Page:The Journal of geology (IA journalofgeology11893univers).pdf/203

the other hand, the localities of Little Falls, Minn., Medora, Ind., and Loveland, Ohio, which have recently been urged as offering evidence of glacial man, were passed in silence. The paper referred constantly to the chipped stones as "paleolithic implements," and ignored the recent issue raised by Professor Holmes' investigations which are thought by many to make it probable that, whatever their geological age, the chipped stones are rejects and failures incident to the process of neolithic manfacture, and are therefore neither "paleolithic" nor "implements" in the proper sense of the terms. In the discussion, attention was called to the significant omission of three out of six of the localities which a year ago were urged as furnishing evidence of glacial man. Attention was called to the Ohio exhibit in the Anthropological Department of the Exposition in Chicago as furnishing proof that the testimony relating to the Newcomerstown locality cannot be accepted as having scientific value, because the point marked upon the photographs of the exhibit as being the location of the find cannot be rationally supposed to be the actual locality. Considerable discussion also turned upon the possibilities of intrusion, particularly through the agency of the growth and decay of the roots of successive generations of forests. It was urged that, allowing not more than six thousand years since the close of the glacial period, and allowing one hundred years for a generation of trees, sixty generations may have grown in succession. In the process of the growth of the large roots of the trees, the gravels and other material were pressed laterally and to some extent upward by their expansion, and on the decay of the roots the space they occupied was refilled, presumably from above, in part at least. In the case of trees which have tap roots the penetration is deep, particularly on gravel terraces where the substratum is porous and relatively dry and the ground-water far below the surface. It was urged that, in the refilling of the numerous tubes formed by the growth and decay of the roots of so many generations of trees, opportunities would be afforded for the occasional and sometimes deep penetration of relics that were originally