravels of California. The famous “Calaveras skull” is figured upon another page of this volume, where the circumstances attending its discovery are briefly referred to.[1520] It is astonishing to see how frail is the foundation upon which such a surprising superstructure has been raised, as it is found set forth in detail in the section entitled Human remains and works of art of the gravel series, in the third chapter of Professor Whitney’s memoir on The auriferous gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California.[1521] All is hearsay testimony, and entirely uncontrolled by any such careful scrutiny as marks the work of the British Association in the explorations carried on for fifteen years at Kent’s Hole, near Torquay. There can be no question that human bones and human implements have often been discovered in these gravels, but according to the accounts as given these are mingled in them in inextricable confusion. What is the character of these objects of human workmanship? So far are they from being, as Professor Whitney describes them, “always the same kind of implements, ... namely, the coarsest and the least finished which one would suppose could be made and still be implements.” One account speaks of “a spear or lance head of obsidian, five inches long and one and a half broad, quite regularly formed.” Others mention “spear and arrow heads made of obsidian;” or “certain discoidal stones from three to four inches in diameter, and about an inch and a half thick, concave on both sides, with perforated centre.” Still another witness speaks of “a large stone bead, made perhaps of alabaster, about one and a half inches long and about one and one fourth inches in diameter, with a hole through it one fourth of an inch in size.” We are also told of a “stone hatchet of a triangular shape, with a hole through it for a handle, near the middle. Its size was four inches across the edge, and length about six inches.” So also oval stones with continuous “grooves cut around them,” and “grooved oval disks,” are more than once mentioned. We think these quotations will be sufficient to convince the archæologist that here is no question of palæolithic implements, but that we have to do simply with the common Indian objects found on the surface all over our country. Besides the rude cuts in Bancroft,[1522] I know of only one example of these California discoveries which has been figured. This is the “beautiful relic” described by Mr. J. W. Foster, of which he says: “When we consider its symmetry of form ... and the delicate drilling of the hole through a material so liable to fracture, we are free to say it affords an exhibition of the lapidary’s skill superior to anything yet furnished by the Stone age of either continent.”[1523] Mr. Foster doubtfully suggests that this object was “used as a plummet for the purpose of determining the perpendicular to the horizon.” It has been shown, however, by Mr. W. H. Henshaw, that among the Indians of Southern California similar objects have long been used by their medicine-men as “medicine or sorcery stones.”[1524] Whichever may be held to be the true explanation of its use, either is more likely to be a characteristic of the Indian race than of primitive man.

But the objects whose presence in the gravels is most repeatedly spoken of are stone mortars, which Professor Whitney supposes were “used by the race inhabiting this region in prehistoric times ... for providing food.” One of these is stated to have been “found standing upright, and the pestle was in it, in its proper place, apparently just as it had been left by the owner.” It was taken out of a shaft, according to the testimony, twelve feet underneath undisturbed strata. This was certainly a very marvellous thing to have happened if all the objects found in the gravels are supposed to have been brought there by the action of floods of water. But it is a very simple matter, if the supposition of Mr. Southall be correct, who thinks that “these mortars have been left in these positions by the ancient inhabitants in their search for gold.”[1525] The Spaniards found gold in abundance in Mexico, and the locality from which it came is believed by Mr. Southall to be indicated by a discovery made in 1849 by some gold-diggers at one of the mountain diggings called Murphy’s, in the region in which Professor Whitney’s discoveries have taken place. In examining a high barren district of mountain, they were surprised to come upon the abandoned site of an ancient mine. At the bottom of a shaft two hundred and ten feet deep a human skeleton was found, with an altar for worship and other evidences of ancient labor by the aborigines.[1526] Mr. Southall believes that these mortars were used “for crushing the cemented gravel of the auriferous beds.” Some corroboration is afforded for this suggestion by the fact that stone mortars of a like character are found in the ancient gold mines, worked by the early Egyptian monarchs, in the Gebel Allakee Mountains near the Red Sea, which were used in pulverizing the gold-bearing quartz.

As to the authenticity of the “Calaveras skull,”

“Great contest followed and much learned dust.”

The probabilities seem in favor of its being a genuine human fossil, and the question recurs as to its character and the presumable age of the deposits from which it came. The latest geologist who has studied the locality, so far as the writer is aware, says of these deposits: “Even before visiting California I had suspected these old river gravels might be contemporaneous with the glacial epoch, and I still think this possible. This area was not glaciated, and these old gravels, hundreds of feet in thickness, may very well represent that great interval of time occupied in other regions by the glacial periods.”[1527] In discussing this question from the point of view of the character of the fossil animal remains contained in the gravels, we must continually bear in mind what Professor E. D. Cope says of the Mesozoic and Cænozoic of North America: “The faunæ of these periods have not yet been discriminated.... Many questions of the exact contemporaneity of these different beds are as yet unsettled.”[1528] Professor Cope has previously pointed out how marked a difference there is between the quaternary fauna of North America and that of Europe; we have no Hippopotamus or Rhinoceros Tichorinus, and they no Megatherium, Megalonyx, and other species. Under the varying conditions of animal existence thus implied, to assail established ideas upon the sequence in man’s development, or to maintain that he has had a long career on the Pacific slope of our continent before he had made his appearance in Western Europe, seems to the writer to be an attempt to explain “ignotum per ignotius.”

What is really to be understood by the assumption that man existed in tertiary times? So profound a palæontologist as Professor William Boyd Dawkins thinks “it is impossible to believe that man should have been an exception to the law of change. In the Pliocene age we cannot expect to find traces of man upon the earth. The living placental mammals had only then begun to appear, and seeing that the higher animals have invariably appeared in the rocks according to their place in the zoölogical scale, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, placental mammals, it is hardly reasonable to suppose that the highest of all should then have been upon the earth.”[1529] When, therefore, some of the geologists of our country support Professor Whitney’s claim that these discoveries of human fossils have actually proved man’s existence in the Pliocene period, by arguments mainly based upon the effects of erosion and the immense periods of time which these imply, or favor his inference from the animal fossils contained in these deposits that there has been “a total change in the fauna and flora of the region,” and that “the fauna of the gravel deposits is almost exclusively made 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.

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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).

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.

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]

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

The early attempts to disclose the ethnological relations of the moundbuilders on cranial evidence were embarrassed by the fewness of the skulls then known. Morton (Crania Americana) called the four examined by him identical with those of the red Indian.[1743] At present, considerable numbers are available; but still Wilson (Prehistoric Man, ii. 128) holds that “we lack sufficient data,” and in the consideration of them sufficient care has not always been taken to distinguish intrusive burials of a later date.[1744]

J. W. Foster (Prehist. Races, ch. 8; Amer. Assoc. Adv. Sci. Trans., 1872; and Amer. Naturalist, vi. 738) held to a lower type of skull, on this evidence, than Wilson (Prehist. Man, ii. ch. 20) contended for. There are examples of the wide difference of views (MacLean, 142), when some, like Morgan, connect them with the Pueblo skulls (No. Amer. Rev., cix., Oct., 1869), and others, like Morton, Winchell, Wilson, Brasseur, and Foster, find their correspondences in those of Mexico and Peru.[1745] Putnam, whose experience with mound skulls is greatest of all, holds to the southern short head and the northern long head (Rept. 1888). Probably we have no better enumeration of the variety of objects and relics found in the mounds, though much has since been added to the collection, than in Rau’s Catalogue of the Archæological Collection of the National Museum (Washington, 1876).[1746] Unfortunately he shows little or no discrimination between discoveries in the mounds and those of the surface. The interest in such collections has naturally brought prominently to the attention of every student of such collections the tricks of fraudulent imitators, and there are several well-known instances of protracted controversies on the genuineness of certain relics.[1747]

There remains in this survey of the literature of the mounds in all their varieties, to go over it, finally, in relation to their geographical distribution:[1748]—

New England is almost destitute of these antiquities. The one that has attracted some attention is what is described as a fortification in Sanbornton, in New Hampshire, which when found was faced with stone externally, and the walls were six feet thick and breast-high, when described about one hundred and fifteen years ago. There is a plan of it, with a descriptive account, preserved in the library of the American Antiq. Society,[1749] and another plan and description in M. T. Runnels’s Hist. of Sanbornton (Boston, 1882), i. ch. 4. Squier also figured it.

CINCINNATI TABLET.

After a cut in Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, i. 274, engraved from a rubbing taken from the original. Wilson adds: “Mr. Whittlesey has included this tablet among his Archæological Frauds; but the result of inquiries made by me has removed from my mind any doubt of its genuineness.” Cf. other cuts in M. C. Read, Archæol. of Ohio (1888); Squier and Davis, fig. 195; Short, p. 45; MacLean, 107; and Second Rept. Bur. of Ethnol., pp. 133-34.

As we move westward, the mounds begin to be numerous in the State of New York, and particularly in the western part of it. One of the earliest descriptions of them, after that of the missionary Kirkland (about 1788), is in the “Journal of the Rev. John Taylor while on a mission through the Mohawk and Black River Country in 1802,” which was first printed, with plans of the works examined, in the Documentary Hist. New York (vol. iii. quarto ed.). In 1818 DeWitt Clinton published at Albany his Memoir on the Antiquities of the western part of New York, in which he attributes their origin to the Scandinavians.[1750] They were again described in David Thomas’s Travels through the western country in 1816 (Auburn, 1819). There is not much else to note for twenty-five years. In 1845, Schoolcraft made to the N. Y. Senate his Report on the Census of the Iroquois Indians (Albany and N. Y., 1846, 1847, 1848), which is better known, perhaps, in the trade edition, Notes on the Iroquois; or Contributions to the Statistics, Aboriginal History, Antiquities and General Ethnology of Western New York (N. Y. 1846). In 1850, the Third Report of the Regents of the University of the State of N. Y. contains F. B. Hough’s paper on the earthwork enclosures in the State, with cuts. The same year (1850) came the essential authority on the New York mounds, E. G. Squier’s Aboriginal Monuments of the State of N. Y., comprising the results of original surveys and explorations, with an illustrative appendix (Washington, 1850), which the next year made part of the second volume of the Smithsonian Contributions.[1751] He enumerates in New York about 250 defensive structures, beside burial mounds and in his appendix describes those in New Hampshire and some in Pennsylvania.[1752] Some new explorations of the New York mounds were made in 1859 by T. Apoleon Cheney, who describes them, giving plans and cuts, in the Thirteenth Report of the Regents of the University.[1753]

ANCIENT WORKS ON THE MUSKINGUM.

Reduced from an early engraving in T. M. Harris’s Journal of a Tour into the territory northwest of the Alleghany, 1803 (Boston, 1805). Harris’s plan in relation to the new town of Marietta is given in Vol. VII. p. 540. To follow down the plans chronologically, we find that of Winthrop Sargent, communicated to the Amer. Academy in 1787, reproduced in their Memoirs, new ser. v. part i. The Columbian Mag., May, 1787, vol. i. 425, and the N. Y. Mag. (1791) had plans. One was in Schultz’s Travels (1807), 146. Atwater, of course, gave one in 1820. A survey by S. Dewitt, 1822, is in Josiah Priest’s Amer. Antiquities, 3d ed., Albany, 1833. Others are in the Amer. Pioneer, Oct., 1842, June 1843, and in S. P. Hildreth’s Pioneer History, 212 (Jan., 1843). Whittlesey made the survey in Squier and Davis (who also give a colored view), and it is reduced in Foster. Cf. also Amer. Antiquarian, Jan., 1880; Mag. Amer. Hist., 1885, p. 547; Henry A. Shepard’s Antiquities of Ohio (Cinn., 1887); Nadaillac’s L’Amérique préhistorique, 105, and Les prem. Hommes, ii. 33.

It was, however, in Ohio that the interest in these mounds was first incited, and that the more thorough exploration has been made.[1754] The earliest pioneers reported upon them. Cutler described them in 1789 in a letter to Jeremy Belknap.[1755] Benj. S. Barton described a mound at Cincinnati in 1799.[1756] Dr. Harris in 1805 was seemingly the earliest traveller to note them in Journal of a Tour, where he gives one of the earliest engravings. A plan of those at Circleville, with description by J. Kilbourne, is given in the Ohio Gazetteer (Columbus, 1817). Caleb Atwater, in 1820, was more familiar with them than with others of his broader field. Warden in his Recherches noted the early describers. Gen. Harrison discussed the mounds in his Discourse on the Aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio (Cincinnati, 1838). Squier and Davis, of course, brought them within their range,[1757] and Col. Whittlesey supplemented their work in the third volume of the Smithsonian Contributions. Whittlesey and Matthew C. Read contributed the Report on the Archæology of Ohio, which forms the second portion of the Final Report of the Ohio State Board of Centennial Managers (Columbus, 1877), and in it is a list of the ancient enclosures, which is not, as Short says (p. 82), as complete as it should be. A survey of the mounds was made by E. B. Andrews, and published in the Peabody Mus. Repts. (no. x.), 1877. The Ohio State Archæological and Historical Society started in June, 1887, the Ohio archæological and historical Quarterly, which has vigorously entered the field, and in it (March, 1888) G. F. Wright has reported on the present condition of the mounds. M. C. Read’s Archæology of Ohio (Cleveland, 1888) was published by the Western Reserve Historical Society, whose series of Tracts is of importance for the study of the mounds.[1758] Henry A. Shepard’s Antiquities of the State of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1887) summarizes the discoveries to date.[1759] Thomas (Fifth Rept. Bur. Ethnol.) claims that the Ohio mounds were built by Indians, but not by the Indians, nor by the ancestors of them, who inhabited this region at the coming of the whites; but by an Indian race driven south, of whom he finds the modern representatives in the Cherokees.

From E. G. Squier’s Aboriginal Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (N. Y., 1847), taken from Amer. Ethnol. Soc. Trans., ii. The letters A, B, C, etc. mark the ancient works. Enclosures are shown by broken lines. The mounds are designated by small dots. Some of the best maps which we have showing the geographical positions of groups of mounds accompany Thomas’s paper in the Fifth Rept., Bur. Ethnol.

The works at Marietta, on the Muskingum River, were the earliest observed. Taking the southern and southeastern counties, there are no very conspicuous examples elsewhere, though the region is well dotted with earthworks.[1760] Those at Cincinnati were, after those at Marietta, the earliest to be noticed.[1761] The adjacent Little Miami Valley is the region which Professor Putnam and Dr. Metz have been of late so successfully working.[1762]

THE WORKS AT NEWARK, OHIO.

After a cut in Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, i. 269, made from surveys “executed while the chief earthworks could still be traced in all their integrity;” and they “illustrate rites and customs of an ancient American people, without a parallel among the monumental memorials of the old world.” Cf. Atwater, Warden, Squier and Davis, and MacLean.

Of all the works in the central portions of Ohio, and indeed of all in any region, those at Newark, in Licking County, are the most extensive, and have been often described.[1763] In the east[1764] and west[1765] there are other of these earthworks; but those in the north have been particularly examined by Col. Whittlesey and others.[1766] The enclosure called Fort Azatlan, at Merom on the Wabash River, is the most noticeable in Indiana.[1767] In Illinois, the great Cahokia truncated pyramid, 700 feet long by 500 wide and 90 high, is the most important.[1768]

Henry Gillman, of Detroit, has been the leading writer on the mounds of Michigan.[1769] The supposed connection of their builders with the ancient copper mines of Lake Superior is considered in another place. Thomas (Fifth Rept., Bur. Ethnol.) contends that much of the copper found in the mounds was of European make, and had no relation to any aboriginal mining.

Wisconsin is the central region of what are known as the animal, effigy, symbolic, or emblematic mounds. Mention has been made elsewhere of the earliest notices of this kind of earthwork. The most extensive examination of them is the Antiquities of Wisconsin as surveyed and described by I. A. Lapham (Washington, 1855), with a map showing the sites.[1770] The consideration of these effigy mounds has given rise to various theories regarding their significance, whether as symbols or to totems.[1771] It is Thomas’s conclusion that the effigy mounds and the burial mounds of Wisconsin were the work of the same people (Fifth Rept., Bur. Ethnol.).

The existence of what is called an elephant or mastodon mound in Grant County has been sometimes taken to point to the age of those extinct animals as that of the erection of the mounds.[1772] Putnam, referring to the confined area in which these effigy mounds are found, says that the serpent mound, the alligator mound,[1773] and Whittlesey’s effigy mound in Ohio, and two bird mounds in Georgia,[1774] are the only other works in North America to which they are at all comparable.[1775]

When Lewis and Clark explored the Missouri River in 1804-6, they discovered mounds in different parts of its valley; but their statements were not altogether confirmed till the parties of the United States surveyors traversed the region after the civil war, as is particularly shown in Hayden’s Geological Survey, 6th Rept., in 1872. Within the present State of Missouri the mounds which have attracted most notice are those near the modern St. Louis.[1776] In Iowa (Clayton County) there is said to be the largest group of effigy mounds west of the Mississippi.[1777] The mounds of Iowa and the neighboring region are also discussed by Thomas in the Fifth Rept. Bur. Ethnol. O. H. Kelley has reported on the remains of an ancient town in Minnesota.[1778] In Kansas there is little noticeable,[1779] and there is not much to record in Dacotah,[1780] Utah,[1781] California,[1782] and Montana.[1783] We find scant accounts of the mounds in Oregon and Washington in the narrative of the Wilkes Exploring Expedition and in the earlier story of Lewis and Clark. Some of the mounds are of doubtful artificiality.[1784]

Along the lower portion of the Mississippi, but not within three hundred miles of its mouth, we find in Louisiana other mound constructions, but not of unusual significance.[1785]

The first effigy mound, a bear, which was observed south of the Ohio, is near an old earthwork in Greenup County, Kentucky.[1786] The mounds of this State early attracted notice.[1787] Bishop Madison[1788] thought them sepulchral rather than military. In the Western Review (Dec., 1819) one was described near Lexington. Rafinesque added a not very sane account of them to Marshall’s History of Kentucky, in 1824, which was also published separately, and since then all the general histories of Kentucky have given some attention to these antiquities.[1789]

In Tennessee we find in connection with the earthworks the stone graves, which the explorations of Putnam, about ten years ago, brought into prominence.[1790] The chief student of the aboriginal mounds in Georgia has been Col. C. C. Jones, Jr., who has been writing on the subject for nearly forty years.[1791] The mounds in the State of Mississippi, as including the region of the Natchez Indians, derive some added interest because of the connection sometimes supposed to exist between them and the race of the mounds.[1792] The same characteristics of the mounds extend into Alabama.[1793] The mounds in Florida attracted the early notice of John and William Bartram, and are described by them in their Travels, and have been dwelt upon by later writers.[1794] The seaboard above Georgia has not much of interest.[1795] Concerning the mounds along the Canadian belt there is hardly more to be said.[1796]

Lubbock classes the signs of successive periods in North America thus: original barbarism, mounds, garden beds, and then the relapse into barbarism of the red Indian. The agricultural age thus follows that of the mound erection, in his view, though, as Putnam says, there seems enough evidence that the constructors of the old earthworks were an agricultural race.[1797]

There is another class of relics which, outside the hieroglyphics of Central America, has as yet had little comprehensive study, though the general books on American archæology enumerate some of the inscriptions on rocks, which are so widely scattered throughout the continent.[1798]

Out of all this discussion has risen the new science of Anthropology, broad enough in its scope to include not only archæology in its general acceptation, but to sweep into its range of observation various aspects of ethnology and of geology. It is a new science as at present formulated; but under other conditions it is traced from its origin with the ancients in a paper by T. Bendyshe in the Memoirs of the Anthropological Society of London (vol. i. 335). Its progress in America is treated by O. T. Mason in the American Naturalist (xiv. 348; xv. 616). The most approved methods of modern research are explained in Emil Schmidt’s Anthropologische Methoden; Anleitung zum beobachten und sammeln für Laboratorium und Reise (Leipzig, 1888). “The methods of archæological investigation are as trustworthy as those of any natural science,” says Lubbock (Scientific Lectures, 139). Beside the publications of the various Archæological, Anthropological, and Ethnological Societies and Congresses[1799] of both hemispheres, we find for Europe a considerable centre of information in the Materiaux pour l’histoire primitive et naturelle (philosophique) de l’homme,[1800] and for America in the publications of the Smithsonian Institution,[1801] in the Comptes rendus of the successive Congresses of Américanistes, and in such periodicals as the American Antiquarian, the American Anthropologist, and the Folk Lore Journal.

MAJOR POWELL.

The broad subject of prehistoric archæology is covered in a paper by Lubbock, which is included in his Scientific Lectures (Lond., 1879);[1802] in H. M. Westropp’s Prehistoric Phases, or Introductory Essays on Prehistoric Archæology (Lond., 1872); in Stevens’s Flint Chips (1870); by Dr. Brinton in the Iconographic Encyclopædia, vol. ii.; and more popularly in Charles F. Keary’s Dawn of History, an introd. to prehistoric study (N. Y., 1879), and in Davenport Adams’s Beneath the Surface, or the Underground World.

The French have contributed a corresponding literature in Louis Figuier’s L’Homme Primitif (Paris, 1870);[1803] in Zaborowski’s L’homme préhistorique (Paris, 1878); and in the Marquis de Nadaillac’s Les premiers hommes et les temps préhistoriques (Paris, 1881), and his Mœurs et monuments des peuples préhistoriques (Paris, 1888), not to mention others.[1804]

The principal comprehensive works covering the prehistoric period in North America, are J. T. Short’s North Americans of Antiquity (N. Y., 1879, and later); the L’Amérique préhistorique of Nadaillac (Paris, 1883);[1805] Foster’s Prehistoric Races of the United States (Chicago, 1873; 6th ed., 1887); and the compact popular Ancient America (N. Y., 1871) of John D. Baldwin. Beside Bancroft’s Native Races, there are various treatises of confined nominal scope, but covering in some degree the whole North American field, which are noted in other pages.[1806]

The purely ethnological aspects of the American side of the subject are summarily surveyed in A. H. Keane’s “Ethnology of America,” appended to Stanford’s Compendium of Geography, Cent. America, etc. (London, 2nd ed., 1882), and there are papers on Ethnographical Collections in the Smithsonian Report (1862).[1807] The great repository of material, however, is in the Contributions to North American Ethnology, being a section of Major Powell’s Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, and in the Annual Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology since 1879, made under Major Powell’s directions, and in the Reports of the Peabody Museum.[1808]

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APPENDIX.

[I.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ABORIGINAL AMERICA.

By the Editor.

The student will find a general survey of “Les Sources de l’histoire anté-Colombienne du nouveau monde, par Léon de Rosny,” in the Revue Orientale et Américaine (Mém. de la soc. d’ethnographie) session de 1877 (p. 139). Bancroft in his Native Races (v. 136) makes a similar grouping of the classes of sources relating to the primitive Americans.[1809] These classes are defined in Daniel G. Brinton’s Review of the data for the study of the prehistoric chronology of America (Salem, 1887), from the Proceedings of the Amer. Asso. for the Advancement of Science (vol. xxxvi.), as conveniently divided into groups pertaining to legendary, monumental, industrial, linguistic, physical, and geological phenomena.

There have been given in the Introduction of the present volume the titles of general bibliographies of American histories, most of which include more or less of the titles pertaining to aboriginal times. It is the purpose of the present brief essay to enumerate, in an approximately chronological order, the titles of some of those and of others which are useful to the archæologist. So far as they are of service to the student of the American languages, an extended list will be found prefixed to Pilling’s Proof-Sheets (p. xi).

The earliest American bibliography was that of Antonio de Leon, usually called Pinelo,—Epitome de la Biblioteca oriental y occidental náutica y Geográfica (Madrid, 1629),—but which is usually found in the edition of Gonzales de Barcía, “Añadido y enmendado nuevamente” (Paris, 1737-1738), in which the American titles, including numerous manuscripts, are given in the second volume.[1810]

The Bibliotheca Hispana Nova of Nicolás Antonio was first published at Rome in 1672, but in a second edition at Madrid in 1783-88.[1811]

Passing by the Bibliotheca Mexicana of Eguiara y Eguren,[1812] and the early edition of Beristain, we note the new edition of the latter, prepared not by Juan Evangelista Guadalajara, as Brasseur notes,[1813] but by another, as the title shows,—Biblioteca Hispano-Americana Septentrional, ó catalogo y noticia de los Literatos que ó nacidos, ó educados, ó florecientes en la America Septentrional Española, han dado á luz algun escrito ó lo han dexado preparado para la prensa por José Mariano Beristain y Martin de Souza. Segunda edicion, por Fortino Hipólito Vera (Amecameca, 1883).

Dr. Robertson intimates that the lists of books which writers of the seventeenth century had been in the habit of prefixing to their books as evidence of their industry had come to be regarded as an ostentatious expression of their learning, and with some hesitancy he counted out to the reader his 717 titles; but Clavigero, as elsewhere pointed out,[1814] was richer in such resources. Humboldt, in his Vues,[1815] gives a list of the authors which he cites.

The class of dealers’ catalogues—we cite only such as have decided bibliographical value—begins to be conspicuous in Paul Trömel’s Bibliothèque Américaine (Leipzig, 1861), the best of the German ones, and in Charles Leclerc’s Bibliotheca Americana (Paris, 1867), much improved in his Bibliotheca Americana. Histoire, géographie, voyages, archéologie et linguistique des deux Amériques et des îles Philippines (Paris, 1878), with later supplements, constituting the best of the French catalogues, provided with an excellent index and a linguistic table, rendered necessary by the classified plan of the list.

The list formed by students in this field begins with the Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima of Harrisse (New York, 1866; additions, Paris, 1872), and includes the Bibliothèque Mexico-Guatémalienne, précédée d’un coup d’œil sur les études américaines dans leurs rapports avec les études classiques, et suivie du tableau, par ordre alphabétique, des ouvrages de linguistique Américaine contenus dans le même volume (Paris, 1871) of the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who at that time had been twenty-five years engaged in the studies and travels which led to the gathering of his collection. The library, almost entire, was later joined to that of Alphonse L. Pinart, and was included in the latter’s Catalogue de livres rares et précieux, manuscrits et imprimés (Paris, 1883).

In 1866, Icazbalceta published at Mexico his Apuntes para un Catálogo de Escritores en lenguas indígenas de América,[1816] but of his great bibliographical work only one volume has as yet appeared: Bibliografía Américana del Siglo xvi. Primera parte. Catálogo razonado de libros impresos en México de 1539 à 1600, con biografías de autores y otras ilustraciones, precedido de una noticia acerca de la introducción de la imprenta en México (México, 1886).

Bandelier has embodied some of the results of his study in his “Notes on the Bibliography of Yucatan and Central America,” in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., n. s., i. pp. 82-118.

The catalogues of collections having special reference to aboriginal America are the following:—

Catalogue de la Bibliothèque de José Maria Andrade, 7,000 pièces et volumes, ayant rapport au Méxique ou imprimés dans ce pays (Leipzig, 1869).[1817]

Bibliotheca Mejicana: Books and manuscripts almost wholly relating to the history and literature of North and South America, particularly Mexico (London, 1869). This collection was formed by Augustin Fischer, chaplain to the Emperor Maximilian; but there were added to the catalogue some titles from the collection of Dr. C. H. Berendt.

Catalogue of the library of E. G. Squier, edited by Joseph Sabin (N. Y., 1876).

Bibliotheca Mexicana, or A Catalogue of the library of the rare books and important MSS. relating to Mexico and other parts of Spanish America, formed by the late Señor Don José Fernando Ramirez (London, 1880). This catalogue was edited by the Abbé Fischer.[1818]

The most useful guides to the literature of aboriginal America, however, are some compiled in this country. First, the comprehensive though not yet complete bibliography, Joseph Sabin’s Dictionary of books relating to America, now being continued since Sabin’s death, and with much skill, by Wilberforce Eames. Second, the voluminous Proof-sheets of a Bibliography of the languages of the North American Indians (Washington, 1885), prepared by James Constantine Pilling, tentatively, in a large quarto volume, distributed only to collaborators, and out of which, with emendations and additions, he is now publishing special sections of it, of which have already appeared those relating to the Eskimo and Siouan tongues. His enumeration so much exceeds the range of purely linguistic monographs that the treatises become in effect general bibliographies of aboriginal America.

Third, An Essay towards an Indian bibliography, being a Catalogue of books relating to the history, antiquities, languages, customs, religion, wars, literature and origin of the American Indians, in the library of Thos. W. Field, with bibliographical and historical notes and synopses of the contents of some of the works least known (N. Y., 1873). The sale of Mr. Field’s library took place in New York, May, 1875, from a Catalogue not so elaborate, but still of use. These books are not so accurately compiled as to be wholly trustworthy as final resorts.

Finally, the list prefixed to Bancroft’s Native Races, vol. i., and the references of his foot-notes, throughout his five volumes (condensed often in Short’s North Americans of Antiquity), are on the whole the most serviceable aids to the general student, but unfortunately the index of the set is of no use in searching for bibliographical detail.

The reader will remember that the bibliographies of sectional or partial import in the field of American archæology are referred to elsewhere in the present volume.

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[II.]

THE COMPREHENSIVE TREATISES ON AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES.

By the Editor.

At the time when Bancroft published his Native Races (1875), he referred to John D. Baldwin’s Ancient America (N. Y., 1871) as the only preceding, comprehensive book on America before the Spaniards.[1819] It still remains a convenient book of small compass; but its absence of references to sources precludes its usefulness for purposes of study, and it is not altogether abreast of the latest views. To the popular element a moderate share of the indexical character, rendering the book passably serviceable to the average reader, has been added in the somewhat larger North Americans of Antiquity, their origin, migrations, and type of civilization considered, by John T. Short (N. Y., 1880,—somewhat improved in later editions), though it will be observed that the Peruvian and other South American antiquities have not come within his plan. The latest of these comprehensive books is the Marquis de Nadaillac’s (Jean F. A. du Pouget’s) L’Amérique préhistorique (Paris, 1883), which in an English version by N. D’Anvers was published with the author’s sanction in London in 1882. With revision and some modifications by W. H. Dall, which have not met the author’s sanction, it was republished as Prehistoric America (N. Y., 1884). It is a work of more theoretical tendency than the student wishes to find at the opening stage of his inquiry.

But as a compend of every department of archæological knowledge up to about fifteen years ago no advance has yet been made upon Bancroft’s Native Races as indicative of every channel of investigation which the student can pursue. Upon the monuments of the moundbuilders (iv. ch. 13) and the antiquities of Peru (iv. ch. 14) the treatment is condensed and without references, as occupying a field beyond his primary purpose of covering the Pacific slope of North America and the immediately adjacent regions. Mention is made elsewhere of Bancroft’s methods of compilation, and it may suffice to say that in the five volumes of his Native Races he has drawn and condensed his matter from the writings of about 1200 writers, whose titles he gives in a preliminary list.[1820] The method of arranging the departments of the work is perhaps too far geographical to be always satisfactory to the special student,[1821] and he seems to be aware of it (for instance, i. ch. 2); but it may be questioned if, while writing with, or engrafting upon, an encyclopædic system, what might pass for a continuous narrative, any more scientific plan would have been more successful. Bancroft’s opinions are not always as satisfactory as his material. The student who uses the Native Races for its groups and references will accordingly find a complemental service in Sir Daniel Wilson’s Prehistoric Man (London, 1876), in which the Toronto professor conducts his “researches into the origin of civilization in the old and the new world,” by primarily treating of the early American man, as the readiest way of understanding early man in Europe. His system is to connect man’s development topically in the directions induced by his habits, industries, dwellings, art, records, migrations, and physical characterizations.

Another and older book, in some respects embodying like purposes, and though produced at a time when archæological studies were much less advanced than at present, is Alexander W. Bradford’s American Antiquities and researches into the origin and history of the red race (N. Y., 1841).[1822] The first section of the book is strictly a record of results; but in the final portion the author indulges more in speculative inquiry. Even in this he has not transcended the bounds of legitimate hypothesis, though some of his postulates will hardly be accepted nowadays, as when he contends that the red Indians are the degraded descendants of the people who were connected with the so-called civilization of Central America.[1823]

The periodical literature of a comprehensive sort is not so extensive as treatments of special aspects; but the student will find Poole’s Index and Rhee’s Catalogue and Index of the Smithsonian publications serviceable.

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[III.]

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE INDUSTRIES AND TRADE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES.

By the Editor.

While we have a moderate list of works on the general subject of prehistoric art and industries,[1824] we lack any comprehensive survey of the subject as respects the American continent, and must depend on sectional and local treatment. Humboldt in the introduction to his Atlas of his Essai politique (Paris, 1813) was among the earliest to grasp the material which illustrates the origin and first progress of the arts in America. The arts of the southern regions and western coasts of North America are best followed in those portions of the chapters on the Wild Tribes, devoted to the subject, which make up the first volume of Bancroft’s Native Races,[1825] and for Mexican and Maya productions some chapters (ch. 15, 24) in the second volume. Prescott’s treatment of the more advanced peoples of this region is scant (Mexico, i., introd., ch. 5). The art in stone of the Pueblo Indians is beautifully illustrated in Putnam’s portion of Wheeler’s Report of his survey, and comparison may be made with Hayden’s Annual Rept. (1876) of the U. S. Geol. and Geographical Survey. The work of Putnam and his collaborators in the archæological volume (vii.) of Wheeler’s Survey is probably the most complete account of the implements, ornaments and utensils of any one people (those of Southern California) yet produced; and its illustrations have not been surpassed. Passing north, we shall get some help from E. L. Berthoud’s paper on the “Prehistoric human art from Wyoming and Colorado,” in his “Journal of a reconnaissance in Creek Valley, Col.,” published by the Colorado Acad. of Nat. Sciences (Proceedings, 1872, p. 46). In the Pacific Rail Road Reports (vol. iii. in 1856) there is a paper by Thomas Ewbank in “Illustrations of Indian antiquities and arts.” S. S. Haldeman has described the relics of human industry found in a rock shelter in southeastern Pennsylvania (Compte Rendu, Cong. des Amér., Luxembourg, ii. 319; and Transactions Amer. Philos. Soc., 1878). The best of all the more comprehensive monographs is Charles C. Abbott’s Primitive industry: or illustrations of the handiwork, in stone, bone and clay, of the native races of the Northern Atlantic seaboard of America (Salem, 1881). Morgan’s League of the Iroquois touches in some measure of the arts of that confederacy, his earliest study being in the Fifth Report of the Regents of the State of New York (1852).

For the Canada regions, the Annual Reports of the Canadian Institute, appended to the Reports of the Minister of Education, Ontario, contain accounts of the discovery of objects of stone, horn, and shell. (See particularly the sessions of 1886-87.) Dawson in his Fossil men (ch. 6) considers what he accounts the lost arts of the primitive races of North America. On the other hand, Professor Leidy found still in use among the present Shoshones split pebbles resembling the rudest stone implements of the palæolithic period (U. S. Geological Survey, 1872, p. 652).

Many archæologists have remarked on the uniform character of many prehistoric implements, wherever found, as precluding their being held as ethnical evidences. The system of quarrying[1826] for flint best fitted for the tool-maker’s art has been observed by Wilson (Prehistoric man, i. 68) both in the old and new world, and in his third chapter (vol. i.) we have a treatise on the ancient stone-worker’s art.[1827]

Treating the subject topically, we find the late Charles Rau making some special studies of the implements used in native agriculture[1828] in the Smithsonian Reports for 1863, 1868, and 1869.[1829] The agriculture of the Aztecs and Mayas is treated in Max Steffen’s Die Landwirtschaft bei den altamerikanischen Kulturvölkern (Leipzig, 1883).[1830]

The working of flint or obsidian into arrowpoints or cutting implements is a process by pressure that has not been wholly lost. Old workshops, or the chips of them, have been discovered, and they are found in numerous localities (Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, i. 75, 79; Abbott’s Primitive Industry, and Putnam in the Bull. Essex Institute), but Powell in his Report of Explorations of the Colorado of the West (1873) does not, as Wilson says he does, describe the present ways.[1831]

Wilson (Prehistoric Man, i. ch. 4 and 7) in an essay on the bone and ivory workers substitutes for the corresponding words usually employed in classifying stone implements the terms palæotechnic and neotechnic, as indicating periods of progress, in order that the art of making tools in horn, bone, shell, and ivory might have a better recognition, as of equal importance with that of making such in stone. Separate treatises are few. Morgan has a paper on the bone implements of the Arickarees in the 21st Rept. of the Regents of the University of the State of N. Y. (1871), and Rau’s monograph on Prehistoric fishing in Europe and North America, one of the Smithsonian Contributions (1884), involves the making of fish-hooks of bone. See also Putnam in the Peabody Museum Reports, and in Wheeler’s Survey, vol. vii.; Wyman’s contributions on the shell heaps, and the Journal of the Cincinnati Soc. of Nat. Hist. for such as have been found in the ash-pits of Madisonville. On shell-work there is a section in Foster’s Prehistoric Races (p. 234); a paper by W. H. Holmes in the Second Rept. of the Bureau of Ethnology (p. 179); and one on American shell-work and its affinities by Miss Buckland in the Journal Anthropol. Inst., xvi. 155.

From the primitive materials of stone, bone, horn, or shell, we pass to metals; but as Wilson (i. p. 174) says, “if metal could be found capable of being wrought and fashioned without smelting or moulding, its use was perfectly compatible with the simple arts of the stone period, as a mere malleable stone;” and to the present day, he adds, the rude American race has no knowledge of working metal, except by pounding or grinding it cold.[1832] The story which Brereton tells in his account of Gosnold’s visit (1602) to New England, about the finding of abundant metal implements in use among the natives, is questioned (Baldwin’s Ancient America, p. 62). We have the evidences of the early mining[1833] of copper extending for over a hundred miles along the southern shores of Lake Superior and on Isle Royale, in the abandoned trenches and tools first discovered in 1847; and in one case there was found a mass of native copper (ten feet by three and two, and weighing over six tons) which had been elevated on a wooden frame prior to removal, and was discovered in this condition.[1834] There are also indications that the manufacture of copper tools was carried on in the neighborhood of the mines (Wilson, i. 213); and chemical tests have shown that a popular belief in the tempering of metal by these early peoples is without foundation.[1835]

It seems to be a fact that while in the use of metals an intermediate stage of pure copper, as coming between the use of bone and stone and the use of alloyed metals, was not until comparatively recently suspected in Great Britain, the “peculiar interest attaches to the metallurgy of the new world that there all the earlier stages are clearly defined: the pure native metal wrought by the hammer without the aid of fire; the melted and moulded copper; the alloyed bronze; and the smelting, soldering, graving, and other processes resulting from accumulating experience and matured skill” (Wilson, i. 230). It is in the regions extending from Mexico to Peru that the art of alloying introduces us to the American bronze age. Columbus in his fourth voyage found in a vessel which had come alongside from Yucatan crucibles to melt copper, as Herrera tells us; and Humboldt was among the earliest to discover tools alloyed of copper and tin, and many such alloys have since been recognized among Peruvian bronzes (Wilson, i. 239). In Mexico, metallurgic arts were carried perhaps even farther in casting and engraving, and not only the results but the evidences of their mining places have remained to our day (Ibid. i. 248). It seems evident, however, that experimenting with them had not carried them so near the perfect combination for tool-making (one part tin to nine parts copper) as the bronze people of Europe had reached, though they fell considerably short of the exact standard (Ibid. i. 234). Doubt has sometimes been expressed of Mexican mining for copper, as by Frederick von Hellwald (Compte Rendu, Cong. des Américanistes, 1877, i. 51); but Rau indicated the references[1836] to Short (p. 94), which forcibly led him to the conclusion that the Mexicans mined copper to turn into tools.[1837] Among the Mayas, Nadaillac (p. 269) contends that only copper and gold were in use. Bancroft (ii. 749) thinks the use of copper doubtful, and if used, that it must have been got from the north. He cites the evidences of the use of gold. William H. Holmes discusses The use of gold and other metals among the ancient inhabitants of Chiriqui, Isthmus of Darien (Washington, 1887). As to iron, that found in the Ohio mounds, only of late years, has been proved to be meteoric iron by Professor Putnam (Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Apr., 1883). Bancroft (i. 164) says iron was in use among the British Columbian tribes before contact with the whites, but it was probably derived through some indirect means from the whites. Though iron ore abounds in Peru, and the character of the Peruvian stone-cutting would seem to indicate its use, and though there is a native word for it, no iron implements have been found.[1838] There is not much recorded of the use of silver. It has been found by Putnam in the mounds in thin sheets, used as plating for other metals.[1839] He has also found native silver in masses, and in one case a small bit of hammered gold.

Wilson, in 1876, while regretting the dispersion of the William Bullock collection of pottery, the destruction of that formed by Stephens and Catherwood, and the transference to an English museum of most of the specimens gathered by Squier and Davis, lamented that no American collection[1840] had been yet formed adequate to the requirements of the students of American archæology and ethnology. Since that date, however, the collections in the National Museum (Smithsonian Institution) at Washington and in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge have largely grown; and especially for the fictile art and work in stone of Spanish North America the Museo Nacional in Mexico has assumed importance. The collection in the possession of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia,[1841] since transferred to the Philadelphia Academy, is also of value for the study of the pottery of middle America.

Rau has supplied a leading paper on American pottery in the Smithsonian Report, 1866; and E. A. Barber has touched the subject in papers at the Copenhagen, Luxembourg, and Madrid meetings of the Congrès des Américanistes, and in the American Antiquarian (viii. 76).[1842] W. H. Holmes has a paper on the origin and development of form and of ornament in ceramic art in the Fourth Report, Bureau of Ethnology, p. 437.

For local characters there are various monographs.[1843]

There is no satisfactory evidence that the potter’s wheel was known to any American tribe; but Wilson, in his chapter on ceramic art (Prehistoric Man, ii. ch. 16), feels convinced that the early potter employed some sort of mechanical process, giving a revolving motion to his clay.

MEXICAN CLAY MASK.

After a cut in Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, ii. p. 33, of an example in the collections of the American Philosophical Society, in a totally different style from the usual Mexican terra-cottas; and Wilson remarks of it that one will look in vain in it for the Indian physiognomy. Tyler, Anahuac, 230, considers it a forgery.

Modelling in clay for other purposes than the making of vessels is also considered in this same seventeenth chapter of Wilson, and the subject runs, as respects masks, figurines, and general ornamentation, into the wide range of aboriginal art, which necessarily makes part of all comprehensive histories of art. W. H. Dall has a paper on Indian masks in the Third Report, Bureau of Ethnology, p. 73. The subject is further treated by Wilson in a paper on “The artistic faculty in the aboriginal races,” in the Proceedings (iii., 2d part, 67, 119) of the Royal Society of Canada, and again in a general way by Nadaillac on L’art préhistorique en Amérique (Paris, 1883), taken from the Revue des deux Mondes, Nov. 1, 1883.[1844]

As regards the textile art in prehistoric times, see for a general view W. H. Holmes in the American Antiquarian, viii. 261; and the same archæologist has treated the subject on the evidences of the impression of textures as preserved in pottery, in the Third Rept. Bur. of Ethnology, p. 393. Cf. Sellers in Popular Science Journal, and Wyman in Peabody Museum Reports.

J. W. Foster first made (1838) the discovery of relics of textile fabrics of the moundbuilders; but he did not announce his discovery till at the Albany meeting (1851) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Transactions, 1852, vol. vi. p. 375). He tells the story in his Prehistoric Races, p. 222, and figures the implements, found in the mounds, supposed to be employed in the making their cloth with warp and woof. Putnam has since made similar discoveries (Peabody Museum Reports). The subject is also treated in the Proceedings of the Davenport Academy and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The fabrics were preserved by being placed in contact with copper implements.

The Indians of New Mexico were found by the Spaniards in possession of the art of weaving. Cf. Washington Matthews on the Navajo weavers, in the Third Rept. Bur. of Ethnology, p. 371, and Bancroft (i. 582), who also records the making of fabrics by the wild tribes of Central America (Ibid. i. 766-67). He also notes the references to the textile manufactures of the Nahuas and Mayas (ii. 484, 752). The richest accumulation of graphic data relative to the fabrics of Peru is contained in the great work on the Necropolis of Ancon.

Feather-work was an important industry in some parts of the continent. The subject is studied in Ferdinand Denis’ Arte plumaria: Les plumes, leur valeur et leur emploi dans les arts au Méxique, au Pérou, au Brésil et dans les Indes et dans l’Océanie (Paris, 1875).[1845]

Lewis H. Morgan’s Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines (Washington, 1881) is the completest study of the habitations of the early peoples; but it is written too exclusively in the light of universal communal custom, and this must be borne in mind in using it. The edifices of middle America and Peru have been given a bibliographical apparatus in another part of the present volume; but references may be made to Wilson’s Prehistoric Man (ii. ch. 16), Viollet le Duc’s Habitations of Man, translated by R. Bucknall (Boston, 1876), and to Bandelier’s Archæological Tour, 226, where he quotes as typical the description of a native house in 1583, drawn by Juan Bautista Pomar.

There is no good comprehensive account of American prehistoric trade. The T-shaped pieces of copper in use by the Mexicans came nearest to currency as we understand it, unless it be the wampum of the North American Indians, and the shell money in use on the Pacific coast; but it should be remembered that copper axes and copper plates served such a purpose with some tribes.[1846] The Peruvians used weights, but the Mexicans did not. The latter had, however, a system of measures of length.[1847] The canoe was a great intermediary in the practice of barter.[1848] The Peruvians alone understood the use of sails, and the earliest Spanish navigators on the Pacific were surprised at what they thought were civilized predecessors in those seas when they espied in the distance the large white sails of the Peruvian rafts of burden.[1849] The chief source of trade in such conditions was barter, and we know how the Mexican travelling merchants got information that was availed of by the Mexican marauders in their invasions. Bandelier[1850] gives us the references on the barter system, the traders, and the currency in that country, and we need to consult Dr. W. Behrnauer’s Essai sur le Commerce dans l’ancien Méxique et en Pérou, in the Archives de la Soc. Amér. de France (n. s., vol. i.).

All the treatises on the mounds of the Ohio Valley derive illustrations of intertribal traffic from the shells of the coast, the copper of Lake Superior, the mica of the Alleghanies, the obsidian of the Rocky Mountains or of Mexico, and the unique figurines which the explorations of the mounds have disclosed. Charles Rau has a paper on this aboriginal trade in North America, published in the Archiv für Anthroplogie (Braunschweig, 1872, vol. iv.), which was republished in English in the Smithsonian Report, 1872, p. 249. Bancroft’s references under “Commerce” (v. p. 668) will help the student out in various particulars.

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[IV.]

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON AMERICAN LINGUISTICS.

By the Editor.

It cannot be said that the study of American linguistics has advanced to a position wholly satisfactory. It is beset with all the difficulties belonging to a subject that has not been embraced in written records for long periods, and it is open to the hazards of articulation and hearing, acting without entire mutual confidence. And yet we may not dispute Max Müller’s belief,[1851] that it is the science of language which has given the first comprehensive impulse to the study of mankind.

Out of the twenty distinct sounds which it is said the voice of man can produce,[1852] there have been built up from roots and combinations a great diversity of vocabularies. Comparisons of these, as well as of the methods of forming sentences, have been much used in investigations of ethnical relations. Of these opposing methods, neither is sufficiently strong, it is probable, to be pressed without the aid of the other, though the belief of the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington, under the influence of Major Powell, practically discards all tests but the vocabulary, in tracing ethnological relations. It is held that this one test of words satisfies, as to customs, myths, and other ethnological traits, more demands of classifications than any other. Granted that it does, there are questions yet unsolvable by it; and many ethnologists hold that there are still other tests, physiological, for instance,[1853] which cannot safely be neglected in settling such complex questions. The favorite claim of the Bureau is that its officers are studying man as a human being, and not as an animal; but it is by no means sure that the physical qualities of man are so disconnected with his mind and soul as to be unnecessary to his interpretation. Even if language be given the chief place in such studies, there is still the doubt if the vocabulary can in all ways be safely followed to the exclusion of the structure of the language; and it is not to be forgotten, as Haven recognized thirty years ago, that “one of the greatest obstacles to a successful and satisfactory comparison of Indian vocabularies is caused by the capricious and ever-varying orthography applied by writers of different nations.” This is a chance of error that cannot be eliminated when we have to deal with lists of words made in the past, by persons not to be communicated with, in whom both national and personal peculiarities of ear and vocal organs may exist to perplex. A part of the difficulty is of course removed by trained assistants acting in concert, though in different fields; but the individual sharpness or dulness of ear and purity and obscurity of articulation will still cause diversity of results,—to say nothing of corresponding differences in the persons questioned. There is still the problem, broader than all these divisionary tests, whether language is at all a safe test of race, and on this point there is room for different opinions, as is shown in the discussions of Sayce, Whitney, and others.[1854] “Any attempt,” says Max Müller, “at squaring the classification of races and tongues must necessarily fail.”[1855] On the other hand, George Bancroft (Final revision, ii. 90) says that “the aspect of the red men was so uniform that there is no method of grouping them into families but by their languages.”

It is the wide margin for error, already indicated, that vitiates much that has already been done in philological comparisons, and the over-eager recognition at all times of what is thought to be the word-shunting of “Grimm’s Law” has doubtless been responsible for other confusions.[1856]

Most of the general philological treatises touch more or less intimately the question of language as a test of race,[1857] and all of them engage in tracing affinities, each with confidence in a method that others with equal assurance may belittle.[1858] Thus Bancroft,[1859] reflecting an opinion long prevalent, says that “positive grammatical rules carry with them much more weight than mere word likenesses,”[1860] while, on the contrary, Dawson[1861] says that “grammar is, after all, only the clothing of language. The science consists in its root-words; and multitudes of root-words are identical in the American languages over vast areas.” This last proposition is, as we have seen, the principle on which this inquiry is now conducted with governmental patronage. “Each American language,” says George Bancroft, in his chapter on the dialects of North America, “was competent of itself, without improvement of scholars, to exemplify every rule of the logician and give utterance to every passion.” In accordance with such perhaps extreme views, it has been usually said that the American languages are in development in advance of aboriginal progress in other respects. It is another common observation that while a certain resemblance runs through all the native tongues,[1862] there is no such general resemblance to the old-world languages;[1863] but at the same time the linguistic proof of the unity of the American race is not irrefragable,[1864] and it would take tens of thousands of years, as Brinton holds, if there had been a single source, for the eighty stocks of the North American and for the hundred South American speeches to have developed themselves in all their varieties.[1865] Proceeding beyond stocks to dialects, and counting varieties, Ludewig, in his Literature of the American Languages, gave 1,100 different American languages; but an alphabetical list given by H. W. Bates in his Central America, West Indies and South America (London, 1882, 2d ed.)[1866] affords 1,700 names of such. The number, of course, depends on how exclusive we are in grouping dialects. Squier, for instance, gives only 400 tongues for both North and South America; for, as Nadaillac says, “philology has no precise definition of what constitutes a language.”[1867]

The most comprehensive survey of the bibliography of American linguistics, excluding South America, is in Pilling’s Proof-sheets of a bibliography of the languages of the North American Indians (Washington, 1885), a tentative issue of the Bureau of Ethnology, already mentioned. Pilling also earlier catalogued the linguistic MSS. in the library of the Bureau of Ethnology, in Powell’s First Report of that Bureau (p. 553), in which that bibliographer also gave a sketch of the history of gathering such collections. A section of the Bibliotheca Americana of Charles Leclerc (Paris, 1878) is given to linguistics, and it affords by groups one of the best keys to the literature of the aboriginal languages which we yet have, and it has been supplemented by additional lists issued since by Maisonneuve of Paris. Ludewig’s Literature of American Aboriginal Languages, with additions by W. Turner (London, 1858), was up to date, thirty years ago, a good list of grammars and dictionaries, but the increase has been considerable in this field since then (Pilling’s Eskimo Languages, p. 62). The libraries of collectors of Spanish-American history, as enumerated elsewhere,[1868] have usually included much on the linguistic history, and the most important of the printed lists for Mexico and Central America is that of Brasseur de Bourbourg’s Bibliothèque Mexico-Guatémalienne, précédée d’un coup d’œil sur les études américaines dans leurs rapports avec les études classiques, et suivi du tableau, par ordre alphabétique, des ouvrages de linguistique américaine contenus dans le même volume (Paris, 1871). This list is repeated with additions in the Catalogue de Alphonse L. Pinart et ... de Brasseur de Bourbourg (Paris, 1883). Field’s Indian Bibliography characterizes some of the leading books up to 1873; but the best source up to about the same date for a large part of North America is found in the notes in that section of Bancroft’s Native Races, vol. iii., given to linguistics.[1869] The several Comptes Rendus of the Congrès des Américanistes have sections on the same subject, and the second volume of the Contributions to North American Ethnology, published by the U. S. Geological Survey (Powell’s), has been kept back for the completion of the linguistic studies of the government officials, which will ultimately, under the care of A. S. Gatschet, compose that belated volume. Major Powell, in his conduct of ethnological investigations for the United States government, has found efficient helpers in James C. Pilling, J. Owen Dorsey, S. R. Riggs, A. S. Gatschet, not to name others. Powell outlined some of his own views in an address on the evolution of language before the Anthropological Society of Washington, of which there is an abstract in their Transactions (1881), while the paper can be found in perfected shape as “The evolution of language from a study of the Indian languages,” in the First Report of the Bureau of Ethnology.

Among the earliest of the students of the native languages in the north were the Catholic missionaries in Canada and in the northwest, and there is much of interest in their observations as recorded in the Jesuit Relations. We find a Dictionnaire de la langue huronne in the Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons (Paris, 1632, etc.).

The most conspicuous of the English publications of the seventeenth century was the Natick rendering of the Bible for the Massachusetts Indians, undertaken by the Apostle John Eliot, as he was called, at the expense of the London Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Eliot also published a Grammar of the Massachusetts Indian Language (Cambridge, 1666), which, with notes by Peter S. Duponceau and an introduction by John Pickering, was printed for the Mass. Hist. Society in 1822, as was John Cotton’s Vocabulary of the Massachusetts Indian Language (Cambridge, 1830). Roger Williams’ Key into the language of America has been elsewhere referred to.[1870] The Rev. Jonathan Edwards wrote a paper on the language of the Mohegan Indians, which, with annotations by Pickering, was printed in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. in 1823, and is called by Haven (Archæol. U. S., 29) the earliest exposition of the radical connection of the American languages. Dr. James Hammond Trumbull, the most learned of the students of these eastern languages, has furnished various papers on them in the publications of the American Philological Association and of the American Antiquarian Society,[1871] and has summarized the literature of the subject, with references, in the Memorial Hist. of Boston (vol. i.).

In the eighteenth century there were several philological recorders among the missionaries. Sebastian Rasle made a Dictionary of the Abnake Language, now preserved in MS. in Harvard College library, which, edited by John Pickering, was published as a volume of the Memoirs of the Amer. Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1833. A grammatical sketch of the Abnake as outlined in Rasle’s Dictionary is given by M. C. O’Brien in the Maine Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. ix. The publications of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia have preserved for us the vocabularies and grammars of the Delaware language, collected and arranged by John Heckewelder[1872] and David Zeisberger, while the latter Moravian missionary collected a considerable MS. store of linguistic traces of the Indian tongues, a part of which is now preserved in Harvard College library.[1873] One of this last collection, an Indian Dictionary; English, German, Iroquois (the Onondaga), and Algonquin (the Delaware) (Cambridge, 1887,) has been carefully edited for the press by Eben Norton Horsford. Dr. John G. Shea published a Dictionnaire Français-Onontagué, édité d’après un manuscrit du 17^e siècle (N. Y., 1859), which is preserved in the Mazarin library in Paris.

There was no attempt made to treat the study of the American languages in what would now be termed a scientific spirit by any English scholar till towards the end of the eighteenth century. The whole question of the origin of the Indians had for a long time been the subject of discussion, and it had of necessity taken more or less of a philological turn from the beginning; but the inquiry had been simply a theoretical one, with efforts to substantiate preconceived beliefs rather than to formulate inductive ones, as in such works as—not to name others—Adair’s American Indians (London, 1775), where every trace was referable to the Jews, and Count de Gebelin’s Monde Primitif (Paris, 1781), where a comparison of American and European vocabularies is given.[1874]

A much closer student appeared in Benjamin Smith Barton, of Philadelphia, though he was not wholly emancipated from these same prevalent notions of connecting the Indian tongues with the old-world speeches. He says that he was instigated to the study by Pallas’ Linguarum totius orbis Vocabularia comparativa (Petropolis, 1786, 1789), and the result was his New View of the Origin of the tribes and nations of America (Philad., 1797; again, 1798). He sets forth in his introduction his methods of study. Charlevoix had suggested that the linguistic test was the only one in studying the ethnological connections of these peoples; but Barton asserted that there were other manifestations, equally important, like the physical aspects, the modes of worship, and the myths. He examined forty different Indian languages, and thinks they show a common origin, and that remotely a connection existed between the old and new continents.

The most eminent American student[1875] of this field in the early half of this century was Albert Gallatin. He began his observations in 1823, at the instance of Humboldt, and two years later he took advantage of a representative convocation of Indian tribes, then held in Washington, to continue his studies of their speech. In 81 tribes brought under his notice he found what he thought to be 27 or 28 linguistic families. This was a wider survey than had before been made, and he regretted that he was not privileged to profit by the vocabularies collected by Lewis and Clark, which had unfortunately been lost. At the request of the Amer. Antiquarian Society, he wrote out and enlarged this study in the second volume of their Collections in 1836, and advanced views that he never materially changed, believing in a very remote Asiatic origin of the tongues, and without excepting the Eskimos from his conclusions. In 1845, in his Notes on the semi-civilized nations of Mexico, his conclusions were much the same, but he made an exception in favor of the Otomis. At this time he counted more than a hundred languages, similar in structure but different in vocabularies, and he argued that a very long period was necessary thus to differentiate the tongues. At the age of eighty-seven Gallatin gave his final results in vol. ii. of the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society (1848). Gallatin published a review[1876] of the volume on Ethnography and Philology, which had been prepared by Horatio Hale as the seventh volume of the Publications of the Wilkes United States Exploring Expedition (1838-42), and Hale himself, then in the beginning of his reputation as a linguistic scholar,[1877] published some papers of his own in the same volume of the Transactions.[1878]

The two Americans who have done more than others, without the aid of the government, to organize aboriginal linguistic studies are Dr. John Gilmary Shea of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Dr. Daniel Garrison Brinton of Philadelphia. Of Shea’s Library of American Linguistics he has given an account in the Smithsonian Rept., 1861.[1879]

Dr. Brinton has set forth the purposes of his linguistic studies in an address before the Pennsylvania Historical Society, American Aboriginal Languages and why we should study them (Philad., 1885,—from the Pennsylvania Magazine of History, 1885, p. 15). In starting his Library of Aboriginal American Literature, he announced his purpose to put within the reach of scholars authentic materials for the study of the languages and culture of the native races, each work to be the production of the native mind, and to be printed in the original tongue, with a translation and notes, and to have some intrinsic historical or ethnological importance.[1880]

The other considerable collections are both French. Alphonse L. Pinart published a Bibliothèque de linguistique et d’ethnographie Américaines (Paris and San Francisco, 1875-82).[1881]

The publishing house of Maisonneuve et Compagnie of Paris, which has done more than any other business firm to advance these studies, has conducted a Collection linguistique Américaine, of much value to American philologists.[1882]

Other French studies have attracted attention. Pierre Etienne Duponceau published a Mémoire sur le système grammatical des langues de quelques nations indiennes de l’Amérique du Nord (Paris, 1838).[1883] He conducted a correspondence with the Rev. John Heckewelder respecting the American tongues, which is published in the Transactions of the Amer. Philosophical Society (Phil., 1819), and he translated Zeisberger’s Delaware Grammar.

The studies of the Abbé Jean André Cuoq have been upon the Algonquin dialects,[1884] and published mainly in the Actes de la Société philologique (Paris, 1869 and later). His monographic Etudes philologiques sur quelques langues sauvages de l’Amérique was printed at Montreal, 1866. It was the result of twenty years’ missionary work among the Iroquois and Algonquins, and besides a grammar contains a critical examination of the works of Duponceau and Schoolcraft. Lucien Adam has been very comprehensive in his researches, his studies being collected under the titles of Etudes sur six langues Américaines (Paris, 1878) and Examen grammatical comparé de seize langues Américaines (Paris, 1878).[1885]

The papers of the Count Hyacinthe de Charencey have been in the first instance for the most part printed in the Revue de Linguistique, the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, and the Mémoires de l’Académie de Caen, and have wholly pertained to the tongues south of New Mexico; but his principal studies are collected in his Mélanges de philologie et de paléographie Américaines (Paris, 1883).[1886]

The most distinguished German worker in this field, if we except the incidental labors of Alexander and William von Humboldt,[1887] is J. C. E. Buschmann, whose various linguistic labors cover the wide field of the west coast of North America from Alaska to the Isthmus, with some of the regions adjacent on the east. He published his papers in Berlin between 1853 and 1864, and many of them in the Mémoires de l’Académie de Berlin.[1888]

Dr. Carl Hermann Berendt has published his papers in Spanish, English, and German, and some of them will be found in the Smithsonian Reports, in the Berlin Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, and in the Revista de Mérida. Under the auspices of the American Ethnological Society, a fac-simile reproduction of his graphic Analytical Alphabet for the Mexican and Central American languages was published in 1869, the result of twelve years’ study in those countries.[1889]

The languages of what are called the civilized nations of the central regions of America deserve more particular attention.

In the Mexican empire the Aztec was largely predominant, but not exclusively spoken, for about twenty other tongues were more or less in vogue in different parts. Humboldt and others have found occasional traces in words of an earlier language than the Aztec or Nahua, but different from the Maya, which in Brasseur’s opinion was the language of the country in those pre-Nahua days. Bancroft, contrary to some recent philologists, holds the speech of the Toltec, Chichimec, and Aztec times to be one and the same.[1890] It was perhaps the most copious and most perfected of all the aboriginal tongues; and in proof of this are cited the opinions of the early Spanish scholars, the successes of the missionaries in the use of it in imparting the subtleties of their faith, and the literary use which was made of it by the native scholars, as soon as they had adapted the Roman alphabet to its vocabulary and forms.[1891]

The Maya has much the same prominence farther south that the Nahua has in the northerly parts of the territory of the Spanish conquest, and a dialect of it, the Tzendal, still spoken near Palenqué, is considered to be the oldest form of it, though probably this dialect was a departure from the original stock. It is one of the evidences that the early Mayas may have come by way of the West India islands that modern philologists say the native tongues of those islands were allied to the Maya. Bancroft (iii. 759, with other references, 760) refers to the list of spoken tongues given in Palacio’s Carta al Rey de España (1576) as the best enumeration of the early Spanish writers.[1892] For its literary value we must consult some of the authorities like Orozco y Berra, mentioned in connection with the Aztec. Squier published a Monograph of authors who have written on the languages of Central America, and collected vocabularies and composed works in the native dialects of that country (Albany, 1861,—100 copies), in which he mentions 110 such authors, and gives a list of their printed and MS. works. Those who have used these native tongues for written productions are named in Ludewig’s Literature of the Amer. Aborig. Languages (London, 1858) and in Brinton’s Aboriginal American Authors (Phila., 1883).[1893]

The philology of the South American peoples has not been so well compassed as that of the northern continent. The classified bibliographies show the range of it under such heads as Ande (or Campa), Araucanians (Chilena), Arrawak, Aymara, Brazil (the principal work being F. P. von Martius’s Beiträge zur Ethnographie und Sprachenkunde Amerika’s, zumal Brasiliens, Leipzig, 1867, with a second part called Glossaria linguarum brasiliensium, Erlangen, 1863), Chama, Chibcha (or Muysca, Mosca), Cumanagota, Galibi, Goajira, Guarani, Kiriri (Kariri), Lule, Moxa, Paez, Quichua, Tehuelhet, Tonocote, Tupi, etc.

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[V.]

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE MYTHS AND RELIGIONS OF AMERICA.

By the Editor.

The earliest scholarly examination of the whole subject, which has been produced by an American author, is Daniel G. Brinton’s Myths of the New World, a treatise on the symbolism and mythology of the Red Race of America (N. Y., 1868; 2d ed., 1876). It is a comparative study, “more for the thoughtful general reader than for the antiquary,” as the author says. “The task,” he adds, “bristles with difficulties. Carelessness, prepossessions, and ignorance have disfigured the subject with false colors and foreign additions without number” (p. 3). After describing the character of the written, graphic, or symbolic records, which the student of history has to deal with in tracing North American history back before the Conquest, he adds, while he deprives mythology of any historical value, that the myths, being kept fresh by repetition, were also nourished constantly by the manifestations of nature, which gave them birth. So while taking issue with those who find history buried in the myths, he warns us to remember that the American myths are not the reflections of history or heroes. In the treatment of his subject he considers the whole aboriginal people of America as a unit, with “its religion as the development of ideas common to all its members, and its myths as the garb thrown around those ideas by imaginations more or less fertile; but seeking everywhere to embody the same notions.”[1894] This unity of the American races is far from the opinion of other ethnologists.

Brinton gives a long bibliographical note on those who had written on the subject before him, in which he puts, as the first (1819) to take a philosophical survey, Dr. Samuel Farmer Jarvis in a Discourse on the religion of the Indian tribes of North America, printed in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Collections, iii. (1821). Jarvis confined himself to the tribes north of Mexico, and considered their condition, as he found it, one of deterioration from something formerly higher. There had been, of course, before this, amassers of material, like the Jesuits in Canada, as preserved in their Relations,[1895] sundry early French writers on the Indians,[1896] the English agents of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, and the Moravian missionaries in Pennsylvania and the Ohio country, to say nothing of the historians, like Loskiel (Geschichte der Mission, 1789), Vetromile (Abnakis and their History, New York, 1866), Cusick (Six Nations), not to mention local observers, like Col. Benjamin Hawkins, Sketch of the Creek Country (Georgia Hist. Soc. Collections, 1848, but written about 1800).

If the placing of Brinton’s book as the earliest scholarly contribution is to be contested, it would be for E. G. Squier’s Serpent Symbol in America (N. Y., 1851);[1897] but the book is not broadly based, except so far as such comprehensiveness can be deduced from his tendency to consider all myths as having some force of nature for their motive, and that all are traceable to an instinct that makes the worship of fire or of the sun the centre of a system.[1898] With this as the source of life, Squier allies the widespread phallic worship. In Bancroft’s Native Races (iii. p. 501) there is a summary of what is known of this American worship of the generative power. Brinton doubts (Myths, etc., 149) if anything like phallic worship really existed, apart from a wholly unreligious surrender to appetite.

Another view which Squier maintains is, that above all this and pervading all America’s religious views there was a sort of rudimentary monotheism.[1899]

When we add to this enumeration the somewhat callow and wholly unsatisfactory contributions of Schoolcraft in the great work on the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851-59), which the U. S. government in a headlong way sanctioned, we have included nearly all that had been done by American authors in this field when Bancroft published the third volume of his Native Races. This work constitutes the best mass of material for the student—who must not confound mythology and religion—to work with, the subject being presented under the successive heads of the origin of myths and of the world, physical and animal myths, gods, supernatural beings, worship and the future state; but of course, like all Bancroft’s volumes, it must be supplemented by special works pertaining to the more central and easterly parts of the United States, and to the regions south of Panama. The deficiency, however, is not so much as may be expected when we consider the universality of myths. “Unfortunately,” says this author, “the philologic and mythologic material for such an exhaustive synthesis of the origin and relations of the American creeds as Cox has given to the world in the Aryan legends in his Mythology of the Aryan Nations (London, 1870) is yet far from complete.”

In 1882 Brinton, after riper study, again recast his views of a leading feature of the subject in his American hero-myths; a study in the native religions of the western continent (Philad., 1882), in which he endeavored to present “in a critically correct light some of the fundamental conceptions in the native beliefs.” His purpose was to counteract what he held to be an erroneous view in the common practice of considering “American hero-gods as if they had been chiefs of tribes at some undetermined epoch,” and to show that myths of similar import, found among different peoples, were a “spontaneous production of the mind, and not a reminiscence of an historic event.” He further adds as one of the impediments in the study that he does “not know of a single instance on this continent of a thorough and intelligent study of a native religion made by a Protestant missionary.”[1900] After an introductory chapter on the American myths, Brinton in this volume takes up successively the consideration of the hero-gods of the Algonquins and Iroquois, the Aztecs, Mayas, and the Quichuas of Peru. These myths of national heroes, civilizers, and teachers are, as Brinton says, the fundamental beliefs of a very large number of American tribes, and on their recognition and interpretation depends the correct understanding of most of their mythology and religious life,—and this means, in Brinton’s view, that the stories connected with these heroes have no historic basis.[1901]

The best known of the comprehensive studies by a European writer is J. G. Müller’s Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen (Basle, 1855; again in 1867), in which he endeavors to work out the theory that at the south there is a worship of nature, with a sun-worship for a centre, contrasted at the north with fetichism and a dread of spirits, and these he considers the two fundamental divisions of the Indian worship. Bancroft finds him a chief dependence at times, but Brinton, charging him with quoting in some instances at second-hand, finds him of no authority whatever.

One of the most reputable of the German books on kindred subjects is the Anthropologie der Naturvölker (Leipzig, 1862-66) of Theodor Waitz. Brinton’s view of it is that no more comprehensive, sound, and critical work on the American aborigines has been written; but he considers him astray on the religious phases, and that his views are neither new nor tenable when he endeavors to subject moral science to a realistic philosophy.[1902]

In speaking of the scope of the comprehensive work of H. H. Bancroft we mentioned that beyond the larger part of the great Athapascan stock of the northern Indians his treatment did not extend. Such other general works as Brinton’s Myths of the New World, the sections of his American Hero-Myths on the hero-gods of the Algonquins and Iroquois, and the not wholly satisfactory book of Ellen R. Emerson, Indian myths; or, Legends, traditions, and symbols of the aborigines of America, compared with those of other countries, including Hindostan, Egypt, Persia, Assyria, and China (Boston, 1884), with aid from such papers as Major J. W. Powell’s “Philosophy of the North American Indians” in the Journal of the Amer. Geographical Society (vol. viii. p. 251, 1876), and his “Mythology of the North American Indians” in the First Annual Rept. of the Bureau of Ethnology (1881), and R. M. Dorman’s Origin of primitive superstition among the aborigines of America (Philad., 1881), must suffice in a general way to cover those great ethnic stocks of the more easterly part of North America, which comprise the Iroquois, centred in New York, and surrounded by the Algonquins, west of whom were the Dacotas, and south of whom were the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, sometimes classed together as Appalachians.[1903]

The mythology of the Aztecs is the richest mine, and Bancroft in his third volume finds the larger part of his space given to the Mexican religion.

Brinton (Amer. Hero Myths, 73, 78), referring to the “Historia de los Méxicanos por sus Pinturas” of Ramirez de Fuenleal, as printed in the Anales del Museo Nacional (ii. p. 86), says that in some respects it is to be considered the most valuable authority which we possess,[1904] as taken directly from the sacred books of the Aztecs, and as explained by the most competent survivors of the Conquest.[1905]

We must also look to Ixtlilxochitl and Sahagún as leading sources. From Sahagún we get the prayers which were addressed to the chief deity, of various names, but known best, perhaps, as Tezcatlipoca; and these invocations are translated for us in Bancroft (iii. 199, etc.), who supposes that, consciously or unconsciously, Sahagún has slipped into them a certain amount of “sophistication and adaptation to Christian ideas.” From the lofty side of Tezcatlipoca’s character, Bancroft (iii. ch. 7) passes to his meaner characteristics as the oppressor of Quetzalcoatl.

The most salient features of the mythology of the Aztecs arise from the long contest of Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, the story of which modified the religion of their followers, and, as Chavero claims, greatly affected their history.[1906] This struggle, according as the interpreters incline, stands for some historic or physical rivalry, or for one between St. Thomas and the heathen;[1907] but Brinton explains it on his general principles as one between the powers of Light and Darkness (Am. Hero Myths, 65).

The main original sources on the character and career of Quetzalcoatl are Motolinía, Mendieta, Sahagún, Ixtlilxochitl, and Torquemada, and these are all summarized in Bancroft (iii. ch. 7).

It has been a question with later writers whether there is a foundation of history in the legend or myth of Quetzalcoatl. Brinton (Myths of the New World, 180) has perhaps only a few to agree with him when he calls that hero-god a “pure creature of the fancy, and all his alleged history nothing but a myth,” and he thinks some confusion has arisen from the priests of Quetzalcoatl being called by his name.

Bandelier (Archæol. Tour) takes issue with Brinton in deeming Quetzalcoatl on the whole an historical person, whom Ixtlilxochitl connects with the pre-Toltec tribes of Olmeca and Xicalanca, and whom Torquemada says came in while the Toltecs occupied the country. Bandelier thinks it safe to say that Quetzalcoatl began his career in the present state of Hidalgo as a leader of a migration moving southward, with a principal sojourn at Cholula, introducing arts and a purer worship. This is substantially the view taken by J. G. Müller, Prescott, and Wuttke.

QUETZALCOATL.

After a drawing in Cumplido’s Mexican ed. of Prescott’s Mexico, vol. iii. Images of him are everywhere (Nadaillac, 273-74). Cf. Eng. transl. of Charnay, p. 87.

Bancroft (iii. 273) finds the Geschichte der Amer. Urreligionen (p. 577) of Müller to present a more thorough examination of the Quetzalcoatl myth than any other,[1908] but since then it has been studied at length by Bandelier in his Archæological Tour (p. 170 etc.), and by Brinton in his Amer. Hero Myths, ch. 3.[1909]

What Tylor (Primitive Culture, ii. 279) calls “the inexplicable compound, parthenogenetic deity, the hideous, gory Huitzilopochtli” (Huitziloputzli, Vitziliputzli), the god of war,[1910] the protector of the Mexicans, was considered by Boturini (Idea, p. 60) as a deified ancient war-chief. Bancroft in his narrative (iii. 289, 294; iv. 559) quotes the accounts in Sahagún and Torquemada, and (pp. 300-322) summarizes J. G. Müller’s monograph on this god, which he published in 1847, and which he enlarged when including it in his Urreligionen.

Acosta’s description of the Temple of Huitzilopochtli is translated in Bancroft (iii. 292). Solis follows Acosta, while Herrera copies Gomara, who was not, as Solis contends, so well informed.

As regards the Votan myth of Chiapas, Brinton tells us something in his American Hero Myths (212, with references, 215); but the prime source is the Tzendal manuscript used by Cabrera in his Teatro Critico-Americano.[1911] No complete translation has been made, and the abstracts are unsatisfactory. Bancroft aids us in this study of worship in Chiapas (iii. 458), as also in that of Oajaca (iii. 448), Michoacan[1912] (iii. 445), and Jalisco (iii. 447).

THE MEXICAN TEMPLE.

Reduced from a drawing in Icazbalceta’s Coleccion de Documentos, i. p. 384. There were two usual forms of the Mexican temple: one of this type, and the other with two niche-like pavilions on the top. Cf. drawings in Clavigero (Casena, 1780), ii. 26, 34; Eng. tr. by Cullen, i. 262, 373; Stevens’s Eng. tr. Herrera (London, 1740, vol. ii.).

“The religion of the Mayas,” says Bancroft (iii. ch. 11), “was fundamentally the same as that of the Nahuas, though it differed somewhat in outward forms. Most of the gods were deified heroes.... Occasionally we find very distinct traces of an older sun-worship which has succumbed to later forms, introduced according to vague tradition from Anahuac.” The view of Tylor (Anahuac, 191) is that the “civilization,” and consequently the religions, of Mexico and Central America were originally independent, but that they came much into contact, and thus modified one another to no small extent.”

Modern scholars are not by any means so much inclined as Las Casas and the other Catholic fathers were to recognize the dogma of the Trinity and other Christian notions, which have been thought to be traceable in what the Maya people in their aboriginal condition held for faith.

The most popular of their deified heroes were Zamná and Cukulcan, not unlikely the same personage under two names, and quite likely both are correspondences of Quetzalcoatl. We can find various views and alternatives on this point among the elder and recent writers. The belief in community of attributes derives its strongest aid from the alleged disappearance of Quetzalcoatl in Goazacoalco just at the epoch when Cukulcan appeared in Yucatan. The centres of Maya worship were at Izamal, Chichen-Itza, and the island of Cozumel.

The hero-gods of the Mayas is the topic of Brinton’s fourth chapter in his American Hero Myths, with views of their historical relations of course at variance with those of Bancroft. As respects the material, he says that “most unfortunately very meagre sources of information are open to us. Only fragments of their legends and hints of their history have been saved, almost by accident, from the general wreck of their civilization.” The heroes are Itzamná, the leader of the first immigration from the east, through the ocean pathways; and Kukulcan, the conductor of the second from the west. For the first cycle of myths Brinton refers to Landa’s Relation, Cogolludo’s Yucatan, Las Casas’s Historia Apologética, involving the reports of the missionary Francisco Hernandez, and to Hieronimo Roman’s De la Republica de las Indias Occidentales.

THE TEMPLE OF MEXICO.

After plate (reduced) in Herrera.

The Kukulcan legends are considered by Brinton to be later in date and less natural in character, and Hernandez’s Report to Las Casas is the first record of them. Brinton’s theory of the myths does not allow him to identify the Quetzalcoatl and Kukulcan hero-gods as one and the same, nor to show that the Aztec and Maya civilizations had more correspondence than occasional intercourse would produce; but he thinks the similarity of the statue of “Chac Mool,” unearthed by Le Plongeon at Chichen-Itza, to another found at Tlaxcala compels us to believe that some positive connection did exist in parts of the country (Anales del Museo Nacional, i. 270).[1913] “The Nahua impress,” says Bancroft (iii. 490), “noticeable in the languages and customs of Nicaragua, is still more strongly marked in the mythology. Instead of obliterating the older forms of worship, as it seems to have done in the northern parts of Central America, it has here and there passed by many of the distinct beliefs held by different tribes, and blended with the chief elements of a system which is traced to the Muyscas in South America.”

The main source of the Quiché myths and worship is the Popul Vuh, but Bancroft (iii. 474), who follows it, finds it difficult to make anything comprehensible out of its confusion of statement. But prominent among the deities seem to stand Tepeu or Gucumatz, whom it is the fashion to make the same with Quetzalcoatl, and Hurakan or Tohil, who indeed stands on a plane above Quetzalcoatl. Brinton (Myths, 156), on the contrary, connects Hurakan with Tlaloc, and seems to identify Tohil with Quetzalcoatl. Bancroft (iii. 477) says that tradition, name, and attributes connect Tohil and Hurakan, and identify them with Tlaloc.

TEOYAOMIQUI.

The idol dug up in the Plaza in Mexico is here presented, after a cut, following Nebel, in Tylor’s Anahuac, showing the Mexican goddess of war, or death. Cf. cut in American Antiquarian, Jan., 1883; Powell’s First Rept. Bur. Ethn., 232; Bancroft, iv. 512, 513, giving the front after Nebel, and the other views after Léon y Gama. Bandelier (Arch. Tour, pl. v) gives a photograph of it as it stands in the court-yard of the Museo Nacional.

Gallatin (Am. Ethn. Soc. Trans., i. 338) describes Teoyaomiqui as the proper companion of Huitzilopochtli: “The symbols of her attributes are found in the upper part of the statue; but those from the waist downwards relate to other deities connected with her or with Huitzilopochtli.” Tylor (Anahuac, 222) says: “The antiquaries think that the figures in it stand for different personages, and that it is three gods: Huitzilopochtli the god of war, Teoyaomiqui his wife, and Mictlantecutli the god of hell.” Léon y Gama calls the statue Teoyaomiqui, but Bandelier, Archæol. Tour, 67, thinks its proper name is rather Huitzilopochtli. Léon y Gama’s description is summarized in Bancroft, iii. 399, who cites also what Humboldt (Vues, etc., ii. 153, and his pl. xxix) says. Bancroft (iii. 397) speaks of it as “a huge compound statue, representing various deities, the most prominent being a certain Teoyaomiqui, who is almost identical with, or at least a connecting link between, the mother goddess” and Mictlantecutli, the god of Mictlan, or Hades. Cf. references in Bancroft, iv. 515.

Brinton’s Names of the gods in the Kiché myths, a monograph on Central American mythology (Philad. Am. Philos. Soc., 1881), is a special study of a part of the subject.

Brinton (Myths, etc., 184) considers the best authorities on the mythology of the Muyscas of the Bogota region to be Piedrahita’s Historia de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reyno de Granada (1668, followed by Humboldt in his Vues) and Simm’s Noticias historiales de las Conquistas de Tierra Firme en el Nuevo Reyno de Granada, given in Kingsborough, vol. viii.

The mythology of the Quichuas in Peru makes the staple of chap. 5 of Brinton’s Amer. Hero-Myths. Here the corresponding hero-god was Viracocha. Brinton depends mainly on the Relacion Anónyma de los Costumbres Antiguos de los Naturales del Piru, 1615 (Madrid, 1879); on Christoval de Molina’s account of the fables and religious customs of the Incas, as translated by C. R. Markham in the Hakluyt Society volume, Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas (London, 1873); on the Comentarios reales of Garcilasso de la Vega; on the report made to the viceroy Francisco de Toledo, in 1571, of the responses to inquiries made in different parts of the country as to the old beliefs which appear in the “Informacion de las idolatras de los Incas é Indios,” printed in the Coleccion de documentos ineditos del archivo de Indias, xxi. 198; and in the Relacion de Antigüedades deste Reyno del Piru, by Juan de Santa Cruz Pachicuti.

ANCIENT TEOCALLI, OAXACA, MEXICO.

After a cut in Squier’s Serpent Symbol, p. 78.

Brinton dissents to D’Orbigny’s view in his L’homme Américaine, that the Quichua religion is mainly borrowed from the older mythology of the Aymaras.

Francisco de Avila’s “Errors and False Gods of the Indians of Huarochiri” (1608), edited by Markham for the Hakluyt Society in the volume called Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas, is a treatment of a part of the subject.

Adolf Bastian’s Ein Jahr auf Reisen—Kreuzfahrten zum Sammelbehuf aus Transatlantischen Feldern der Ethnologie, being the first volume of his Die Culturländer des Alten America (Berlin, 1878), has a section “Aus Religion and Sitte des Alten Peru.”

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[VI.]

ARCHÆOLOGICAL MUSEUMS AND PERIODICALS.

By the Editor.

The oldest of existing American societies dealing with the scientific aspects of knowledge is the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, whose Transactions began in 1769, and made six volumes to 1809. A second series was begun in 1818.[1914] What are called the Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee make two volumes (1819, 1838), the first of which contains contributions by Heckewelder and P. S. Duponceau on the history and linguistics of the Lenni Lenape. Its Proceedings began in 1838. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was instituted at Boston in 1780, a part of its object being “to promote and encourage the knowledge of the antiquities of America,”[1915] and its series of Memoirs began in 1783,[1916] and its Proceedings in 1846. These societies have only, as a rule, incidentally, and not often till of late years, illustrated in their publications the antiquities of the new world; but the American Antiquarian Society was founded in 1812 at Worcester, Mass., by Isaiah Thomas, with the express purpose of elucidating this department of American history. It began the Archæologia Americana in 1820, and some of the volumes are still valuable, though they chiefly stand for the early development by Atwater, Gallatin, and others of study in this direction. In the first volume is an account of the origin and design of the society, and this is also set forth in the memoir of Thomas prefixed to its reprint of his History of Printing in America, which is a part of the series. The Proceedings of the society were begun in 1849, and they have contained some valuable papers on Central American subjects. The Boston Society of Natural History[1917] published the Boston Journal of Natural History from 1834 to 1863, and in 1866 began its Memoirs. Col. Whittlesey gave in its first volume a paper on the weapons and military character of the race of the mounds, and subsequent volumes have had other papers of an archæological nature; but they have formed a small part of its contributions. Its Proceedings have of late years contained some of the best studies of palæolithic man. The American Ethnological Society, founded by Gallatin (New York), began its exclusive work in a series of Transactions (1845-53, vols. i., ii., and one number of vol. iii.), but it was not of long continuance, though it embraced among its contributors the conspicuous names of Gallatin, Schoolcraft, Catherwood, Squier, Rafn, S. G. Morton, J. R. Bartlett, and others. Its Bulletin was not continued beyond a single volume (1860-61).[1918] The society was suspended in 1871.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science began its publications with the Proceedings of its Philadelphia meeting in 1848. Questions of archæology formed, however, but a small portion of its inquiries[1919] till the formation of a section on Anthropology a few years ago.

The American Geographical Society has published a Bulletin (1852-56); Journal (or Transactions) (1859), etc., and Proceedings (1862-64). Some of the papers have been of archæological interest.

The Anthropological Institute of New York printed its transactions in a Journal (one vol. only, 1872-73).

The Archæological Institute of America was founded in Boston in 1879, and has given the larger part of its interest to classical archæology. The first report of its executive committee said respecting the field in the new world: “The study of American archæology relates, indeed, to the monuments of a race that never attained to a high degree of civilization, and that has left no trustworthy records of continuous history.... From what it was and what it did, nothing is to be learned that has any direct bearing on the progress of civilization. Such interest as attaches to it is that which it possesses in common with other early and undeveloped races of mankind.” Appended to this report was Lewis H. Morgan’s “Houses of the American Aborigines, with suggestions for the exploration of the ruins in New Mexico,” etc.,—advancing his well-known views of the communal origin of the southern ruins. Under the auspices of the Institute, Mr. A. F. Bandelier, a disciple of Morgan, was sent to New Mexico for the study of the Pueblos, and his experiences are described in the second Report of the Institute. In their third Report (1882) the committee of the Institute say: “The vast work of American archæology and anthropology is only begun.... Other nations, with more or less of success, are trying to do our work on our soil. It is time that Americans bestir themselves in earnest upon a field which it would be a shame to abandon to the foreigner.” Still under the pay of the Institute, Mr. Bandelier, in 1881, devoted his studies to the remains at Mexico, Cholula, Mitla, and the ancient life of those regions. At the same time, Aymé, then American consul at Merida, was commissioned to explore certain regions of Yucatan, but the results were not fortunate.

The Institute began in 1881 the publication of an American Series of its Papers, the first number of which embodied Bandelier’s studies of the Pueblos, and the second covered his Mexican researches. In 1885 the American Journal of Archæology was started at Baltimore as the official organ of the Institute, and occasional papers on American subjects have been given in its pages. The editors were called upon to define more particularly their relations to archæology in America in the number for Sept., 1888. In this they say: “The archæology of America is busied with the life and work of a race or races of men in an inchoate, rudimentary, and unformed condition, who never raised themselves, even at their highest point, as in Mexico and Peru, above a low stage of civilization, and never showed the capacity of steadily progressive development.... These facts limit and lower the interest which attaches ... to crude and imperfect human life.... A comparison of their modes of life and thought with those of other races in a similar stage of development in other parts of the world, in ancient and modern times, is full of interest as exhibiting the close similarity of primitive man in all regions, resulting from the sameness of his first needs, in his early struggle for existence.” The editors rest their reasons for giving prominence to classical archæology upon the necessity of affording by such complemental studies the means of comparison in archæological results, which can but advance to a higher plane the methods and inductions of the prehistoric archæology of America.

The American Folk-Lore Society was founded in Jan., 1888, and The Journal of American Folk-Lore was immediately begun. A large share of its papers is likely to cover the popular tales of the American aborigines.

The Anthropological Society of Washington is favorably situated to avail itself of the museums and apparatus of the American government, and members of the Geological Survey and Ethnological Bureau have been among the chief contributors to its Transactions,[1920] which in January, 1888, were merged in a more general publication, The American Anthropologist. A National Geographic Society was organized in Washington in 1888.

There are numerous local societies throughout the United States whose purpose, more or less, is to cover questions of archæological import. Those that existed prior to 1876 are enumerated in Scudder’s Catalogue of Scientific Serials; but it was not easy always to draw the line between historical associations and those verging upon archæological methods.[1921]

The oldest of the scientific periodicals in the United States to devote space to questions of anthropology is Silliman’s American Journal of Science and Arts (1818, etc.). The American Naturalist, founded in 1867, also entered the field of archæology and anthropology. The same may be said in some degree of the Popular Science Monthly (1877, etc.), Science (1883), and the Kansas City Review. The chief repository of such contributions, however, since 1878, has been The American Antiquarian (Chicago), edited by Stephen D. Peet. Its papers are, unluckily, of very uneven value.[1922]

The best organized work has been done in the United States by the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology, in Cambridge, Mass., and by certain departments of the Federal government at Washington.

The Peabody Museum resulted from a gift of George Peabody, an American banker living in London, who instituted it in 1866 as a part of Harvard University.[1923] It was fortunate in its first curator, Dr. Jeffries Wyman, who brought unusual powers of comprehensive scrutiny to its work.[1924] He died in 1874, and was succeeded by one of his and of Agassiz’s pupils, Frederick W. Putnam, who was also placed in the chair of archæology in the university in 1886. The Reports, now twenty-two in number, and the new series of Special Papers are among the best records of progress in archæological science.

The creation of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846, under the bequest of an Englishman, James Smithson, and the devotion of a sum of about $31,000 a year at that time arising from that gift, first put the government of the United States in a position “to increase and diffuse knowledge among men.”[1925]

The second Report of the Regents in 1848 contains approvals of a manuscript by E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis, which had been offered to the Institution for publication, and which had been commended by Albert Gallatin, Edward Robinson, John Russell Bartlett, W. W. Turner, S. G. Morton, and George P. Marsh. Thus an important archæological treatise, The Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, comprising the results of extensive original surveys and explorations (Washington, 1848), became the first of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. The subsequent volumes of the series have contained other important treatises in similar fields. Foremost among them may be named those of Squier on the Aboriginal Monuments of New York (vol. ii., 1851); Col. Whittlesey on The Ancient Works in Ohio (vol. iii., 1852); S. R. Riggs’ Dakota Grammar and Dictionary (vol. iv., 1852); I. A. Lapham’s Antiquities of Wisconsin (vol. vii., 1855); S. F. Haven’s Archæology of the United States (vol. viii., 1856); Brantz Mayer’s Mexican History and Archæology (vol. ix., 1857); Whittlesey on Ancient Mining on Lake Superior (vol. xiii., 1863); Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity of the human family (vol. xvii., 1871);—not to name lesser papers. To supplement this quarto series, another in octavo was begun in 1862, called Miscellaneous Collections; and in this form there have appeared J. M. Stanley’s Catalogue of portraits of No. Amer. Indians (vol. ii., 1862); a Catalogue of photographic portraits of the No. Amer. Indians (vol. xiv., 1878).

Of much more interest to the anthropologist has been the series of Annual Reports with their appended papers,—such as Squier on The Antiquities of Nicaragua (1851); W. W. Turner on Indian Philology (1852); S. S. Lyon on Antiquities from Kentucky (1858), and many others.

The sections of correspondence and minor papers in these reports soon began to include communications about the development of archæological research in various localities. They began to be more orderly arranged under the sub-heading of Ethnology in the Report for 1867, and this heading was changed to Anthropology in the Report for 1879. Charles Rau (d. 1887) had been a leading contributor in this department, and no. 440 of the Smithsonian publications was made up of his Articles on Anthropological Subjects, contributed from 1863 to 1877 (Washington, 1882). No. 421 is Geo. H. Boehmer’s Index to Anthropological Articles in the publications of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, 1881). Among the later papers those of O. T. Mason of the Anthropological Department of the National Museum are conspicuous.

The last series is the Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, placed by Congress in the charge of the Smithsonian. The Reports of the American Historical Association will soon be begun under the same auspices.

Major J. W. Powell, the director of the Bureau of Ethnology, said that its purpose was “to organize anthropologic research in America.”[1926] It published its first report in 1881, and this and the later reports have had for contents, beside the summary of work constituting the formal report, the following papers:—

Vol. i.: J. W. Powell. The evolution of language.—Sketch of the mythology of the North American Indians.—Wyandot government.—On limitations to the use of some anthropologic data.—H. C. Yarrow. A further contribution to the study of mortuary customs among the North American Indians.—E. S. Holden. Studies in Central American picture-writing.—C. C. Royce. Cessions of land by Indian tribes to the United States: illustrated by those in Indiana.—G. Mallery. Sign language among North American Indians compared with that among other peoples and deaf-mutes.—J. C. Pilling. Catalogue of linguistic manuscripts in the library.—Illustration of the method of recording Indian languages. From the manuscripts of J. O. Dorsey, A. S. Gatschet, and S. R. Riggs.

Vol. ii.: F. H. Cushing. Zuñi fetiches.—Mrs. E. A. Smith. Myths of the Iroquois.—H. W. Henshaw. Animal carvings from mounds of the Mississippi Valley.—W. Matthews. Navajo silversmiths.—W. H. Holmes. Art in shell of the ancient Americans.—J. Stevenson. Illustrated catalogue of the collections obtained from the Indians of New Mexico and Arizona in 1879;—Illustrated catalogue of the collections obtained from the Indians of New Mexico in 1880.

Vol. iii.: Cyrus Thomas. Notes on certain Maya and Mexican manuscripts.—W. (C.) H. Dall On masks, labrets, and certain aboriginal customs, with an inquiry into the bearing of their geographical distribution.—J. O. Dorsey. Omaha sociology.—Washington Matthews. Navajo weavers.—W. H. Holmes. Prehistoric textile fabrics of the United States, derived from impressions on pottery;—Illustrated catalogue of a portion of the collections made by the Bureau of Ethnology during the field season of 1881.—James Stevenson. Illustrated catalogue of the collections obtained from the Pueblos of Zuñi, New Mexico, and Wolpi, Arizona, in 1881.

Vol. iv.: Garrick Mallery. Pictographs of the North American Indians.—W. H. Holmes. Pottery of the ancient Pueblos;—Ancient pottery of the Mississippi Valley;—Origin and development of form and ornament in ceramic art.—F. H. Cushing.. A study of Pueblo pottery as illustrative of Zuñi culture growth.

Vol. v.: Cyrus Thomas. Burial mounds of the northern sections of the United States.—C. C. Royce. The Cherokee nation of Indians.—Washington Matthews. The Mountain Chant: a Navajo ceremony.—Clay MacCauley. The Seminole Indians of Florida.—Mrs. Tilly E. Stevenson. The religious life of the Zuñi child.

What is known as the United States National Museum is also in charge of the Smithsonian Institution,[1927] and here are deposited the objects of archæological and historical interest secured by the government explorations and by other means. The linguistic material is kept in the Bureau of Ethnology. The skulls and physiological material, illustrative of prehistoric times, are deposited in the Army Medical Museum, under the Surgeon-General’s charge.

Major Powell, while in charge of the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, had earlier prepared five volumes of Contributions to Ethnology, all but the second of which have been published. The first volume (1877) contained W. H. Dall’s “Tribes of the Extreme Northwest” and George Gibbs’ “Tribes of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon.” The third (1877): Stephen Powers’ “Tribes of California.” The fourth (1881): Lewis H. Morgan’s “Houses and house life of the American Aborigines.” The fifth (1882): Charles Rau’s “Lapidarian sculpture of the Old World and in America,” Robert Fletcher’s “Prehistoric trephining and cranial Amulets,” and Cyrus Thomas on the Troano Manuscript, with an introduction by D. G. Brinton.

Among the Reports of the geographical and geological explorations and surveys west of the 100th meridian conducted by Capt. Geo. M. Wheeler, the seventh volume, Report on Archæological and Ethnological Collections from the vicinity of Santa Barbara, California, and from ruined pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico and certain Interior Tribes (Washington, 1879), was edited by F. W. Putnam, and contains papers on the ethnology of Southern California, wood and stone implements, sculptures, musical instruments, beads, etc.; the Pueblos of New Mexico, their inhabitants, architecture, customs, cliff houses and other ruins, skeletons, etc.; with an Appendix on Linguistics, containing forty Vocabularies of Pueblo and other Western Indian Languages and their classification into seven families.

The Reports of the Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, under the charge of F. V. Hayden, brought to us in those of 1874-76 the knowledge of the cliff-dwellers, and they contain among the miscellaneous publications such papers as W. Matthews’ Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians and W. H. Jackson’s Descriptive Catalogue of photographs of No. Amer. Indians.

There are other governmental documents to be noted: The Exploration of the Red River of Louisiana in 1852, by R. B. Marcy and G. B. McClellan (Washington, 1854), contains a vocabulary of the Comanches and Witchitas, with some general remarks by W. W. Turner. There is help to be derived from the geographical details, and from something on ethnology, in the Reports of Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean (Washington, 1856-60, in 12 vols.); in W. H. Emory’s Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey (Washington, 1857-58, in 2 vols.); J. H. Simpson’s Report of Explorations across the great basin of the territory of Utah in 1859 (Washington, 1876); J. N. Macomb’s Report of the Exploring Expedition from Santa Fé to the Junction of the Grand and Green Rivers of the Great Colorado of the West in 1859 (Washington, 1876).

There were also published, under the auspices of the government, the conglomerate and very unequal work of Henry R. Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information respecting the history, conditions, and prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, collected and prepared under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (Philad., 1851-57, in 6 vols., with a trade edition of the same date). An act of Congress (March 3, 1847) authorized its publication. As reissued it is called Archives of aboriginal knowledge, containing original papers laid before Congress, respecting the Indian tribes of the United States (Philadelphia, 1860, ’68, 6 vols.). It has the following divisions: General history.—Manners and customs.—Antiquities.—Geography.—Tribal organization, etc.—Intellectual capacity.—Topical history.—Physical type.—Language.—Art.—Religion and mythology.—Demonology, magic, etc.—Medical knowledge.—Condition and prospects.—Statistics and population.—Biography.—Literature.—Post-Columbian history.—Economy and statistics. An edition of vols. 1-5 (1856) is called Ethnological researches respecting the Red Men of America, Information respecting the history, etc. The sixth volume is in effect a summary of the preceding five.[1928]

At a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a committee was charged with preparing a memorial to Congress, urging action to insure the preservation of certain national monuments. There is a summary of their report in Science, xii. p. 101.

Of all European countries, the most has been done in France, by way of periodical system and corporate organizations, to advance the study of American anthropology, ethnology, and archæology. The Annales des voyages, de la géographie et de l’histoire, traduits de toutes les langues Européennes; des relations originales, inédites,[1929] the publication of which was begun by Malte-Brun in 1808 and continued to 1814, and the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, begun in 1819 and continued with a slightly varying title till 1870, are sources occasionally of much importance. At a later day, Edouard Lartet and others have used the Annales des Sciences Naturelles as a medium for their publications. We hardly trace here, however, any corporate movement before the institution of the Société de Géographie de Paris in 1820. In 1824 it issued the first volume of its Recueil de Voyages et de Mémoires, which reached seven volumes in 1864, and had included (vol. ii.) an account of Palenqué and the researches of Warden on the antiquities of the United States. Since this society began the issue of its Bulletin in 1827, it has occasionally given assistance in the study of American archæology.

The earliest distinctive periodical on the subject was the Revue Américaine, of which, in 1826-27, three volumes, in monthly parts, were published in Paris.[1930] In 1857 a movement was inaugurated which engaged first and last the coöperation of some eminent scholars in these studies, like Aubin, Buschmann, V. A. Malte-Brun, Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, Jomard, Alphonse Pinart, Cortambert, Léon de Rosny, Waldeck, Abbé Domenech, Charencey, etc. The active movers were first known as the Comité d’Archéologie Américaine, and they issued an Annuaire (1863-67) and one volume, at least, of Actes (1865), as well as a collection of Mémoires sur l’archéologie Américaine (1865). This organization soon became known as the Société Américaine de France, and under the auspices of this name there has been a series of publications of varying designation.[1931] Its Annuaire began in 1868, and has been continued. The general name of Archives de la Société Américaine de France covers its other publications, which more or less coincide with the Revue Orientale et Américaine par Léon de Rosny, the first series of which appeared in Paris in 10 vols., in 1859-65, followed by a second, the first volume of which (vol. xi. of the whole) is called Revue Américaine, publié sous les auspices de la Société d’Ethnographie et du Comité d’Archéologie Américaine, and is at the same time the fourth volume of the Actes de la Société d’Ethnographie Américaine et Orientale. The whole series is sometimes cited as the Mémoires de la Société d’Ethnographie.[1932] The series, already referred to, of the Archives de la Soc. Amér. de France is made up thus: Première série: vol. i., Revue Orientale et Américaine; ii., Revue Américaine; iii. and iv., Revue Orientale et Américaine.[1933] The nouvelle série has no sub-titles, and the three volumes bear date 1875, 1876, 1884.

The student of comparative anthropology will resort to the Materiaux pour l’histoire positive et philosophique (later primitive et naturelle) de l’homme, the publication of which was begun at Paris in 1864 by Gabriel de Mortillet, and has been continued by Trutot, Cartailhac, Chautre, and others. This publication has contained abstracts of the proceedings of an annual gathering in Paris, whose Comptes rendu have been printed at length as of the Congrès international d’anthropologie et d’archéologie préhistoriques (1865, etc.).[1934]

Léon de Rosny published but a single volume of a projected series, Archives paléographiques de l’Orient et de l’Amérique (Paris, 1870-71), which contains some papers on Mexican picture-writing. Rosny and others, who had been active in the movement begun by the Comité d’Archéologie Américaine, were now instrumental in organizing the periodical gathering in different cities of Europe, which is known as the Congrès international des Américanistes. The first session was held at Nancy in 1875, and its Compte Rendu was published in two volumes (Nancy and Paris, 1876). The second meeting was at Luxembourg in 1877 (Compte Rendu, Paris, 1878, in 2 vols.); the third at Brussels in 1879 (Compte Rendu); the fourth at Madrid in 1881 (Congreso internacional de Américanistas. Cuarta reunion, Madrid, 1881); the fifth at Copenhagen (Compte Rendu, Copenhagen, 1884); and others at Chalons-sur-Marne, Turin, and Berlin. The papers are printed in the language in which they were read.

The Mémoires de la Société d’Ethnographie (founded in 1859) began to appear in 1881, and its third volume (1882) is entitled Les Documents écrits de l’Antiquité Américaine, compte rendu d’une mission scientifique en Espagne et en Portugal, par Léon de Rosny, avec une carte et 10 planches. The fourth volume is P. de Lucy-Fossarieu’s Ethnographie de l’Amérique Antarctique (Paris, 1884). In the second volume of a new series there is an account by V. Devaux of the work in American ethnology done by Lucien de Rosny as a preface to a posthumous work[1935] of Lucien de Rosny, Les Antilles, étude d’Ethnographie et d’Archéologique Américaines (Paris, 1886).

Latterly there has been a consolidation of interests among kindred societies under the name of Institution Ethnographique, whose initial Rapport annuel sur les récompenses et encouragements décernés en 1883 was published at Paris in 1883. This society now comprises the Société d’Ethnographie, Société Américaine de France, Athénée Oriental, and Société des Etudes Japonaises.

In England, organized efforts for the record of knowledge began with the creation of the Royal Society, though certain sporadic attempts had earlier been known. America was represented among its founders in the younger John Winthrop, and Cotton Mather was a contributor to its transactions, and there has occasionally been a paper in its publications of interest to American archæologists.[1936] The Society of Antiquaries began to print its Archæologia in 1779 and its Proceedings in 1848, and the American student finds some valuable papers in them. The British Association for the Advancement of Science began its Reports with the meeting of 1831, and it has had among its divisions a section of anthropology. In 1830 the Royal Geographical Society began its Journal with a preliminary issue (1830-31, in 2 vols.), though its regular series first came out in 1832. Its Proceedings appeared in 1855, and both publications are a conspicuous source in many ways relating to early American history.[1937] Closely connected with its interest has been the publication begun under the editing of C. R. Markham, and called successively Ocean Highways (1869-73, vol. i.-v.), with an added title of Geographical Review (1873-74), and lastly as The Geographical Magazine (vol. i.-iii., 1874-76).

The Ethnological Society published four volumes of a Journal[1938] between 1844 and 1856, and resuming published two more volumes in 1869-70. Its contents are mainly of interest in comparative study, though there are a few American papers, like D. Forbes’s on the Aymara Indians of Peru. This society’s Transactions was issued in two volumes, 1859-60; and again in seven volumes, 1861-69.

Meanwhile, some gentlemen, not content with the restricted field of the Ethnological Society, founded in London an Anthropological Society, which began the publication of Memoirs (1863-69, in 3 vols.); and in this publication Bollaert issued his papers on the population of the new world, on the astronomy of the red man, on American paleography, on Maya hieroglyphics, on the anthropology of the new world, on Peruvian graphic records,—not to name other papers by different writers. The Transactions and Journal of the society, as well as the Popular Magazine of Anthropology (1866), made part in one form or another of the Anthropological Review, begun in 1863, and discontinued in 1870, when the Journal of Anthropology succeeded, but ceased the next year. The Proceedings of the society make one volume, 1873-75, under the title of Anthropologia, and the society also maintained a series of translations of foreign treatises, the first of which was Theodor Waitz’s Introduction to Anthropology, ed. from the German by J. F. Collingwood (1863); and this was followed by a version by James Hunt, the president of the society, of Professor Carl Vogt’s Lectures on Man, his place in Creation and in the history of the Earth (1864), and by other works of Broca, Pouchet, Blumenbach, etc.

What is known as the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland united some of these separate endeavors and began its Journal in 1871. The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society has also at times been the channel by which some of the leading anthropologists have published their views, and a few papers of archæological import have been given in the Transactions (1884, etc.) of the Royal Historical Society. Professedly broader relations belong to the Transactions (Comptes rendus) of the International Congress of prehistoric (anthropology and) archæology, which began its sessions in 1866.[1939] The latest summary is the Archæological Review, a journal of historic and prehistoric antiquities, edited by G. L. Gomme, of which the first number appeared in March, 1888, which has for a main feature a bibliographical record of past and current archæological literature.[1940]

It is, however, in the volumes of the Hakluyt Society’s publications, beginning in 1847, in the annotated reprint of the early writers on American nations and on the European contact with them, that the most signal service has been done in England to the study of the early history of the new world. They are often referred to in the present History.

In Germany a Magazin für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen was published at Zittau as early as 1788-1791.

Wagner published at Vienna, in 1794-96, two volumes of Beiträge zur philosophischen Anthropologie; and Heynig’s Psychologisches (zugleich Anthropologisches) Magazin was published at Altenburg in 1796-97.

The Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaft began its Abhandlungen in 1804, but it was not till long after that date that Buschmann and others used it as a channel of their views.

Vertuch’s Archiv für Ethnographie und Linguistik (Weimar, 1807) only reached a single number.

The Zeitschrift für physische Aerzte, which was published by Nasse, at Leipzig, 1818-22, was succeeded by the Zeitschrift für die Anthropologie (Leipzig, 1823-24), and this was followed by a single volume, Jahrbücher für Anthropologie (Leipzig, 1830).

Bran’s Ethnographisches Archiv was published at Jena from 1818 to 1829.

It was not till after 1860 that the new interest began to manifest itself, though Fechner’s Centralblatt für Naturwissenschaften und Anthropologie was published at Leipzig in 1853-54.

Ecker’s Archiv für Anthropologie was published at Braunschweig in 1866-68, which came in 1870 under the direction of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, which also began a Correspondenzblatt in 1870, and a series, Allgemeine Versammlung, in 1873. This is the most important of the German societies.

Bastian’s Zeitschrift für Ethnologie was begun at Berlin in 1869, and later added a Supplement.

The Anthropologische Gesellschaft of Vienna began its Mittheilungen in 1870; and in 1887 the Prähistorische Commission of the Kais. Akad. der Wissenschaften at Vienna printed the first number of its Mittheilungen.

The Verein für Anthropologie in Leipzig published but a single number of a Bericht in 1871.

The Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte continued its Verhandlungen for 1871-72 only; and the Göttinger Anthropologischer Verein made but a bare beginning (1874) of its Mittheilungen.

The Bericht of the Museum für Völkerkunde was begun in Leipzig in 1874.

The Münchener Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte began the publication of Beiträge in 1876.

In all these publications there have been papers interesting to American archæologists, if only in a comparative way, and at times American subjects have been frequent, especially in later years. The publications of zoölogical and geographical societies have in some respects been at times of equal interest, but it has not been thought worth while to enumerate them.[1941]

The Königliche Museum at Berlin has a considerable collection of American antiquities, which has been fostered by Humboldt and others, and the ethnological department has made some important publications like those relating to Amerika’s Nordwestküste.[1942]

Waitz in his Anthropologie der Naturvölker (vol. iii.; Die Amerikaner, Th. i., Leipzig, 1862) has enumerated the literature of American anthropology upon which he depended.

The interest in most of the other European countries is more remotely American. The Museum of Ethnography at St. Petersburg is not without some objects of interest.[1943]

In Sweden the Antropologiska Sällskapet of Stockholm began a Tidsskrift in 1875; but it affords little assistance to the Americanist except in comparative study.[1944]

The student will find some suggestions in a little tract by J. J. A. Worsaae, De l’organisation des musées historico-archéologiques dans le Nord et ailleurs. Traduit par E. Beauvois (Copenhagen, 1885), which is extracted from the Mémoires de la société royale des antiquaires de Nord, 1885.

There has begun recently in Leyden an Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie. Herausg. von Krist. Bahnson, Guido Cora [etc.] (Leiden, 1888).

In Italy the Archivio per l’Antropologia et la Etnologia was begun at Florence in 1871, and was later made the organ of the Società Italiana di Antropologia di Etnologia. There is an occasional paper in the Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana, published at Rome.

In Spain the Sociedad Antropológica Española began at Madrid the publication of its Revista de Antropologia in 1875.

The session of the Congrès des Américanistes at Madrid in 1881 gave a new life in Spain to the study of American archæology and history, and out of this impulse there was begun a Biblioteca de los Americanistas, publícala D. Justo Zaragoza; Editor D. Luis Navarro; and the series has been begun with the Recordacion florida, discurso del reino de Guatemala, an hitherto unpublished work (1690) of Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, edited by Justo Zaragoza; and with the Historia de Venezuela, being a third edition of the work of José de Oviedo y Baños, edited by C. F. Duro.

The Museo Nacional in Mexico has grown to have a proper importance,[1945] since the Mexican government has prevented the further exportation of archæological relics. It was founded in 1824 by Fathers Icaza and Gondra, but it owes its creation largely to the skill of Professor Gumesindo Mendoza, its curator, by whose death it lost much.[1946] There is a tendency to draw to it other collections. There was a beginning made to publish illustrations of the relics in the museum sixty years ago, but it came to little,[1947] and it was not until recently the publication of Anales del Museo Nacional de Méjico was begun that there seemed to be a proper effort made. The periodicals Revista Mexicana (1835), and Museo Mexicano (1843-45) have done something to illustrate the subject,—not to name others of less importance. The principal periodical source farther south, the Registro Yucatéco, only ran to four volumes, published at Merida in 1845-46.

The most conspicuous archæological repository in South America is that of the National Museum at Rio de Janeiro, whose published Mémoires contain important contributions to Brazilian Archæology.

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⁂ The editor must be understood as approaching the purely archæological side of the study of Aboriginal America, as a student of the literature pertaining to it, rather than as a critic of phenomena. He has not proceeded even in this course without consultation with Professors Putnam, Haynes, and Brinton, with Mr. Lucien Carr and with Señor Icazbalceta.

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