Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/336

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322
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

studies, that all the stone implements of our Eastern sea-board are not of one origin, go far to confirm the position of the historical student that an earlier race than the Indian once resided here?

De Costa remarks: "During the eleventh century the red-man lived upon the North American Continent, while the eastern border of his territory could not have been situated far away from the Atlantic coast. In New England he must have succeeded the people known as Skrællings. Prior to that time, his hunting-grounds lay toward the interior of the continent. In course of time, however, he came into collision with the ruder people on the Atlantic coast, the descendants of an almost amphibious glacial man."

This "amphibious glacial man," I submit, is he who fashioned the rude palæolithic implements, that, with bones of extinct and Arctic mammalia, are now found in the glacial drift of our river-valleys; and his "descendants," a rude people, with whom the Indian finally came in contact, were those who fashioned the plainly finished argillite arrow-heads and spears that are now, in part, commingled with the elaborate workmanship of the latest race, save one, that has peopled this continent.

BODILY DEFORMITIES IN GIRLHOOD.

By CHARLES ROBERTS, F. R. C. S.[1]

I HOPE the time is not distant when a careful study of the living model of the child and the adult, and the whole period of the development of the one into the other, will form a part of the student's ordinary course of anatomy and physiology, as such knowledge is essential to the surgeon engaged in removing and preventing deformities of the body. Orthopedic surgery as a specialty is a great evil both to the profession and the public. The specialist who concentrates all his attention on a narrow field of study and practice is tempted to exaggerate its importance, and to analyze and disintegrate his facts till he loses sight of their relation to and their dependence on each other; while, on the other hand, the general practitioner is disheartened and repelled by the apparent complication of the subject, and is induced to hand over to the specialist many cases which he is quite competent to treat, or, as is too often the case, to undervalue the importance or deny the existence of many deformities. How else can we explain the difference in practice between the fussy mechanical ingenuity with which many professed orthopedists treat the slightest deformities of children—which, by the way, they often tell us are only visible to their specially trained eye, and are hidden from that of the

  1. Late Assistant-Surgeon to the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children, etc.