The Red-Man, it thus appears, is among the ancients of the earth. How old he may be it is impossible to determine; but with one American school of ethnologists, no historical antiquity is sufficient for him. The earliest contributions of the New World to the geological traces of man were little less startling, when first brought to light, than any that the European drift has since revealed. The island of Guadaloupe, one of the lesser Antilles, discovered by Columbus in 1493, furnished the first examples of fossil man, and of works of art imbedded in the solid rock. They seemed to the wondering naturalist to upset all preconceived ideas of the origin of the human race. But more careful investigation proved the rock to be a concretionary limestone formed from the detritus of corals and shells. The skeletons are probably by no means ancient, even according to the reckoning of American history; though supplying a curious link in the palæontological treasures both of the British Museum and the Jardin des Plantes. Dr. Lund, the Danish naturalist, has described human bones, bearing, as he believed, marks of geological antiquity, found along with those of many extinct mammals, in the calcareous caves of Brazil. Fossil human remains have also been recovered from a calcareous conglomerate of the coral reefs of Florida, estimated by Professor Agassiz to be not less than 10,000 years old;[4] and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia treasures the _os innominatum_ of a human skeleton, a fragment of disputed antiquity, dug up near Natchez, on the Mississippi, beneath the bones of the megalonyx.[5]