150 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 1890. 



on the spot. For except the charred wood, apparently the remains 

 of a camp fire, there was no other trace of human occupation. 



Possibly they were a party of belated fishermen or oyster- catchers 

 spending the night in the shelter of the trees, which, though they 

 may have been at a considerable elevation above the sea, were certain- 

 ly not far from the coast, for on 'the gravel in a crevice of the rock 

 was found an oyster shell. 



Again, when fresh excavations were being made by Sir Thomas 

 Thompson last year for an extension of the docks, two or three n^re 

 trees were found, among which was another log, charred much in the 

 same way as the first. These are, however, eclipsed in interest by a 

 specimen which Sir Thomas has kindly lent me for exhibition to-day. 

 It is one of two covered stone jarsf found on the level of the soil in 

 which the trees were rooted. | As they were standing right side up 

 with their covers on, it seems unlikely that they were dropped from 

 a passing boat. If not, they prove conclusively the presence of man 

 on the spot at the time the submerged forest was above water. The 

 man, however, was not far advanced in civilization, or his jars would 

 have been of pottery or metal, or, if of stone, more smoothly finished. 

 Nor does he seem to have been a permanent inhabitant of the place. 

 For there are no other traces of his occupation than the remains of 

 this fire and his two jars, and the stone of which the latter are made, 

 though doubtless of volcanic origin, like almost all the stone for 

 hundreds of miles round, differs in colour and texture from an}' found 

 in Bombay. 



Here, then, are traces of another, or perhaps the same, party of 



t These jars were nearly spherical in shape, but with flat bottoms, roughly hewn 

 and hollowed with some narrow angular pointed tool, the marks of which were not 

 smoothed off. The covers were stopper shaped and fitted loosely in the mouths. 



J So I was told by Sir T. T., but this seems to be a mistake, for I was told by 

 Mr. Ormiston, after the delivery of my lecture, that Mr. Lynn, the Engineer, pointed 

 out to him a spot in his plan and section of the works as the place where the pots 

 wpre found, from which it would seem they were lying only a foot or two below the 

 top level of the blue clay, and must therefore have been buried long after the subsi- 

 dence, and were probably dropped from a passing boat. This does not, however, 

 detract from the evidence (of the charred logs that the subsidence took place in the 

 Human Period, or tend in any way to show thnt Bombay itself was then permanently 

 inhabited by men. 



