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 I IO AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899

Whitney's time the evidence has been strengthened by Becker, and especially by his statement that Mr Clarence King, Director of the Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, found a pestle in the tufa- ceous deposits under the lava cap of Tuolumne table mountain and removed it from the matrix with his own hands.

It is impossible not to be deeply impressed by the amount and consistent nature of the evidence presented ; yet such is the magnitude of the proposition to be sustained that even this testi- mony seems inadequate, and we seek by reexamination and renewed research to determine its exact strength and true sig- nificance.

AGE OF THE AURIFEROUS GRAVELS

The substantial correctness of the geologic determinations of Whitney has recently been made fully apparent by the able geol- ogists of the U. S. Geological Survey. It was expected by many students of the subject that the relic-bearing gravels would in time prove to be younger than Whitney believed ; that they would be found to correspond in age with the Glacial period — possibly with the closing episodes of that period as determined in the eastern states ; and others were confident that they would prove to be even post-Glacial ; but instead of this, Becker, Lind- gren, Turner, and Diller have extended the gravel-forming epoch to cover the Miocene and probably the greater part of the Eocene, thus making comparisons with the close of the Glacial period hardly more reasonable than the attempt to include the whole group of phenomena within the period of biblical record. To say that they were ten times or a hundred times older than the Glacial period, as represented by the greatest extension of the ice in Ohio and Delaware valleys, would probably not be doing justice to a lapse of time that can be expressed only in several geologic periods.

As many readers may not be familiar with the geologic rela- tions of the Auriferous gravels, and hence find themselves unable

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