Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/165

Rh by text and drawing that here stood the famous palisaded town of Hochelaga. Its inhabitants, as his vocabulary shows, belonged to the group of tribes whose word for five is wisk—that is to say, they were of the Iroquois stock. Much as Canada has changed since then, we can still study among the settled Iroquois the type of a race lately in the Stone age, still trace remnants and records of their peculiar social institutions, and still hear spoken their language of strange vocabulary and unfamiliar structure. Peculiar importance is given to Canadian anthropology by the presence of such local American types of man, representatives of a stage of culture long passed away in Europe. Nor does this by any means oust from the Canadian mind the interest of the ordinary problems of European anthropology. The complex succession of races which makes up the pedigree of the modern Englishman and Frenchman, where the descendants perhaps of palæolithic, and certainly of neolithic, man have blended with invading Keltic, Roman, Teutonic-Scandinavian peoples—all this is the inheritance of settlers in America as much as of their kinsfolk who have staid in Europe. In the present scientific visit of the Old to the New World, I propose to touch on some prominent questions of anthropology with special reference to their American aspects. Inasmuch as in an introductory address the practice of the Association tends to make arguments unanswerable, it will be desirable for me to suggest rather than to dogmatize, leaving the detailed treatment of the topics raised to come in the more specialized papers and discussions which form the current business of the section.

The term prehistoric, invaluable to anthropologists since Professor Daniel Wilson introduced it more than thirty years ago, stretches back from times just outside the range of written history into the remotest ages where human remains or relics, or other more indirect evidence, justifies the opinion that man existed. Far back in these prehistoric periods, the problem of Quaternary man turns on the presence of his rude stone implements in the drift gravels and in caves, associated with the remains of what may be called for shortness the mammoth-fauna. Not to recapitulate details which have been set down in a hundred books, the point to be insisted on is how, in the experience of those who, like myself, have followed them since the time of Boucher de Perthes, the effect of a quarter of a century's research and criticism has been to give Quaternary man a more and more real position. The clumsy flint pick and its contemporary mammoth-tooth have become stock articles in museums, and every year adds new localities where palæolithic implements are found of the types catalogued years ago by Evans, and in beds agreeing with the sections drawn years ago by Prestwich. It is generally admitted that about the close of the Glacial period savage man killed the huge maned elephants, or fled from the great lions and tigers on what was then forest-clad valley-bottom, in ages before the later water-flow had cut out the present wide