Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/705

 636 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899

covered by accumulating debris and deposits from running or percolating waters. As mining operations went on these burial places were cleaned out and the bones became public property. Skulls were plentiful at Angels in those days, as many persons testify. There is, therefore, a chance that the skull sent to Dr Jones was not the one found by Mattison, but a cement-covered specimen derived from some other source as Stickle states and Scribner suggests. Certainly there were several months during which little or no trace was kept of the lump of conglomerate carried home by Mattison. The usual answer to the suggestion that there might have been a changeling skull is that the Cala- veras specimen is not a common skull, but a fossil, and must have come from gravel deposits identical with those in Bald mountain if not actually from the Mattison mine, and that its great age is thus sufficiently established. But who shall say that many of the skulls found about Angels Camp were not obtained from com- paratively recent burials in surface exposures of auriferous gravels or in other gravels where the conditions were such as to permit of rapid cementation, giving rise to phenomena identical with those observed in the Calaveras skull ?

Testimony of the Skull Itself. — Recognizing the fallibility of human testimony and the consequent difficulty of surely connect- ing the Calaveras skull with the gravels in place in Bald moun- tain, the characteristics and condition of the skull itself have been appealed to by advocates of its authenticity. The report on its physical characters, however, made by Jeffries Wyman, does not in any way aid the case. It is to be expected that a Tertiary skull would in some manner show or suggest inferior develop- ment, but this skull appears to represent a people superior to the present Indian tribes of the region. Again, it is to be expected that some distinctive characteristic, some race peculiarity, would appear in the skull of a people separated by uncounted centuries from the present; that it would be longer or shorter, thicker or thinner, or more or less prognathous than the Indian skull, but

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