Fig. 76.—General section of Baltimore and Ohio cut, near Claymont, Delaware, where Mr. Cresson found palæolithic implements figured in the text (from photograph by Cresson).
The age of these deposits in which implements have been found at Claymont and at Trenton will be referred to again when we come to the specific discussion of the date of the Glacial period. It is sufficient here to bring before our minds clearly, first, the fact that this at Claymont is connected with the river floods accompanying the ice at its time of maximum extension, and when there was a gradually increasing or differential depression of the country to an unknown extent to the northward.
Two radically different theories are presented to account for the deposits variously known as the Columbia gravel and the Philadelphia brick-clay. Mr. McGee, in the monograph above referred to, supposes them to have been deposited during a period of a general subsidence of the coast-line; so that they took place at about tide-level. Mr. Upham, on the other hand, supposes them to have been deposited during the period of general elevation to whose influence he mainly attributes the Glacial period itself. In his view much of the shallow sea-bottom adjoining the present shore off from Delaware and Chesapeake Bays was then a land-surface, and the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna Rivers, coming down from the still higher elevations of the north, flowed through extensive plains so related to the northern areas of elevation that deposition was occurring in their valleys, owing in part to the flooded condition of the streams, in part to the differential elevation, and in part to the superabundance of silt and other débris furnished by the melting ice-sheet in the head-waters of these streams.
The deposits of Trenton gravel occurred much later, at a time when the ice had melted far back towards the head-waters of the Delaware, and after the land had nearly resumed its present relations of level, if indeed it had not risen northward to a still greater relative height.
As would be expected from the climatic conditions accompanying the Glacial epoch, man’s companions in the animal world were very different during the period when the high-level river gravels of America were forming from those with which he is now associated. From the remains actually discovered, either in these gravels or in close proximity to them, we infer that, while the mastodon was the most frequent of the extinct quadrupeds with which man then had to contend in that region, he must have been familiar also with the walrus, the Greenland reindeer, the caribou, the bison, the moose, and the musk ox.
In the Glacial Terraces of Europe.
The existence of glacial man in Europe was first determined in connection with the high-level river gravels already described in the valley of the Somme, situated in Picardy in the northern part of France. Here in 1841 Boucher de Perthes began to discover rudely fashioned stone implements in undisturbed strata of the gravel terraces, whose connection with the Glacial period we have already made clear. But for nearly twenty years his discoveries were ignored by scientific men, although he made persistent efforts to get the facts before them, and published a full account of them with illustrations as early as 1847. Some suggested fraud on the part of the workmen; others without examination declared that the gravel must have been disturbed; while others, still, denied altogether the artificial character of the implements.