Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/696

 holmes] a uriferous gra vel man 62 7

been scaled off, probably in cleaning away the other material attached to the base " (plate XXIX, a). Together the two eminent professors carefully chiseled away the foreign matter adhering to its base, so as to expose the natural surface of the skull, leaving it in its present state (plate XXIX, b). The skull was found to be that of a very old person, the teeth being gone, and the alveoli nearly absorbed. The lower jaw is gone, and the cranium is far from perfect ; portions of the occiput are missing, and the remain- ing portions are badly fractured. Professor Whitney expresses his views as to how the specimen came to be thus rudely fractured, and as to subsequent events in its history, in the following words :

" The skull was unquestionably dug up somewhere, and had unques- tionably been subjected to quite a series of peculiar conditions. In the first place, it had been broken, and broken in such a manner as to indicate great violence, as the fractures go through the thickest and heaviest parts of the skull ; again, the evidence of violent and pro- tracted motion, as seen in the manner in which the various bones are wedged into the hollow and internal parts of the skull, as, for instance, the bones of the foot under the malar bone. The appearance of the skull was something such as would be expected to result from its having been swept, with many other bones, from the place where it was originally deposited down the shallow but violent current of a stream, where it would be exposed to violent blows against the boulders lying in its bed. During this passage it was smashed, and fragments of the bones occurring with it were thrust into all the cavities where they could lodge. It then came to rest somewhere, in a position where water charged with lime salts had access to it, and on a bed of aurifer- ous gravel. While it lay there the mass on which it rested was cemented to it by the calcareous matter deposited around the skull, and thus the base of hard mixed tufa and pebbles which was attached to it when it was placed in the writer's hands was formed. At this time, too, the snail crept in under the malar bone, and there died. Subsequently to this the whole was enveloped by a deposit of gravel, which did not afterwards become thoroughly consolidated, and which, therefore, was easily removed by the gentlemen who first cleaned up the specimen in question, they only removing the looser gravel which surrounded it." (P. 272.)

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