It is well to emphasize the fact that “The Stone Age” is a classification of man’s handiwork. It is not a work relating to cultures, although remarks as to the culture and relation of tribes are suggested frequently by certain types of specimens. And the cultures I describe are ancient cultures, not modern. The linguistic map compiled by Major Powell, and the “Handbook of American Indians” present the habitations of existing tribes and their customs, far better and more comprehensively than could I. The Sioux, the Cherokees, the Iroquois (or any one of a score of tribes), may occupy the same region to-day that other and extinct bands of red men claimed for their own centuries ago, and the artifacts found therein may or may not be comparable with those made and used by the present inhabitants of the section. It is these older things and cultures to which I would confine “The Stone Age.” In some respects the points of view of the ethnologist and of the student of folk-lore and linguistics on the one hand, and of the archæologist on the other, are quite divergent. And touching upon this variance of opinion there is something to be said. It has occurred to me that those museum men who collect and study modern material more than the prehistoric have not a clear perspective of the past in this country. As against this statement these gentlemen might properly reply that those of us who study olden times fall into grievous errors because we do not explain ancient cultures through a study of cultures among living tribes. [Illustration: FIG. 3. (S. 2–3.) Block of flint; partly worked. W. A. Jacobs collection. Similar to Fig. 5. ] If any man will read carefully the “Jesuit Relations” and the narrations of our earliest explorers among the Indians, he will see at once that there is a great gulf between the aborigines of long ago and the Indians of the present. The Sun Dance as witnessed by Catlin among the Mandans and the Sun Dance as seen by Dr. George A. Dorsey on the Kiowa Reservation are quite different affairs. The latter showed white man’s influence, the former was more aboriginal. Much of the ancient or prehistoric life we cannot reconstruct, but the day is coming when by minute and unceasing study of these peculiar objects, and by the process of elimination, we shall arrive at certain definite conclusions as to the life of man in the past.