In the room, on the second floor, over this one are stored the most ancient--most primitive--evidences of man's presence yet discovered in the Atlantic States,--evidences in the shape not only of chipped stones of his fashioning, but relics of his very frame, which incontestably extend the period of human occupation along our Atlantic coast back at least to the glacial era. I refer to the palaeolithic remains exhumed by Dr. C. C. Abbott from the terraces of river-drift in the valley of the Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. These deposits of pebbles and sand owe their origin to the continental glacier, whose front reached in solid mass almost to that locality; through them was worn the bed of the present river, and whatever is contained in their undisturbed mass can belong to no more recent date than the later days of the glacial period. In these gravels near his home, when cut through by railway-building and the wearing of the river-bank, Dr. Abbott found his palaeoliths under such circumstances as left no doubt that they were quite as old as the formation of the bed itself. If you are inexperienced, and take in your hand one of these specimens by itself, it may seem to you simply a small, broken boulder or a fragment from some ledge; but the trained eye sees (what observation and experiment confirm) that fractures like those on these specimens are not such as are made by accident; and when a hundred specimens are displayed before you, all doubt as to their origin vanishes at a glance. Some of these relics are deeply eroded by the weather, others much less so; some are pebbles that have required only a slight chipping to adapt them to their owner's need, others sharp-edged, elaborately flaked, "turtle-backed" weapons, similar in shape to much of the more modern and finished work in flint. With few exceptions, however, these are made of argillite, and in many cases they have lost the fineness of edge and angle by weathering and by attrition against the gravel in which they were rolled under glacial floods. They bear about the same relation in their roughness and shapelessness to the carefully-worked relics of the red Indian found on the surface, or in the accumulation of soil resulting from the decay of countless generations of forest and herbage which everywhere covers the old gravels, as the matchlock of the Pilgrim Fathers bears to our target-rifle. But they are of human origin, and assert the presence of humanity on the Atlantic coast of America at the close of the glacial period just as logically as the teeth in the green-sand argue sharks in the Cretaceous sea.