520 DAVENPORT ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES. 



for doubting his integrity and truthfulness, and I accept his statements 

 without (juestion. I believe the elephant pipes and inscribed tablets 

 were discovered exactly as represented in the published accounts of 

 their finding by the Davenport Academy of Sciences; and I have no 

 disposition, at present, to inquire into the possibility of fraud having 

 been practiced by other designing persons. Mound-building, I know, 

 was i)racticed by some of our Indians down to a comparatively recent 

 date; and, in many instances, articles of modern manufacture have 

 been found interred in the mounds, together with ancient stone imple- 

 ments, etc. Consequently, while I believe Rev. Mr. Gass to be inno- 

 cent of practicing decei)tion, I yet cannot give my assent to the 

 inference that the pipes and tablets are the work of a pre-Columbian 

 people; nor do I see any reason to ascribe to them a higher anti(juity 

 than the date of the advent of Europeans into this valley. 



The elephant i)ipes are presented to the scientific world as new and 

 valuable corroborative evidence of the coeval existence of man and 

 the great i)roboscidians on this continent. If this high claim could be 

 established by irrefragible proof of their prehistoric origin, their evi- 

 dence would be startling indeed. Owing, perhajjs, to inherent perverse 

 dullness, or ignorance, I must frankly confess that I am yet skeptical as 

 to the contemporaneous existence of man and the mammoth anywhere 

 on earth. Obviously, in the brief limits of a letter, I cannot state 

 much more than my convictions. To cite and discuss facts and 

 authorities at length, and to elaborate the reasoning by which I have 

 been comi)elled to reject the aj^parently well-founded conclusions of 

 men far abler than myself, would require the space of a considerable 

 volume. 



Admitting the well-known fact that the bones of man and the prod- 

 ucts of his arts are often found intimately associated with the remains of 

 the mammoth and other extinct animals, in the drift-gravels of En- 

 gland, of Nebraska, of the valley of the Somme, at Neanderthal, on 

 the Pomme de Terre, and elsewhere, does it j^rove more than the oper- 

 ation of the process that may at this day be going on at the Mer de 

 Cxlace and other great glaciers, where the bones of the perished hunter 

 and his weapons and accoutrements, on the surface, may ultimately be 

 rolled away and buried in the moraine, together with the remains of 

 the mammoth long before entombed beneath the sea of ice? I think 

 the agency of local glaciers fully explains many of the splendid discov- 

 eries of MM. Boucher de Perthes and Lartet, and others, in the valleys 

 of Southern France. But we are told that we have the testimony of 

 witnesses, written on tablets of ivory, who actually smv the great hairy 

 mammoth stalking about on the eastern slopes of the Pyrenees and in 

 the valleys of old Gascony. Among the relics of early man exhumed at 

 Les Eyzies and La Madelaine were fragments of ivory, on some of which 

 were rudely scratched the unmistakable outlines of the huge monster, 

 with its curiously curved tusks and long, shaggy hair. Of these clumsy 

 etchings of the great beast. Sir Charles Lyell says: "If the represen- 

 tation had been merely that of an elephant, we might have conject- 

 ured tliat some African tribe, migrating to the south of France, had 



