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 622 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s.. i, 189V

origin of the specimens and were afraid of them because of the mortal dread that every Indian feels of anything connected with the dead. How the eleven large spearheads got into the mine, or whether they ever came from the mine at all, are queries that I shall not assume to answer, but that they did not come from the bed of a Tertiary torrent seems sufficiently clear; for how could a cache of eleven slender, leaflike implements remain un- scattered under these conditions ; how could fragile glass blades stand the crushing and grinding of a torrent bed ; or how could so large a number of brittle blades remain unbroken under the pick of the miner working in a dark tunnel ? — for, as Dr Becker states, " the auriferous gravel is hard picking, in large part it requires blasting."

That the affidavit of Mr Neale does not materially strengthen the evidence favoring antiquity I am now fully convinced. In his conversation with me he did not claim to have been in the mine when the finds were made, and a sworn statement vouching for the truth of assertions made by other persons, and these other persons unnamed miners, cannot be of value in establishing a proposition requiring proofs of the very highest order. That the other like finds of the Table Mountain region, recorded by Whitney and others, are equally open to criticism may reason- ably be assumed.

The King Find. — The only bit of testimony that may not be challenged with impunity is the finding of a fragmentary pestle in the face of Table mountain two or three miles north of the Mon- tezuma mine by Mr Clarence King, and reported in detail and with an illustration in Dr Becker's paper (page 193), already referred to. I sought the particular site from which the object was obtained, and passed up and down over every outcrop of rock on the slope, from the lava-cap to the pasture fields below, in the hope of finding some trace of human handiwork, but beyond the usual Digger mealing stones scattered over the sur- face, nothing was found. I tried to learn whether it was possible

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