“It would not be wise,” continues Mr Wilson, “to found hasty theories on such strange juxtaposition of relics, possibly of very widely separated periods. The Ashley River has channeled for itself a course through the eocene and post-pliocene formations of South Carolina, and where these are exposed on its shores the fossils are washed from their beds, and become mingled with the remains of recent indigenous and domestic animals, and objects of human art. But the discovery of Dr Klipstein was made in excavating an undisturbed, and, geologically speaking, a comparatively recent formation.” After alluding to the magnificent skeleton of the _Mastodon Ohioticus_ which is now in the British Museum, and in companionship with which an Indian flint arrow-head was found, he adds:— “Another remarkable account, preserved in the ‘American Journal of Science,’ describes the bones of a mastodon, with considerable portions of the skin, found in Missouri, associated with stone spear-heads, axes, and knives, under circumstances which suggest the idea that it had been entangled in a bog, and there stoned to death, and partially consumed by fire. Such contiguity of the works of man with those extinct diluvial giants warns us at least to be upon our guard against any supercilious rejection of indications of man’s ancient presence in the New World as well as the Old. If the evidence is inconsequential or untruthful, future discoveries will not fail to bring it to nought; if, on the contrary, it involves glimpses of an unseen truth, no organised scepticism will prevent the ultimate disclosure of its amplest revelations.” Had man, during the whole of this early prehistoric epoch, whatever its duration may have been, lived like the savage, in what we call the _stone period_? Or had the use of metals and other arts been discovered and lost again—lost, perhaps, because human societies had not attained that coherence and stability necessary to the preservation of the arts? However this may be, it cannot be doubted that the use of the metal tool forms an important era in the progress of civilisation. And Mr Wilson mentions a fact which enables us to understand very readily the transition from the use of stone to the use of metal. Copper is still found in the New World, and probably was at first found in the Old World, in a pure state—in _nuggets_, as an Australian gold-digger would call them—and these could at once be beaten into the shape of an axe by stone hammers without the application of fire. The fragment of copper was to the Indian a new kind of stone, which had the fortunate property of malleability.