Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/690

 stone implements would have been fashioned, not from jasper, but from the material first at hand.

The shores of the large rivers, where no one denies that he made his earliest habitation, are strewn with pebbles of convenient size and conchoidal fracture, and from these (who can doubt it?) he made his first tools, whether already elsewhere taught the value of jasper or not.

From Belvidere to Chester, from Beach Haven to Havre de Grace, the river beaches may be looked upon as one great pre-historic



quarry littered with the chips, the hammer stones, and the refuse implements of vanished peoples; and while the remote jasper quarries were disassociated of necessity with abundant traces of village life, here were quarry and village sites combined, where the relics of the stone-chipper must needs lie within a few feet or yards of those of the potter, the fisherman, and the hunter. It is here rather than upon the hilltops of Durham and Macungie that archæology may look for man's earlier and intermediate handiwork in stone, the telltale sites whose relics more or less deeply buried shall carry us back to the morning of his first coming.

Meanwhile, with eyes wider open, we are ready for another ransacking of the gravel pits of Trenton and Madisonville. More