we find remains of the same kind, chipped implements of
stone and broken fragments of quartz buried in the drift
of the Mississippi and Missouri valleys. These have
sometimes been found lying beside or under the bones of
elephants and animals unknown in North America since the
period of the Great Ice. Not many years ago, some men
engaged in digging a well on a hillside that was once
part of the beach of Lake Ontario, came across the remains
of a primitive hearth buried under the accumulated soil.
From its situation we can only conclude that the men who
set together the stones of the hearth, and lighted on it
their fires, did so when the vast wall of the northern
glacier was only beginning to retreat, and long before
the gorge of Niagara had begun to be furrowed out of the
rock.

Many things point to the conclusion that there were men
in North and South America during the remote changes of
the Great Ice Age. But how far the antiquity of man on
this continent reaches back into the preceding ages we
cannot say.



CHAPTER III

THE ABORIGINES OF CANADA

Of the uncounted centuries of the history of the red man
in America before the coming of the Europeans we know