Page:The Journal of geology (IA journalofgeology11893univ).pdf/46

loss to explain the occurrence that he felt compelled to again "take up the examination of the gravel deposits of the valley of the Delaware" with the hope of "finally solving the problem."^[1] The true conditions would have been at once apparent to any one not utterly blinded by the prevailing misconceptions.

The entire simplicity of the archeologic conditions in the Delaware valley may be further illustrated. Had William Penn paused in his arduous traffic with the tawny Delawares, and glanced out with far-sighted eyes from beneath the pendant branches of the great elm at Shackamaxon, he might have beheld an uncouth savage laboriously fabricating rude ice age tools, making the clumsy turtle-back, shaping the mysterious paleolith, thus taking that first and most interesting theoretical step in human art and history. Had he looked again a few moments later he might have beheld the same tawny individual deeply absorbed in the task of trimming a long rude spear point of "Eskimo" type from the refractory argillite. If he had again paused when another handful of baubles had been judiciously exchanged, he would have seen the familiar redskin carefully finishing his arrow points and fitting them to their shafts preparatory to a hunting and fishing cruise on the placid Delaware. This in a brief space of time Penn might have gleaned the story of the ages—the history of the turtle-back, the long spear point and their allies—as in a single sheaf. But the opportunity was wasted, and the heaps of flinty refuse left upon the river bank by the workmen were the only record left of the nature of the work of that day. Two hundred years of aboriginal misfortune and Quaker inattention and neglect have resulted in so mixing up the simple evidence of a day's work, that it has taken twenty-five years to collect the scattered fragments, to sift, separate and classify them, and to assign them to theoretic places in a scheme of culture evolution that spans then thousand years.

Yet is there really nothing in it all, in the theories, the