FOSSIL HUMAN RELICS. 371 



similar to that now surrounding- Callao, which being protected 

 by a shingle beach, is raised but very little above the level of the 

 sea. On this plain, with its underlying red-clay beds, I imai>-ine 

 that the Indians manufactured their earthen vessels ; and that, 

 during some violent earthquake, the sea broke over the beaciu 

 and converted the plain into a temporary lake, as happened round 

 Callao in IT 13 and 1746. The water would then have deposited 

 mud, containing fragments of pottery from the kilns, more abun- 

 dant at some spots than at others, and shells from the sea. This 

 bed with fossil earthenware, stands at about the same heio^ht with 

 the shells on the lower terrace of San Lorenzo, in which the 

 cotton-thread and other relics were embedded. Hence we may 

 safely conclude, that within the Indo-human period there has 

 been an elevation, as before alluded to, of more than eigh*^y-five 

 feet ; for some little elevation must have been lost by the coast 

 having subsided since the old maps were engraved. At Val- 

 paraiso, although in the 220 years before our visit, the elevation 

 cannot have exceeded nineteen feet, yet subsequently to 1817 

 there has been a rise, partly insensible and partly by a start 

 during the shock of 1822, of ten or eleven feet. The antiquity 

 of the Indo-human race here, judging by the eighty-five feet 

 rise of the land since the relics were embedded, is the more re- 

 markable, as on the coast of Patagonia, when the land stood 

 about the same number of feet lower, the Macrauchenia was a 

 living beast; but as the Patagonian coast is some way distant 

 from the Cordillera, the rising there may have been slower than 

 here. At Bahia Blanca, the elevation has been only a few feet 

 since the numerous gigantic quadrupeds were there entombed ; 

 and, according to the generally received opinion, when these ex- 

 tinct animals were living, man did not exist. But the ri>ing of 

 that part of the coast of Patagonia, is perhaps noways connected 

 ■with the Cordillera, but rather with a line of old volcanic rocks 

 in Banda Oriental, so that it may have been infinitely slower than 

 on the shores of Peru. All these speculations, however, must 

 be vague ; for who will pretend to say. that there may not have 

 been several periods of subsidence, intercalated between the 

 movements of elevation ; for we know that along the whole coast 

 of Patagonia, there have certainly been many and long pauses 

 111 the upward action of the elevatory forces. 



