Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/344

328 size, few natural objects on the immediate shores of the river are as first seen by William Penn and his associates. This fact has not been duly considered, and unwarranted conclusions have been published as established truths—all, of course, eliminating antiquity from the Indian history of the region. The fact that a so-called paleolithic implement was found lying on the surface of the river's shore has resulted in a pen picture of a modern Indian attempting to fashion a blade and tossing the pebble aside in disgust. Why, indeed, could not an Indian walk on exposed gravel and pick up a pebble as well as we can to-day?

There are two considerations to which we must give heed when this question is asked. We are, in the first place, tacitly informed that the Indian was given to chipping stone in this haphazard way to supply a sudden need upon the spot, all of which is not only not a reasonable assumption, but absolutely incorrect, as argillite bowlders and pebbles, which are not abundant in the gravels, were not habitually used, but, instead, the mineral was systematically mined and selected with skill, so that failures were reduced to a minimum. Then, again, if the object as found has been lying undisturbed on the river shore for centuries—two centuries at least—why is it that the chips are not there also? These are never found under such circumstances. In fact, they are very rarely found at all in the gravel where the implement itself occurs, and in numbers they exceed the "reject" or finished object at least as ten to one. Furthermore, we are asked to believe that the river shore where we find rude implements is the same to-day as when the Indian wandered along it centuries ago. Fig. 1 shows clearly how the never-resting tidal flow wears away the shore, carrying sand and fine gravels from one point and spreading it elsewhere to form a sand bar, it may be, and turning the channel from one side of the stream to the other, and so exposing long reaches of the shore to wasting, that for many a year had been fixed and apparently secure. Often the mud is entirely removed from the underlying gravel, and abundant traces of Indian occupation are brought to light, and, less frequently, so strong a current attacks a given point that even the gravel is moved and deep holes are formed, to be filled in time with the wasting shore from a point perhaps a mile away. This is the story of the river of to-day, and so it has been for centuries; and yet we are asked to believe that we can fill the moccasin prints of the Indian by walking now along the water's edge. I submit that it is asking a great deal too much.

It has been suggested that rudely chipped implements, when found on the gravelly shore of the river, have fallen out from the bank and rolled down from where they had long been lying. This