Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/38

28 by floes and icebergs in spring-time, if not all the year round. The hearth itself tells only that its builders knew the uses of fire, and constructed rude fireplaces, but is silent as to their knowledge of water-craft, as to their implements and utensils, as to whether they were hunters or fishermen, and so as to nearly all of their habits and customs. Miss Babbitt's quartz-chips appear (though the geologic relations are somewhat obscure) to represent the site of a primitive workshop or rendezvous on the banks of a river heading in the ice-sheet a few miles or scores of miles up-stream. The artificial origin of the chips has been disputed, and is indicated by their concentration in a certain local stratum and their absence from contiguous strata and other localities rather than by their form—the distribution being apparently explicable only on the hypothesis that they were artificially accumulated, whether or not they were artificially fabricated. The rude chips throw no light on the habits, customs, or environment of the men



by whom they may have been fashioned, save that, if artificial, they exhibit the lowest known grade of culture; but this testimony of the quartz-chips is apparently antagonized by that of the polished-stone axe and disk, the copper spear-head, etc., recorded by N. H. Winchell from another part of the same terrace-plain.

The deposit in which the Madisonville implement was found