1895] OJJ [Mercer. 



The other discovery was that of the so-called "alabaster quarry," a 

 place where heavy quartzite boulders had been used to batter away the 

 side of a stalagmite, known as the "Pillar of the Constitution," some 

 two subterranean miles distant from the entrance — a mine in fact in 

 one of the large domed chambers where several cubic yards of the 

 snow-Avhite carbonate of lime had been removed from the vertical wall 

 of an enormous fluted column. 



A heap of splinters, from which I picked up these specimens as ex- 

 amples, showing the characteristic rectangular planes of fracture, lay 

 under the hollow, where not only had several quartzite hammer stones 

 been found by Mr. Rothrock, but a pick made of stag's antlers, such a& 

 Canon Qreenwell found in the subterranean galleries of the Neolithic 

 flint mines at Grimes Graves, in England ; such, as again, M. M. Cornet 

 Briart encountered underground in similar workings at Spienues, in 

 Belgium, and such as later explorers exhumed at Cissbury, in Eng- 

 land, proving the use of stag's horns for digging in the stone age, an 

 adaption of a natural convenience further suggested by a hoard of sev- 

 eral score antlers discovered by Mr. S. Grimley's ancestor in a slate 

 rift on Perkiomen creek, Montgomery county, Pa., where they had 

 been probably stored for kindred uses by Indians. Notwithstanding 

 the fact that I could find but one large boulder hammer at the 

 "alabaster quarry," the proof of Indian work at the spot was satisfac- 

 tory, and of a character, I believed, never noticed and studied before 

 the discovery of the site, though I cannot (on the strength of obser- 

 vations on the growth of stalactites in the American Naturalist ^or De- 

 cember, 1894), with Mr. Hovey, ascribe great antiquity to a crust of 

 stalagmite which partially overflows the quarried hole.* As I knew of 

 no object made of stalagmite among the "Indian relics " in any col- 

 lection or museum in the United States, it remained to be seen what the 

 Indians did with the quarried fragments ; why they left so many, appar- 

 ently available, pieces behind, and what kind of fragments were de- 

 sired. I came to think that it was a question of fineness of grain with 

 them, and adaptability of size and shape to the kind of object intended 

 to be made, so as to escape the great labor of rubbing down, a suppo- 

 sition that appeared more probable later, when I luckily found the 

 other specimen here shown associated with aboriginal rubbish at a 

 place near the entrance of the cave, where evidently the Indian had 

 lost it after having brought it fi-om the quarry, nearly two miles away 

 under ground. 



This discovery of my own helped to elucidate the other very inter- 

 esting question suggested by what I had seen : What lights had the 

 Indians used in their distant and dangerous wanderings and their pro- 

 longed quarryings in the cave? A question finally settled after study- 

 ing numerous charred fragments of the shellbark hickory, which in 



* stalactites 60 centimetres long and fifteen years old, described by Prof. Franz Adami 

 in the American Naturalist lor December, 1894. 



PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXXIV. 149. 2 Y. PRINTED FEB. 3, 1896. 



