Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ... THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN THE DELAWARE VALLEY. AN INQUIRY AS TO THE AGE OF SOME OF THE CHIPPED STONES CALLED " TURTLEBACKS." By HENRY C. MERCER. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. No class of archaeological specimens has attracted more attention in late years than the family of roughly chipped points or ovate stone blades of various shape, known in France as coups de poing and haches, in England as Drift implements or implements of Drift type, and in America as Trenton gravel specimens, "paleoliths," "turtlebacks," or looked at from a certain point of view, as wasters, "rejects and failures." Made of jasper, argillite, ryolite, quartz, chert, novaculite, and many other chippable stones on this side of the Atlantic -- sometimes of quartzite in Spain, and chiefly of flint in England and France, a general similarity was once supposed to run through them all, but the more they are studied, the more they seem to vary in make, shape, and purpose. There are large chips among them in France (at Abbeville) worked only on one side, small knives classed with them in England (at Caddington), and thick disc-like forms, flat on one side, of the same category in America (at Trenton). But the great majority of them-- thick, clumsy, and heavy -- present a leaf-like shape tapering to a sort of rude point at one end. (See Figs, 1, 2, 4, 6, 16, 24, 30, etc.) Told that they are implements, the visitor to the museum, who often looks in vain for signs of wear in their cutting edges, wonders how they were used, whether grasped in the hand, as is sometimes supposed, or mounted in hafts of wood or bone. Boucher de Perthes found them in the Somme gravels associated with the bones of the mammoth and rhinoceros, which at once set the geological stamp of great antiquity upon...
