Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/334

320 well-designed a weapon as the argillite spear-head should not have utilized stone in various other ways to meet their wants, precisely as the Indian did subsequently. No other form of implement than these spear-heads was clearly associated with them, except when found on the surface, and so not clearly separable from the true Indian implements associated therewith. Recently, the occurrence of a stone hammer, traces of fire—charcoal—and a flat stone bearing marks of a hammer or rubbing-stone, at a depth of nearly three feet below the surface, has rendered it quite probable that a proportion of the surface-formed relics of these patterns should be regarded as of other than Indian origin. If we examine a series of the stone implements of the only other American race—the Esquimaux—we will find that not only is the variation in pattern very considerable, but that precisely such forms of domestic implements as are now in use in the Arctic regions, among the Chukches, are common "relics" in New Jersey. In his recent volume of Arctic explorations, Professor Nordenskiöld describes a series of stone hammers and a stone anvil, which are used together for crushing bones. Every considerable collection of stone implements gathered along our sea-board, anywhere from Maine to Maryland, contains numbers of identical objects.

While many of these hammers and mortars are unquestionably of Indian origin, no valid reason can be urged that a proportion of them are not of the same origin as the argillite spear-heads. Indeed, grooved stone hammers have been found quite deeply imbedded in the sand—as deep as the usual depth at which argillite arrow-points occur; but this, of itself, is scarcely significant. So unstable is the surface of the earth, where sand prevails, that the actual position, when found, of any single specimen, is of little importance. It is only when thousands have been gathered with great care, and under the most favorable circumstances, that any inferences may be drawn. This is true of the argillite arrow-heads, of which thousands have been gathered, and presumably true of the hammers and mortars, because such implements are common among an American race which uses also such spear-points as are so abundant in New Jersey. The similarity between a Chukche spear-point figured by Nordenskiöld and an Esquimau spear figured by Lubbock and the New Jersey specimens is very striking. Of course, such similarity may be considered as mere coincidence, but that it has an important bearing on the question becomes evident when the many circumstances suggestive of a pre-Indian race on the Atlantic sea-board are collectively considered. Singly, any fact may be held to be of little or no value; but when many of like significance are gathered together, they are self-supporting, and the one central fact becomes established.

Basing the supposition that palæolithic man was not the ancestor