"In the future I shall send you such things as I find, either in photograph or, if possible, the objects themselves, and you may rest assured that I shall send you nothing the authenticity of which is not sufficiently established. Unfortunately many persons, especially in the Capital, busy themselves in the fabrication of ancient objects, and for this reason I place no trust in any one but myself or in persons who can have no possible interest in deceiving me.” INDIANA ACADEmy of Science.—At the eighth annual meeting of the Indiana Academy of Science, held in Indianapolis, December 28 and 29, the following papers of anthropologic interest were read: Evidences of man's early existence in Indiana, from the oldest river gravels along the White Water river, by A. W. Butler. The Crawford mound, by H. M. Stoops. Notes on archeology in Mexico, by J. T. Scovell. Ancient earthworks near Anderson, Indiana, by F. A. Walker. Some Indian camping sites near Brookville, by A. W. Butler. Remarkable prehistoric relic, by E. Pleas. The mounds of Brookville township, Franklin county, Indiana, by H. M. Stoops. Remarks on archeological map making, by A. W. Butler. STONE-AXE CURRENCY IN BRITISH NEW GUINEA.-Although the native canoe-builders in the Louisiade archipelago work with adzes made of hoop-iron, the payment for their work is made in stone axes, ten to fifty of these being the price of a canoe. The stone axe is still the accepted medium of exchange in large transactions-pigs, for instance, and wives are valued in that currency. It is only fair, by the way, to mention that the purchase of a wife is stated by the natives not to be such in the ordinary sense; the articles paid are, they say, a present to the girl's father. In Mowatta, sisters are specially valued, as they can be interchanged with other men's sisters as wives.Trotter in Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc., p. 795, Nov., 1892. MAN AND THE GLACIAL PERIOD. BY W J MCGEE. I. Wheresoever workers assemble, there idlers gather to feast on the fruits of honest toil; a part are pitiable paupers, some traffic in unwholesome wares, others swindle the unwary under the cloak of honest dealing and cheat justice by specious pleas, and still others steal and rob. Thus the laborer is always the prey of the idler, and progressive mankind is handicapped by the burden of the helpless and the perverse. In like manner the workshops and market-places of science are haunted by harpies; a part are the feeble of mind who always absorb but never produce, some starve and poison hungry minds with the husks of fiction and the lotus of myth, others foist falsehood on the unwary under the guise of science and hide from justice behind shields of skillfully-woven words, and still others scoff at reason and rob knowledge of its glory. Thus creative genius is the prey of intellectual parasites, and the progress of knowledge is hindered by the helpless and the perverse. Anthropology is the youngest of the sciences, and even yet is barely crystallized out of the original magma of unsystemic thought; moreover, anthropology is the most complex and obscure among the subjects of knowledge, so that its field gives but treacherous ground even for the cautious student. Yet the science of man is peculiarly attractive to human kind, and for this reason the untrained are constantly venturing upon its purlieus; and since each heedless adventurer leads a rabble of followers, it behooves those who have at heart the good of the science not only to guard carefully their own footsteps, but to bell the blind leaders of the blind. The blind leaders are sometimes comparatively innocent traffickers in the imaginary, like unto the sellers of poison drinks, and sometimes the less pardonable deceivers of the unwary and defeaters of justice, like unto commercial swindlers; while the blind led are the dupes of the one and the victims of the other. No question in anthropology is more enticing than that of human antiquity, and there is much writing on the subject-some good, more bad. In the latter class fall two recent publications, which have much in common. The first of these is Doughty's "Evidences of Man in the Drift; " the second is Wright's "Man and the Glacial Period." Both works profess to treat of the geologic antiquity of man, though neither author can be classed as geologist or anthropologist. The former is a numismatist, a member of the American Numismatic and Archæological Society, and makes no pretense of geologic skill or repute; the latter is a professor of theology in a theologic seminary, yet lays claim withal to geologic skill, which serves to render his writing the more specious. 11. Mr. Doughty appears to have made a large collection of icewrought and water-worn pebbles and ferruginous nodules from the glacial drift, and to have found in their varied and curious forms suggestions of elaborate art. The ferruginous nodules are his most precious relics, abounding as they do in the fantastic forms of clay cemented by iron oxides. "To geologists these tablets are known as a variety of clay stones" (page 13); but to Mr. Doughty they are engraved tablets rich in records of the past. "They bear upon their flattened surfaces figures of human and animal forms, sometimes singly represented, but more frequently in groups," of which one "represents a man with Caucasian features sitting in the presence of several highly-colored individuals, who approach him with bowed heads. In each instance, either the seated figure holds a staff bearing the head of a serpent, or the staff is held before or behind him by another. The seated figure almost always wears an 1 Evidences of Man in the Drift-a description of certain archæological objects recently discovered in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey: read before the American Numismatic and Archæological Society, March 28, 1892; by Francis Worcester Doughty. New York: privately printed, 1892. 2 The International Scientific Series. Man and the Glacial Period; by G. Frederick Wright, D. D., LL. D., F. G. S. A., professor in Oberlin Theological Seminary, assistant on the United States Geological Survey, author of The Ice Age in North America, Logic of Christian Evidences, etc.; with an Appendix on Tertiary Man, by Prof. Henry W. Haynes (fully illustrated). New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1892. * * * elaborate feathered crown resembling that worn by the Palenque figures" (page 10). "Having no desire to theorize," Mr. Doughty merely suggests that the scene represents "the ruler of the serpent clan, or totem, receiving homage from subordinate tribes." "Many of these clay tablets are painted, but the arrangement of color, which resembles the Chinese style, is such as to render it very difficult to determine the nature of the scenes depicted.” They are also patinated. A perplexing feature, however, is "the want of proper division between the figures," which is ascribed to a fundamental idea of "space economy," and which "to our eye creates hopeless confusion. The large figures are made up of many smaller ones, and the designs are hard to decipher. * * * A foot in one group is liable to serve as a head in another, the arm of one becomes the leg of another," etc. Moreover, "a specimen held one way shows one design, reversed another, turned again, still another, and so on up to four." Most readers will heartily concur in the author's qualified opinion that "it is hard to understand such artistic methods" (page 11). The sculpturing is not external alone: "Many of the tablets contain a layer of clay through the center. ***This interior layer of clay presents a second face as perfect as the first, and in every case is found worked up with figures or painted;" and "the most perfect depictions of the human form** * were found upon the inside clay surfaces of some of these stones." Mr. Doughty's active imagination is able to find not only "traces of animal matter" in the tablets, but "parchment or skin dressed in clay;" and upon this scroll" appears an excellent male head, a full figure of a very fat gentleman, and other devices" (page 12). In short, "these tablets appear to be simply the clay books of the men of the drift ;" and this interpretation is sustained by a quotation from Job, xix, 23 (page 13). The pebbles are hardly less significant to Mr. Doughty; many are heads in profile and full face; some bear "Indian figures and feathered head-dresses strongly marked. Others represent faces of a distinctly Caucasian type, and are often heavily bearded. Sometimes the beard is represented as a mere goatee, at others as being blown by the wind, at others still cut square after the Assyrian style." "Other heads have been found of strongly-marked negroid features. and cranial shape;" and it is truly remarkable that the Caucasian pebbles are white, the negroid pebbles black and the Indian pebbles brown, and even more remarkable that the Caucasian heads "wear hats of various recognized patterns" (page 9). Most striking of all is the solitary instance "of a white face with stronglymarked Celtic features, and a heavy red beard and moustache." The author suggestively adds, "I have found no representative of the cow, but of the man-headed bull I have several examples" (page 10). Other "existing animals" are "the dog, horse, sheep, rabbit, black bear, wolf, anthropoid ape, elephant, green adder, parrot and smaller birds, and the dolphin or whale." There are also many prehistoric animal forms, including "an animal of hippopotimus [sic] type, a large web-footed bird somewhat resembling the dodo, and, lastly, a reptile with a long snout and flattened paddle-like tail" (page 10). Not content with proving the existence of man in the drift by these remarkable carvings, Mr. Doughty ventures to predict that the "Old Man of the Mountain, that gigantic human profile cut on the New Hampshire hills" (an imaginative sketch of which embellishes the work), was carved out "untold ages ago by the men of the drift" (page 15). It should be added that Mr. Doughty rejects the "well-known glacial theory" and accepts the view of Ignatius Donnelly, that "the drift was suddenly thrown upon the earth either by the contact of our planet with a comet or by some other agency not understood" (page 7). In brief the book is a bundle of absurdities worthy of notice. only because it is representative of the vain imaginings so prevalent among unscientific collectors and because its maleficent influence has been multiplied by favorable press notices. III. The Reverend Professor Wright begins with an introductory chapter, in which he discusses the characters of existing glaciers. He says: "A glacier is a mass of ice so situated and of such a size as to have motion in itself. *** Upon ascending a glacier far enough, one reaches a part corresponding to the lake out of which a river often flows. Technically this motionless part is called the névé. *** The névé is the reservoir from which the glacier gets both its supply of ice and the impulse which gives it its first movement" (pages 2, 3). Unfortunately the author does not indicate how a moving body can have a motionless part, nor how |