1897.1 THE FOSSIL SLOTH AT JUG l^OXE CAVE, TEXN. 43 



cave, must needs have passed. Their trarapling liad draggled the 

 surface, kicking earth into it from other areas, or dropping " petre 

 dirt" upon it from bags. Moreover charred pieces of resinous 

 pine, Pinus 7nitis ; twigs of hazel, Cory/us atncricana, and frag- 

 ments of burnt cane, Arundifiaj'ia iecta, strewed the surface, repre- 

 senting doubtless the remains of the torches of such white nitre 

 hunters as had not had lamps or candles, and, we may reasonably 

 suppose, of the Indians who had preceded them (see Fig. 2). The 

 appearance of this surface film then, which I have called 



LAYER I 



{2 to J inches thick), 



thus disturbed for two or three inches, and scattered with lumps 

 of nitrous earth and with these burnt sticks, was sufficient to 

 demonstrate that human beings had visited the cave if no further 

 proof of the fact had existed. Over and above the certainty that 

 white men had long passed and repassed the spot, and that many of 

 the torch ends, and particularly the pieces of pitch pine (which sug- 

 gested the splitting agency of iron tools), might be referred to them, 

 it seemed reasonable to suppose that some at least of the 

 pieces of charred cane (resembling fragments of Arundinaria 

 found by us mingled with aboriginal bones in the sepulchral chasm 

 at Lookout cave) had been cast away at the spot by Indians. 



Our party of four, Mr. G. B. Johnson, James Priest, my assis- 

 tant, Joseph Mussleman, and myself, had stopped, and Priest, our 

 guide, holding down his candle, pointed to a hollow caused by dig- 

 ging in the mass of dry manure, where he about 1884, while filling 

 several bags full of the "fertilizer," as he called it, for his garden, 

 and later Mr. Johnson himself on a similar errand, had found sev- 

 eral vertebrae, ribs, the pelvis and the skull with teeth of a large 

 animal (the extinct sloth), which, after remaining for some time 

 at the house of Mr. Johnson, had been sent to Nashville and sold.^ 

 For this reason, and as well testified by the letters to me of Prof. J. 

 M. Safford, State Geologist of Tennessee, who first advised my ex- 

 ploring the cave, let it be said in parenthesis that without doubt 

 the sloth skull now in the possession of Prof. Safford, at Nashville, 

 and which I have been unfortunately unable to obtain from 

 him for comparative study, is the skull thus found by Priest, 



1 By a Mr. A. J. Denton, as Mr. Johnson informed me. 



