To go no farther back than the river-drift men, if, with Dawkins, we admit that these are the first reliable traces of man, we find that these people were not confined to any one special region of the earth's crust, but, on the contrary, are found impartially scattered from tropical India, through Europe, to the continent of North America. They could not have been distributed through the northern approaches of the continents unless this distribution occurred in preglacial times, because, as Dawkins shows, an icebarrier must have spanned the great oceans in northern latitudes. It seems an almost fruitless speculation to inquire into the manner of their dispersion, yet one is tempted to surmise that if they originated in the tropics, then submerged continents must be restored to offer the means necessary for such a dispersal. If, on the other hand, their home was in the north or south temperate zone, and the distribution circumpolar, which seems more probable, then we have another evidence of the wide separation which the race had undergone, at that early day, from its tropical relatives, the apes. Whatever the facts may ultimately show, this unparalleled distribution of a people in the lowest stages of savagery proves beyond question that man must have preëxisted for an immense period of time, for, with the known fixity of low savage tribes, the time required to disperse this people over the whole earth can only be measured by geological centuries.

The farther we penetrate into the past, and ascertain some definite horizon of man's occurrence, other observers in widely different regions of the earth bring to light traces of man's existence in equally low horizons. The remoteness of man's existence in time and space is so vast that, to borrow an astronomical term, no parallax has thus far been established by which we can even faintly approximate the distance of the horizon in which he first appeared. By this fact we are justified in the assumption that the progenitors of quaternary man, under different genera possibly, must be sought for in the tertiaries.

Science will not gain by the erection of any theoretical barriers against tertiary man, until such definite forms are met with as shall reasonably settle the beds in which he first occurred.

We know in what rocks it would be obviously absurd to look for his remains or the remains of any mammal. So long, however, as forms are found, in the lowest beds of the tertiaries, hav

ing the remotest affinity to his order, we must not cease our care in scanning unbiassed, even the rocks of this horizon, for traces of that creature who until within a few short years was regarded as five thousand, eight hundred and some odd years old, and who despite of protest and prejudice has asserted his claim to an antiquity so great and a dispersion so profound that thus far no tendency to a convergence of his earliest traces has been demonstrated.

PAPERS READ.

THE OCCURRENCE OF MAN IN THE UPPER MIOCENE OF NEBRASKA, By Prof. EDWARD D. COPE, Philadelphia, Pa.

[ABSTRACT.]

A LAST superior molar tooth of an Anthropoid, perhaps of the genus Homo, was found by Mr. F. H. Hazard in a bed of loose calcareous sand in southern Nebraska, in company with fossils of undoubtedly Loup Fork or Upper Miocene age. These fossils are Castor pansus Cope, belonging to the extinct section of the genus called Steneofiber; Mylagaulus monodon, an extinct genus allied to the Agutis, and some other bones.

The mineral condition and surface erosion of these specimens are identical, and as far as appearances go, and were not one of them so like the molar of man, no one would dispute their contemporaneity. But the matrix was of soft consistence, so that the actual horizon of the tooth cannot be positively fixed.

EXHIBITION AND DESCRIPTION OF SOME PALEOLITHIC

PLEMENTS FROM CENTRAL MINNESOTA.
BABBITT, Little Falls, Minn.

[ABSTRACT.]

QUARTZ IM

By Miss FRANC E.

THE Little Falls quartz implements here exhibited are to the last degree primitive, in the matter of shaping and finishing; the former of these two processes having been largely accomplished by means of flaking, and the latter, by pecking and rasping. By flaking is meant, of course, the successive detachment, from the piece undergoing manufacture, of relatively large patches of superfluous material, and by rasping, the removal by attrition of troublesome asperities upon the surfaces of such pieces. Both these styles of handiwork appear to have been executed with a convenient bit "The specimens exhibited before the section are now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Mass., where they can be seen by any one interested.

of quartz, which was shaped into a tool by human hands, or used without shaping, according to the particular conditions of the

case.

These quartzes are consequently not chipped, in the ordinary acceptation of the term: and they may, when singly examined, very well be mistaken by the unpractised observer for capricious products of natural agencies. In studying full series of quartzes identical in type, however, one may usually distinguish, among implements variously worn by usage, and others unmistakably incomplete, some one or two which are perfect in their way, and therefore typical, and which, furnishing a standard of comparison for broken and unfinished specimens, serve as a key to the whole group. The inspection of a suite of such implements thus affords the archæologist a sense of certainty not reached in any other way. For this reason, I have included in the first group of the collection herewith submitted, a greater number of one class of wrought instruments, than would otherwise suffice for purposes of examination.

We should naturally expect objects as ancient as these, to be primitive in appearance: if they were not so, the fact would militate, materially, against their claim to be palæolithic. Certain of the marked peculiarities of these quartzes, however, are distinctly referable to specific causes, outside the range of mere antiquity.

In the way of illustration, let us suppose one of two equally developed branches of the human race to have been afforded free access, in glacial time, to the stores of manageable material supplied by the flint-beds of palæolithic Europe, and the other to have been restricted, during the same era, to the deposits of abundant, but intractable quartz, found in central Minnesota. We must believe that, in a case like this, a divergence in methods of work, and consequently in results, would inevitably ensue, and that such effects, perpetuated through the ages, and intensified by reiteration, would finally eventuate in differences of the same nature with those now existing between these roughly wrought quartz remains, and the typical chipped-flint finds of other countries.

It is to be noted that the quartz mineral in question is differentiated from flint, and the coarser sorts of stone, by two important characteristics which, conjoined, could scarcely fail to modify workmanship therein. These are: first, the irregular fracture of this quartz, which causes particular difficulty in working it into ideal forms by the nice operation of chipping: and second, the enduring