18963 A Problem Solved 



that of a child, and the local press made something 

 of a sensation of the "Roblar Man, the earliest 

 record of the human race." I did not, of course, 

 believe it to be human, as no certain trace of man 

 appears until long after the Miocene period; yet I 

 was unable to identify it as anything else. I there- 

 fore asked J. P. Smith of Stanford to secure for 

 purposes of study the section of rock in which the 

 remains occur. The owners of the property, how- 

 ever, were not enthusiastic over the removal, and 

 the flinty nature of the rock made the process very 

 difficult. But Dr. Smith being allowed to take a Pwjded 

 cast of the imprint, we sent duplicates to several "^^''^^ 

 osteologists, none of whom was able to identify 

 the form with certainty, although Lucas made 

 a not improbable guess that it was a species of 

 dolphin. 



The Zolotoi skeleton lay in exactly the same 

 position as our fossil; the details, moreover, corre- 

 sponded closely, leaving little doubt that the Roblar 

 Man was some kind of Fur Seal or Sea Lion, or 

 possibly, as recently suggested by Remington Kel- 

 logg, a baby whale. 



Other occasional incidents varied the routine. 

 One day when Apollon and a helper were out fishing Apoiions 

 with a hook and line, they caught a six-foot halibut '''s halibut 

 which they dared not bring home until every one 

 had gone to bed, for fear "Dr. Jordan would want 

 to put it into alcohol." Learning next morning of 

 their luck, I took a photograph of the great fish, 

 but explained that I had no other use for specimens 

 of that size! 



At another time the same two Aleuts came near 

 bringing me into serious trouble. It was one of 



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