| | | Mississippi. | | | | | | "Moraines de Fond," | Till, or Older | Boulder Clays, with | | or Boulder Clay | Boulder Clay. | Local and some | | proper. | | Travelled Boulders. | | | | | | | | Old Land Surfaces--Peat | | Ancient Diluvial | Pebbly Beds and | under Boulder Clay, | | Sand. | Weyburne Sands, | Local Gravels and | | | Lignitic Forest | Sands. | | | Beds. | | | | | Pre-glacial Gravels of | | | | British Columbia. | +---------------------+--------------------+--------------------------+ In what part of this sequence did man appear? In answer to this, I think it is now generally admitted that he is not certainly known earlier than the Post-glacial period. Various supposed indications of his presence in “Interglacial” Glacial, Pliocene, and even Miocene deposits have proved on examination to be unreliable. America has recently put forth claims to have been inhabited by man in the Pliocene, on the faith of remains found in auriferous gravels in the West. But the facts that the implements and bones found are modern in type, that the gravels were deeply mined by the Indians, and that the objects found, as mortars for dressing gravel, etc., are in many cases such as they would be likely to leave in their excavations, have discredited these supposed discoveries. Still more recently, chipped flints found in gravels in New Jersey, by Abbott, have been supposed to carry back the Indians of the East coast to the Glacial period. It is evident, however, from the description of these deposits by the late Mr. Belt and by Professor Cook, director of the Survey of New Jersey, that they are really Post-glacial, that their age must be estimated by study of the local conditions, and that there is no good ground for correlating them with the upper members of the true Glacial drift to the northwards, with which they had been somewhat rashly identified. Irrespective of the doubtful character of many if not all of the so-called implements, the deposits in which they are found is confessedly not a product of the ice of the Glacial period proper, whether that was, as some maintain, a period of land glaciation as far south as New Jersey or not. It belongs to a time of denudation by water, aided perhaps by floating ice, and is not necessarily older than the river gravels of the Somme, which, like it, contain boulders and imply conditions of torrential action and climate which have long since passed away.