of ornament; carvings in stone, shell, and bone;
implements and ornaments of stone, shell, bone, mica, clay, copper, and
other substances; fragments of cloth and twine twisted from vegetable
fibres, which have been preserved through charring. One case in this
room is devoted to a collection of objects from caves in Kentucky and
Tennessee, and contains many interesting fabrics, including a large
piece of cloth woven from bark-fibre, shoes formed by braiding leaves of
the cat-tail rush, and many other things kept for us in the dry air of
the caves through uncounted centuries. In the gallery are grouped
several collections from Mexico and Central America, which are
especially rich in pottery.

In the room, on the second floor, over this one are stored the most
ancient--most primitive--evidences of man's presence yet discovered in
the Atlantic States,--evidences in the shape not only of chipped stones
of his fashioning, but relics of his very frame, which incontestably
extend the period of human occupation along our Atlantic coast back at
least to the glacial era. I refer to the palaeolithic remains exhumed by
Dr. C. C. Abbott from the terraces of river-drift in the valley of the
Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. These deposits of pebbles and sand owe
their origin to the continental glacier, whose front reached in solid
mass almost to that locality; through them was worn the bed of the
present river, and whatever is contained in their undisturbed mass can
belong to no more recent date than the later days of the glacial period.

In these gravels near his home, when cut through by railway-building and
the wearing of the river-bank, Dr. Abbott found his palaeoliths under
such circumstances as left no doubt that they were quite as old as the
formation of the bed itself. If you are inexperienced, and take in your
hand one of these specimens by itself, it may seem to you simply a
small, broken boulder or a fragment from some ledge; but the trained eye
sees (what observation and experiment confirm) that fractures like those
on these specimens are not such as are made by accident; and when a
hundred specimens are displayed before you, all doubt as to their origin
vanishes at a glance.

Some of these relics are deeply eroded by the weather, others much less
so; some are pebbles that have required only a slight chipping to adapt
them to their owner's need, others sharp-edged, elaborately flaked,
"turtle-backed" weapons, similar in