Such an appeal to European archæology can scarcely fail to suggest some very striking contrasts thereby involved. As the thoughtful student dwells on all the phenomena of change and geological revolution which he has to encounter in seeking to assign to the man of the European Drift his place in vanished centuries, his mind is lost in amazement at the vista of that long-forgotten past. Yet inadequate as the intermediate steps may appear, there are progressive stages. Amid all the overwhelming sense of the vastness of the period embraced in the changes which he reviews, the mind rests from time to time at well-defined stations, in tracking the way backward, through ages of historical antiquity, into the night of time, and so to that dim dawn of mechanical skill and rational industry in which the first tool-makers plied their ingenious arts. But, so far as yet appears, it is wholly otherwise throughout the whole western continent, from the Gulf of Mexico northward to the pole. North America has indeed a Copper age of its own very markedly defined; for the shores and islands of Lake Superior are rich in pure native copper, available for industrial resources without even the most rudimentary knowledge of metallurgic arts. But the tools and personal ornaments fashioned out of this more workable material are little, if at all, in advance of the implements of stone; and, with this exception, the primitive industry of North America manifests wondrously slight traces of progression through all the ages now assigned to man’s presence on the continent. The means available for forming some just estimate of the character of native American art are now abundant. In the National Museum at Washington; the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Mass.; the Peabody Academy at Salem; the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia; the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass.; and in various Historical Societies and University Museums throughout the States; the student of American archæology has the means of obtaining a comprehensive view of the native arts. At the Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia in 1876, the various States vied with one another in producing an adequate representation of the antiquities specially characteristic of their own localities; and numerous valuable reports, of the Smithsonian Institution, the United States Geographical Surveys, the Geological Survey of Canada, and the Geological Surveys of various States, have furnished data for determining the prehistoric chroniclings of the northern continent.