FOSSILS FOUND IN AMERICA.

U. S.

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Thus, near Natchez, Mississippi, there was found about thirty years ago, a fragment of a human bone, the pelvis, in association with the bones of the mastodon, the megalonyx, and other extinct animals. Were the man and the beasts to whom these bones belonged living at the same time? That time was about a hundred thousand years ago, when the mastodon and megalonyx, whose remains must have been buried beneath the present valley and delta of the Fossil reMississippi, were certainly alive. The fissure at the bot- mains in tom of which the bones were found was made during the earthquakes of 1811-12, which extended through a portion of the Mississippi Valley, heaving the earth up into long hillocks, and tearing it open into deep ravines. Sir Charles Lyell, on his visit to this country in 1846, carefully examined the locality and these fossils, with a stronger bias, he has since said, against the probability" of the contemporaneous entombment of man and the mastodon than any geologist would now be justified in entertaining."2 He suggested that the human bone may have fallen from the surface of the soil, while those of the fossil beasts came from strata underneath. Other scientific men afterward adopted this suggestion, though he has since candidly acknowledged that "had the pelvic bone belonged to any recent mammifer other than man, such a theory would never have been resorted to."3

So in New Orleans, in 1852, a human skeleton was dug from an excavation, made for the foundation of gas-works, at a depth of sixteen feet, and beneath four successive buried forests of cypress. Dr. Dowler, into whose possession this skeleton came, believed, from its position, that it had lain there not less than fifty thousand years, but whether this be correct or not, depends upon intricate calculations as to the yearly deposits of the river, about which there is great difference of opinion among geologists. There is on Petit Anse Island, in Louisiana, a bed of almost pure rock salt, found in every part of it at a depth of from fifteen to twenty feet. On this spot have been disinterred the fossil bones of the mastodon and the elephant, and underneath them lay fragments of matting and bits of broken pottery in great profusion. The people to whom this refuse once belonged had resorted to the island for salt, before, it is assumed, the superimposed mud of fifteen or twenty feet in depth, and in which the mastodons and elephants were buried, was deposited; on the other hand, it is doubted whether the whole mass of soil and all it contained may not have been washed down from the surrounding hills, mingling together indiscriminately the remains of various ages.

1 Sir Charles Lyell, Second Visit to the United States, vol. ii. p. 151.

Discovery of

Evidence still more interesting and conclusive that man and the extinct animals were contemporaneous is alleged to have been found in Missouri nearly forty years ago. A Dr. Koch, of St. Louis, an enthusiastic, though not a scientific, collector and exhibitor of fossil remains, affirmed that in 1839 he dug up, in the bottom lands of the Bourbeuse River, in Missouri, from a depth of eight or nine feet, the bones of a mastodon, in such juxtaposition with human relics as mastodon in to show that man and this beast, whose race is no longer Missouri. in existence, met upon that spot in deadly hostility. He asserted that, when the exhumation was made, the great bones of the legs of the animal stood erect as if the creature had become immovably mired in the deep and tenacious clay. Around it had been kindled a fire by human hands, and in the ashes that lay about the skeleton to the depth of from two to six inches were scattered bits of charred wood and half-burnt bones, stone arrow-heads, stone axes, and rough stones, these last brought evidently from the beach of the river at some distance, where in a stratum of the bank, and there only in the neighborhood, are similar stones still found. All these missiles unquestionably had been hurled at the creature, whose gigantic strength, stimulated by pain and rage and fear, the torments of the flames, the shouts of the pursuers, the sharp wounds from their stone weapons, was not enough to extricate him from the slough into which his great weight had sunk him.

There are in this case two considerations to be borne in mind. If man and the mastodon did not live at the same time, a discovery of their remains in the alleged relations is necessarily impossible. But there is no inherent improbability in the story if they were contemporaneous; so huge a beast might easily become mired in a swamp, and then be surrounded and put to death by the savages by such means as were at their command. The only remarkable thing about the incident would be that subsequent deposits of earth should have so completely covered these fossil remains, without disturbing them, that they could be exhumed in their original condition so long afterward.2

1 Savages are alike in all ages and countries. "The people,” — in the Lake region of Eastern Africa, says the great traveller, Livingstone, "employ these continuous or set-in rains for hunting the elephant, which gets bogged and sinks in from fifteen to eighteen inches in soft mud; then even he, the strong one, feels it difficult to escape." — The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, p. 143.

2 See Article XXXV., Silliman's Journal, May, 1875, by James D. Dana; which is devoted to a discussion of this case. Professor Dana considers Koch's statement "very doubtful, but his doubt is evidently as to Koch's truthfulness and character, and not as to any inherent improbability in such a discovery, as he says, "it is to be hoped that the geologists of the Missouri Geological Survey now in progress will succeed in settling the question positively." And on the essential point which alone gives the story any impor tance, he adds: “The contemporaneity claimed will probably be shown to be true for North America by future discoveries, if not already established; for Man existed in Europe long before the extinction of the American mastodon."

THE CALAVERAS SKULL.

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At this exhumation, Dr. Koch always affirmed that twenty persons of the vicinity were present; others have vouched for his integrity and general truthfulness; and though he had little knowledge of scientific facts and methods, and made grave mistakes in the classification of fossil bones, his experience and success in recovering them was greater than that of any other explorers.2 If such a scene, then, the evidences of which he claims to have uncovered, ever occurred — a scene in itself by no means improbable if man and the mastodon lived at the same time in the same region of country a picture is presented of a hunt by pre-historic men on this continent vivid enough to appeal to the dullest imagination, and more remarkable than any similar incident yet found anywhere else.

A year later than this asserted discovery on the Bourbeuse River, the same diligent collector claimed to have made another which must be considered on the same grounds. In the bottomlands of the Pomme de Terre River, in Benton County, Missouri, he dug up, he asserts, an almost entire skeleton of another mastodon, beneath which were two stone arrow-heads in such a position that they must have been there when the animal fell. They lay in a bed of vegetable mould, covered by twenty feet of Dr. Koch's Arrowalternate strata of sand, clay, and gravel, hitherto undisturbed, and on the surface of the ground grew a forest of old

trees.

head.

Fossil hu

California.

Later discoveries of other fossils are not less significant, in the controversies to which they have given rise, of growing interest in the importance of the subject. In 1857, the fragment man skull in of a human skull was taken, it is asserted, from the gold drift of California, one hundred and eighty feet below the surface of Table Mountain, in association with the fossil bones of extinct animals. More recently, in 1867 or 1868, another human cranium was found in a mining shaft in Calaveras County, which Professor Whitney, of the State Geological Survey, believes to have been an authentic "find." To all the alleged circumstances in regard to it he gave a careful examination, and his testimony is accepted as conclusive by many eminent scientific men.3 The shaft in which the bone was buried is one hundred and fifty feet deep, and was sunk through five beds of lava and volcanic tufa, and four beds of gold-bearing

1 Pre-historic Races of the United States, by J. W. Foster, p. 62. Charles Rau, in Smith onian Report for 1872.

2 The Mastodon giganteus mounted in the British Museum was found in Missouri by Dr. Koch, and a representation of it, copied from Owen, is given in Dana's Manual of Geology, 1875, 566.

3 Among others, by the late Professor Jeffries Wyman.