Back of the age of man’s monuments of an architectural character, beyond the beginning of the first existing shell-heap, and at a time probably more remote than the first cultivation of maize, it has been supposed that man occupied the Western Continent as a contemporary with the mastodon, megalonyx and other extinct animals. Our information in this department is entirely dependent upon the revelations of geological science. Unfortunately very little data which may be termed truly scientific has been brought to light. While considerable seeming testimony to man’s antiquity on this continent has been produced from a geologic quarter, still it mostly has been of an unscientific character. Fossils and human remains are said to have been discovered in localities and in associations that if the statements of those who found them could be relied on, would give man an antiquity here as great as in the valley of the Somme or in the bone caves of Belgium, France, and England. In the instances alluded to, it is not so often feared that the veracity of discoverers is doubtful as that their general lack of acquaintance with the science should make them liable to error. Where a competent geologist is not present to examine a fossil _in situ_, and report intelligently upon its position and surroundings, the case must remain open to suspicion. Unfortunately for science, this is precisely the weak point in most of the reputed “finds” which are cited as evidence in this field. In 1848, Count Pourtales found in Florida, according to Agassiz, a human jaw and teeth, and bones of the foot, embedded in a calcareous conglomerate forming a part of a coral reef. This reef, according to Agassiz, may be 135,000 years old, and the human remains at least ten thousand years.[105] This statement has been accepted as reliable by Sir Charles Lyell,[106] Daniel Wilson,[107] and other noted scientific gentlemen. Count Pourtales, however, makes a statement which materially alters the case. He says: “The human jaws and other bones found by myself in Florida in 1848, were not in a coral formation, but in a fresh-water sandstone on the shore of Lake Monroe, associated with fresh-water shells or species still living in the lakes (Paulina, Ampullaria, etc.). No date can be assigned to the formation of that deposit, at least from present observation.”[108] Human remains were found a number of years ago embedded in the solid rock in the island of Guadaloupe. “But more careful investigation proved the rock to be a concretionary limestone formed from the detritus of corals and shells.”[109] This rock was ascertained to have been one of very rapid formation.