Wilson remarks, in his _Report_ of 1887: “Dr. Leidy did not know these implements to be what they really were, that is implements of the Palæolithic period.”[48] But in view of Dr. Leidy’s whole narrative, his assumption seems to be more consistent with the observed data. In the same narrative he describes a stone scraper, or _teshoa_, as the Shoshones call it, employed by them in the dressing of buffalo-skins, but of so simple a character that he says, “had I not observed it in actual use, and had noticed it among the materials of the buttes, or horizontal strata of indurated clays and sandstone, I would have viewed it as an accidental spawl.” When illustrating the characteristics of a like class of stone implements and weapons of Great Britain, Sir John Evans figures and describes an axe, or war-club, procured from the Indians of Rio Frio in Texas. Its blade is a piece of trachyte, so rudely chipped that it would scarcely attract attention as of artificial working, but for the club-like haft, evidently chopped into shape with stone tools, into which it is inserted. Nothing ruder has been brought to light in any drift or cave deposit.[49] Another modern Texas implement, in the Smithonnia collections at Washington,[50] is a rudely-fashioned flint blade, presenting considerable resemblance to a familiar class of oval implements of the river-drift. So far, therefore, as unskilled art and the mere rudeness of workmanship are concerned, it might be assumed that the aborigines of America are thus presented to our study in their most primitive stage. They had advanced in no degree beyond the condition of the European savage of the River-Drift period, when, at the close of the fifteenth century, they were brought into contact with modern European culture; and nothing in their rude arts seemed to offer a clue to their origin, or any evidence of progression. So far as anything could be learned from their work, they might have entered on the occupation of the northern continent, subsequent to the visits of the Northmen in the tenth century; and, indeed, American archæologists generally favour the opinion that the _Skrælings_, as the Northmen designated the New England natives whom they encountered, were not Red Indians but Eskimo. But whatever may have been the local distribution of races at that date, geological evidence, which has proved so conclusive in relation to European ethnology, has at length been appealed to by American investigators, with results which seem to establish for their continent also its primeval Stone period, and remote prehistoric dawn.