Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/476

470 nearly upon the floor of the tunnel. The other skeleton was evidently complete, or nearly so, and but little disturbed. It was found about ten feet further away from the entrance, lying upon the limestone talus, though wholly covered by the silty material characteristic of the tunnel throughout. This skeleton is that of an adult between forty and fifty years of age, about five feet two inches in height, of slight build and, in much probability, of a female. The bones were firm, and as fully fossilized as could be expected in such material as enclosed them. The bones show in places an incrustation of a stony matrix commonly observed about bones of pleistocene animals preserved in river deposits in the west. I may also add that some of the bones of the leg show pathological deposits, probably rheumatoid. The young man who exhumed the skeleton stated that it was irregularly placed. As the specimen came under my observation it was largely enclosed in its original matrix. Very clearly it had not been covered by the limestone talus upon the floor of the cave. Portions of the encrusting matrix enabled one to determine that the bones had been in large part, if not wholly, articulated when discovered. Every collector of vertebrate fossils knows how rarely so large a skeleton as that of a man is found preserved entire and with the bones in position. The right femur was lying in its socket, but reversed; the left femur had been partly dislocated from its acetabulum, and was lying obliquely across the pelvis. Various other bones showed connections, and some of the bones of the feet are still united. Altogether, sufficient fragments were recovered to show that nearly every bone in the skeleton had been present. The femur measures a little more than seventeen inches in length (430 mm.), the tibia fourteen inches (350 mm.), the humerus twelve inches (302 mm.), the radius ten inches (250 mm.), and the forearm, from olecranon to wrist, eleven inches (277 mm.).

It seems very probable that the skeleton had been immersed in water while yet held together by the flesh. It is impossible that it could have been subjected to strong currents of water after the decomposition of the ligaments had occurred, nor could it have been exposed to the atmosphere for any length of time, nor even for a short time to the depredations of predatory animals while yet enclosed in the flesh. In other words, it seems almost beyond dispute that the person had either been thrown into the water very soon after death, or had been drowned, and that the body had remained immersed in comparatively quiet water until covered so deeply by the soil that it could no longer suffer the vicissitudes of exposure to the atmosphere and predatory animals. Evidences of artificial or accidental burial beneath the silt are wanting and are improbable. So far as any theory of the age of the skeleton is contradictory to this evidence it may be rejected.

Two chief views as to the age of the remains are now held: the one by Professors Winchell and Upham; the other by Professor