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
very little indeed. Very few of the tribes possessed even
a primitive art of writing. It is true that the Aztecs
of Mexico, and the ancient Toltecs who preceded them,
understood how to write in pictures, and that, by this
means, they preserved some record of their rulers and of
the great events of their past.
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