The students of modern archæology have become familiar with startling disclosures; and the supposed identification of living representatives of the race of the pleistocene river beds or cave deposits is too fascinating a one to be readily abandoned by its originator. The men of the River-Drift era are assumed to have been a race of still older and ruder savages than the palæolithic cave-men, who were more restricted in their range, and considerably in advance of them in the variety and workmanship of their weapons and implements. The elder ruder race has vanished; but the cave-race of that indefinite but vastly remote era of pliocene, or post-pliocene Europe, is imagined to still survive within the Arctic frontiers of Canada. In discussing the plausible hypothesis which thus aims at recovering in the hyperboreans of America the race that before the close of Europe’s Pleistocene age, hunted the mammoth, the musk-sheep, and the reindeer in the valleys of the Garonne, Professor Dawkins reviewed the manners and habits of the Eskimo as a race of hunters, fishers, and fowlers, accumulating round their dwellings vast refuse heaps similar to those of the ancient cave-men. Both were ignorant of the metallurgic arts, were excluded to a large extent by a like rigorous climate from access to stone or flint; while they habitually turned to account the available material, resulting from the spoils of the chase: bone, ivory, and deer’s horn, in the manufacture of all needful tools. The implements and weapons thus common to both do unquestionably prove that their manner of life was in many respects similar. Professor Dawkins also notes, what can scarcely seem surprising in any people familiar with the working in bone, namely, the use at times by the Eskimo of fossil mammoth ivory for the handles of their stone scrapers, and adds: “It is very possible that this habit of the Eskimos may have been handed down from the late pleistocene times.” But what strikes him as “the most astonishing bond of union between the cave-men and the Eskimo is the art of representing animals”; and, after noting those familiar to both, along with the correspondence in their weapons, and habits as hunters, he says: “All these points of connection between the cave-men and the Eskimos can, in my opinion, be explained only on the hypothesis that they belong to the same race.”[43]