known in Geology as the Glacial period.* And this gives us the most definite clue to the antiquity of man. If we suppose the glaciers to have been at their height eighty thousand years. ago, the date of their disappearance must have been some thousands of years later, for great depths of ice do not fade away in a night, nor, if we may trust recent observation, in many centuries. But we are content to leave the matter here. Man may have been upon the earth, if the assumed data of the glaciers is correct, sixty or seventy thousand years. there is no sufficient evidence that he lived before the ice cap had receded from the region in which his earliest remains are found. Antiquity of man. But * We have purposely avoided all reference to any other than the one ice period. There may have been many in the course of the earth's history; but it is with the last only that we have to do. XII. REMAINS OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATION IN NORTH AMERICA. Discovery America. WHEN, on an October morning in 1492, an adventurous mariner looked out from his gallant little ship, upon the shores of of this western world, he supposed it to be none other than the eastern border of the older continent. And the people he called Indians, because he supposed them to be one with the inhabitants with which Europe had been long familiar in Southern Asia. But when, nineteen years later, Balboa, looking from the heights of the Isthmus of Darien, discovered a vast ocean extending far to the north and the south and the west, it first became apparent that America was a separate continent. And the people, on further investigation, were pronounced a distinct race vision of the human family. or di This at once raised the question whence they came? The generally received opinion that the human family descended from a single pair, found a new complication in this people, so far separated by wide reaches of ocean from the home of the infant race. Whence came the Indian ? Of the various theories advanced, that their progenitors had crossed Behring's Straits from the dreary regions of Siberia, in search of a more genial clime; that they had drifted unwittingly in Chinese junks upon this fair land; that they were degenerate offspring of the Norsemen, who, centuries before, peopled the shores of Greenland, none were entirely satisfactory, for neither of them was capable of proof. Moreover, it afterward appeared that the Indian in different sections of America corresponded to the real or fancied types of nearly all the races, so that all the theories practically failed. It is not our purpose now to inquire which of these theories is most plausible, nor to attempt to settle the question as to how long a time the Indian occupied the soil of America before the voyage of the valiant Genoese in 1492. For while perplexed with this problem we encounter another still more mysterious and remote, and having in it, therefore, more of curious interest, if not the promise of more satisfactory results. It concerns a race that perished here when the |