One of the most widely-known examples was that of Trenton, on the Delaware, where there was a bed of gravel alleged to be pleistocene, and which seemed to contain enough of 'palæolithic' implements to stock all the museums in the world. The evidence of age was not satisfactory from a geological point of view, and Holmes, with the aid of a deep excavation made for a city sewer, has shown that the supposed implements do not belong to the undisturbed gravel, but merely to a talus of loose _débris_ lying against it, and to which modern Indians resorted to find material for implements, and left behind them rejected or unfinished pieces. This alleged discovery has therefore no geological or anthropological significance. The same acute and industrious observer has inquired into a number of similar cases in different parts of the United States, and finds all liable to objections on similar grounds, except in a few cases in which the alleged implements are probably not artificial. These observations not only dispose, for the present at least, of palæolithic man in America, but they suggest the propriety of a revision of the whole doctrine of 'palæolithic' and 'neolithic' implements as held in Great Britain and elsewhere. Such distinctions are often founded on forms which may quite as well represent merely local or temporary exigencies, or the _débris_ of old work-*shops, as any difference of time or culture. [Illustration: CHIPPED QUARTZITES, MODERN AMERICAN (after Holmes) Upper line (1 to 6), unfinished and rejected pieces. Lower line (7 to 18), progress of development from the unfinished oval form to finished lance and arrow-heads.] For the present, therefore, we may afford to pass over with this slight notice the alleged occurrence of miocene and pliocene man, and this the rather since, if such men ever existed in the northern hemisphere, the cold and submergence of the pleistocene must have cut them off from their more modern successors in such a way that man must practically have made a new beginning at the close of the glacial age. I do not refer here to the finds of skulls and implements in the auriferous gravels of Western America. Some of these, if genuine, might go back to the pliocene age, but in so far as the evidence now available indicates, they all belong to the modern races of Indians, and, in one way or another, by fraud or error, have had assigned to them a fabulous antiquity.