Early man is only about a century old—in the New World as well as the Old. While a Frenchman theorized about hand axes and the river terraces of the Somme, a German discovered in Missouri the bones of a mastodon which had been stoned and burned by man. That was 1838. Within twenty years early man had won his title to glacial antiquity in Europe. It took ninety, however, for him to get a really sound and solid claim to even 10,000 years in our hemisphere. The study of early man in the Americas has suffered from blindness and prejudice and also from ardor and infatuation. It has run afoul of the dogmatism of science quite as much as the dogmatism of religion. Before nineteenth century science began to talk of glacial man as a possible and provable fact, there was little or no churchly antagonism. The religious had long shown a fondness for what they called antiquarianism. To find ancient things did no violence to the Bible. Adam was still the first man, and any descendant of his who left stone tools about or who carved mysterious signs on rocks was merely “antediluvian”: he had simply missed the boat. In 1690 the Reverend Cotton Mather called the carvings on Dighton Rock in Massachusetts “the wonderful works of God,” and, before those signs were proved to be of sixteenth century origin, more than 600 books and articles had been written about them. To Mather the fossils of extinct mammals proved the validity of the Bible. “There were giants in the earth in those days.” In 1712 he described the “17-foot thighbone” and the four-pound tooth of a mastodon.[1] In this spirit of sweet reasonableness the pursuit of early man went forward for one hundred and fifty years. When the Dutch traveler Peter Kalm wrote in 1772 of certain curious discoveries in New Jersey, he had no idea that he had come on something which, N. C. Nelson was to declare, “hinted strongly of ‘Quaternary age.’”[2] Though the Mound Builders seemed much more ancient to General Rufus Putnam than they now seem to us, they were still post-Adamites when he mapped the prehistoric earthworks of Marietta, Ohio, in 1788. We doubt that Thomas Jefferson worried one way or the other about biblical sanction when he assumed the role of first archaeologist of America by excavating a Virginia mound in 1784, and reporting on it in his _Notes on Virginia_. Like another deist, Voltaire, he suggested that the origins of the American Indians might be determined by comparing their various languages with the languages of Asiatic peoples.