Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/167

Rh geological period finding on the Pampas the body of a glyptodon, scooping out its flesh, setting up its carapace on the ground like a monstrous dish-cover, and digging himself a burrow to live in underneath this animal roof; but geologists have not accepted the account. Even in the case of so well-known an explorer as the late Dr. Lund, opinions are still divided as to whether his human skulls from the caves of Brazil are really contemporary with the bones of megatherium and fossil horse. One of the latest judgments has been favorable: Quatrefages not only looks upon the cave-skulls as of high antiquity, but regards their owners as representing the ancestors of the living Indians. The high and narrow dimensions of the ancient and modern skulls are given in the "Crania Ethnica," and, whatever a similarity of proportions between them may prove, it certainly exists. Dr. Koch's celebrated flint arrow-head, recorded to have been found under the leg bones of a mastodon in Missouri, is still to be seen, and has all the appearance of a modern Indian weapon, which raises doubt of its being really of the mastodon period. This antecedent improbability of remote geological age is felt still more strongly to attach to the stone pestles and mortars, etc., brought forward by Mr. J. D. Whitney, of the California Geological Survey, as found by miners in the gold-bearing gravels. On the one hand, these elaborate articles of stone-work are the very characteristic objects of the Indian graves of the district, and on the other the theory that the auriferous gravels capped by lava flows are of Tertiary age is absolutely denied by geologists such as M. Jules Marcou in his article on "The Geology of California" ("Bull. Soc. Géol. de France," 1883). It is to be hoped that the section may have the opportunity of discussing Dr. C. C. Abbott's implements from Trenton, New Jersey. The turtle-back celts, as they are called from their flat and convex sides, are rudely chipped from pebbles of the hard argillite out of the bowlder-bed, but the question is as to the position of the sand and gravel in which they are found in the bluffs high above the present Delaware River. The first opinion come to, that the makers of the implements inhabited America not merely after but during the great Ice age, has been modified by further examination, especially by the report of Mr. H. Carvill Lewis, who considers the implement-bearing bed not to have been deposited by a river which flowed over the top of the bowlder-bed, but that, at a later period than this would involve, the Delaware had cut a channel through the bowlder-bed, and that a subsequent glacier-flood threw down sand and gravel in this cutting at a considerable height above the existing river, burying therein the rude stone implements of an Esquimau race then inhabiting the country. Belt, Wilson, and Putnam have written on this question, which I will not pursue further, except by pointing out that the evidence from the bluffs of the Delaware must not be taken by itself, but in connection with that from the terraces high above the James River, near Richmond, where Mr. C. M. Wallace has