Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/688

 Turning back to the quarries and refuse heaps, and passing by the many problems of deep archaeological interest that they suggest, suffice it here to say that for one fact already mentioned they claim attention among the foremost fields of American research.

Here, at a distance of from forty to fifty miles from Trenton, are scores of jasper specimens closely resembling the forms of argillite found there buried fifteen and twenty feet in the glacial gravels; imitations, so to speak, of the so-called "palæolith," or



implement of the savage ice man, who, seven thousand years ago, chipped river pebbles on the freshet-swept banks of the Delaware.

We have been told that this object from Trenton, this "palæolith," is a finished implement, a type of an epoch; that the savage who fashioned it was little better than an ape in culture, ignorant even of the use of the bow, and a slayer of his prey with clubs and stones. And science has willingly stolen into the by-paths of wonder and speculation to suggest his origin and fate. Akin it was said to the river-drift man of Europe, he crossed the North Atlantic on an isthmus that in preglacial times stretched from Britain to Greenland to dwell on the cold shores of the Delaware when the great glacier stretched its coping of ice from the