1897.] THE FOSSTT. SLOTH AT ]ilG J^ONK CAVE. TKXX. Of) 



the exceptional presence of any other grass-eating creature at tliat 

 part of the cave. On the other hand, it appears small for the great 

 sloth, while its unbroken contours infer that it must have been 

 transported when dry and hard if we are to ascribe it to the deer or 

 any animal of the outer forest, and suppose that the hoarding rat 

 carried it down the roof holes into the cave. 



In the compact lower portion of the manure called Layer 3, form- 

 ing, as before described, a crust suggestive of an older floor immedi- 

 ately under the bones, we found what by a reasonable inference 

 were regarded as 



Objects Older Than the Bones. 



Here in the dense mass of rat excrement, rested a lower jaw of the 

 bat, Adelonycteris fiisca (see Fig. 25 object 7), as to which, in 

 completing the list of bat remains found in the cave, Dr. Allen says 

 that the bats here described seem larger than our common eastern 

 forms, though no marked variation in bats has been observed since 

 the Pleistocene.^ Not far from this, and as kindly identified by 

 Mr. C. M. Johnson, of the Wagner Institute, lay a well-preserved 

 dry carcass of the small " window "fly (see Fig. 24), common in 

 the United States, first described in America by Say, in 1828, as a 

 new species, Scenopinus pallipes, but afterwards recognized as iden- 

 tical with the European Scenopinus fenesartlis 

 Linn., the window-haunting adult insect of the 

 so-called carpet worm. Entomologists have 

 left us in doubt as to its life and habits, but 

 we may suppose that its food quest led it so 

 far under ground as a consumer either of 

 decayed wood, of dried wooly or animal matter 

 (like carpets under which its thin larvc^ are 

 often found), or according to Willaston, of the 

 minute tinidce, or the true wool-devouring ^^^'- ^4 (actual size). 

 moths, psocidcE, who would have attended the . , „ „ 



_ ^ window fly, Scenopinus 



decomposition of animal skins and furs at the /enestralis Linn., em- 

 spot. However the fly's visit to the subterra- bedded in the cave 

 nean darkness is to be accounted for, there can ^^^^^ before the sloth 



1 T.^i J 1 X ^1 . •. J .1 1 ^1 bones reached their 



be little doubt that it came down through the 



^ position. 



roof holes like the cricket above mentioned, 



^ Of the few fossil bats found in America, Lund discovered four species of 

 Vampyrus, one species of Molossus and one species of Peropteryx in Pleistocene 

 PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXXVI. 154. E. PRINTED APRIL 26, 1897. 



