when the whole civilized world was progressing in wealth and material comfort at a rate never witnessed before, the Senator concludes that the fact is due solely to a policy which compelled them to pay out of their own earnings many millions of dollars every year to establish and maintain other industries. It would be far more reasonable to conclude that if they had been exempt from this heavy taxation and permitted to expend their money for the improvement of their own property and the education of their children, there would be fewer mortgages upon their land, and a greater degree of comfort and prosperity among the farmers and country people.

J. G. CARLISLE.

PREHISTORIC MAN IN AMERICA.

FAR is near to wings of light, while near is far to wings of sound. On the chronograph of human history, the age of man is long; measured on the geologic dial of the sage, it is short. The year is not a practicable unit for the measurement of the age of man on the globe, as the numbers mount to inconceivable terms; and geologic epochs are not good, for then fractional parts are involved. When we speak of the time this world has been occupied by man, we are compelled to speak indefinitely of many centuries of centuries, or else-still indefinitely-of parts of geologic periods. The history of man has been recorded in the tomes of libraries only since the invention of letters, but a much longer period anterior to that is recorded on the leaves of the book of rocks. The last period recognized in geology is known as the Pleistocene. It begins in the United States with the invasion of a great ice sheet from the north, which gradually extended southward far down the Appalachian Mountains, and nearly to the mouth of the Ohio in the valley of the Mississippi; while in the region of the far west, mountains and table lands were covered with snow and ice, but many of the valleys were left naked. The great ice sheet retreated poleward; then advanced again, perhaps in some places more than once; but finally it fell back to the arctic regions. The work accomplished by this ice agency was very great; it ground and shaped the mountains, destroyed and constructed hills, fashioned valleys, and formed lake basins. It also left vast deposits of clay, sand, and gravel widely distributed over the northern half of the United States. Since its final retreat to the north, rains and rivers, with waves and tides, have been engaged in reshaping the country. The history of this Pleistocene period in the United States is now comparatively well known, but its time is very short compared to the other periods known to geologists. A farmer has crossed the continent. The road to the railway station, six miles

away, he knows well; but from there to San Francisco his knowledge is in larger units of distance, and the topographic details are vague. The geologic scale of time may be compared with the farmer's scale of transcontinental distance: the Pleistocene period is comparatively short and well known; the antecedent periods are vast and vague. All we know of mankind, as dwelling in the region of the United States, is quite within the Pleistocene period, and we have no definite knowledge of his occupancy of this land earlier than about the middle part of the Pleistocene. But there seems to be good evidence that men were here at the time the ice retreated far away to the north and came again to middle latitudes in the United States. So it is that human history in the United States embraces a fraction of a geologic period; but geologists are not able to translate it into the years of the common chronology; they can only say that it comprises many centuries of centuries.

We

The varying classes of magnitudes with which the mind deals must have varying classes of units for their measurement. do not reckon astronomic space in gallons, nor the contents of the sea in seconds of arc. The annalist has a scale divided into centuries and years; the geologist has a scale divided into epochs of rock-formation. But the anthropologist cannot use these; he adopts a scale of his own, with units that are degrees of culture, exhibiting the progress of mankind, through savagery and barbarism and civilization, into the period of modern science which we now occupy. The archæologist must use all these scales, and he endeavors to discover a common unit; but in this he is not fully successful. In speaking of prehistoric man in the United States, it will be well sometimes to use the geologic scale, sometimes the annalist's scale, and sometimes the culture scale, for in so doing a clearer comprehension of the history and characteristics of prehistoric man will be obtained.

Whatever history of mankind in America we have which antedates the Columbian discovery, is archæologic. There is much of this early history, for in late years many men have been engaged in the collection of its data. It is one of the grand discoveries of the scientific era of culture, that man has inhabited the globe from high antiquity, that the primal man was of rude

culture, and that his progress from the lowest to the highest is marked by stages well defined, in a broad way. Human evolution is as much a part of science as botany, chemistry, electricity, or astronomy. For this reason, archæologic research is intensely attractive. The great antiquity of the race was long denied, and those who first ventured to affirm it were denounced. But gradually many investigators weighed the facts and were convinced. Then came a reaction, and less careful scholars became propagandists and defended the new doctrine with sharp polemics, until they carried the conclusion beyond the warrant of facts, and affirmed the existence of races and cultures in past geologic epochs where science itself finds no proof of their existence. Nowhere has this unscientific method been more fully developed than in the United States, unless perchance it be in France, where the wildest results have been obtained. It is here proposed to point out some of this exploitation on the verge of science, and in so doing the methods of archæologic research will be illustrated and the sounder results of scientific investigation indicated.

Widely scattered throughout the United States, from sea to sea, artificial mounds are discovered, which may be enumerated by the thousands or hundreds of thousands. They vary greatly in size; some are so small that a half-dozen laborers with shovels might construct one of them in a day, while others cover acres and are scores of feet in height. These mounds were observed by the earliest explorers and pioneers of the country. They did not attract great attention, however, until the science of archæology demanded their investigation. Then they were assumed to furnish evidence of a race of people older than the Indian tribes. Pseudarchæologists descanted on the "Moundbuilders" that once inhabited the land, and they told of swarming populations who had reached a high condition of culture, erecting temples, practicing arts in the metals, and using hieroglyphs. So The Mound-builders formed the theme of many an essay on the wonders of ancient civilization.

The research of the past ten or fifteen years has put this subject in a proper light. First, the annals of the Columbian epoch have been carefully studied, and it is found that some of the mounds have been constructed in historical time, while early ex

plorers and settlers found many actually used by tribes of North American Indians; so we know that many of them were builders of mounds. Again, hundreds and thousands of these mounds have been carefully examined, and the works of art found therein have been collected and assembled in museums. At the same

time, the works of art of the Indian tribes, as they were produced before modification by European culture, have been assembled in the same museums, and the two classes of collections have been carefully compared. All this has been done with the greatest painstaking, and the Mound-builder's arts and the Indian's arts are found to be substantially identical. No fragment of evidence remains to support the figment of theory that there was an ancient race of Mound-builders superior in culture to the North American Indians. The course of this investigation has been marked by some curious episodes in the history of research. For example, the earlier writers extolled the skill of the sculptors of the mound-building time, and they found carvings of birds and mammals supposed to represent foreign species with great accuracy; but these very works which they praised so highly have been re-examined and found so rude that, though a bird may well be identified as such, it can rarely be recognized as any specific bird of this or any other country.

That some of these mounds were built and used in modern times, is proved in another way. They often contain articles. manifestly made by white men, such as glass beads and copper ornaments. Now, the very first students of this subject, who ran wild with theories, discovered these things, that is, Indian relics; but, having postulated an ancient mound-building race, they easily invented an explanation for the facts which were discordant with their theory. They said, "These are modern intrusions "; and there is an extensive literature relating to intrusive burials in the mounds, wherein the Indians are described as vandals, desecrating the tombs of ancient civilized peoples. If anything was found in a mound in conflict with the favorite hypothesis, it was held to be but the better evidence of the antiquity of moundbuilding.

When the white man first came to this country, he furnished the Indian with firearms, steel traps, and horses; and the agri