1835.] FOSSIL HUMAN RELICS. 355 



rubbish, some bits of cotton thread, plaited rush, and the head 

 of a stalk of Indian corn: I compared these relics with similar 

 ones taken out of the Huacas, or old Peruvian tombs, and found 

 them identical in appearance. On the mainland in front of San 

 Lorenzo, near Bellavista, there is an extensive and level plain 

 about a hundred feet high, of which the lower part is formed of 

 alternating layers of sand and impure clay, together with some 

 gravel, and the surface, to the depth of from three to six feet, of 

 a reddish loam, containing a few scattered sea-shells and numerous 

 small fragments of coarse red earthenware, more abundant at 

 certain spots than at others. At first I was inclined to believe that 

 this superficial bed, from its wide extent and smoothness, must 

 have been deposited beneath the sea ; but I afterwards found in 

 one spot, that it lay on an artificial floor of round stones. It 

 seems, therefore, most probable that at a period when the land 

 stood at a lower level there was a plain very similar to that now 

 surrounding Callao, which being protected by a shingle beach, is 

 raised but very little above the level of the sea. On this plain, 

 with its underlying red-clay beds, I imagine that the Indians 

 manufactured their earthen vessels ; and that, during some violent 

 earthquake, the sea broke over the beach, and converted the plain 

 into a temporary lake, as happened round Callao in 1713 and 1746. 

 The water would then have deposited mud, containing fragments 

 of pottery from the kilns, more abundant at some spots than at 

 others, and shells from the sea. This bed, with fossil earthenware, 

 stands at about the same height with the shells on the lower 

 terrace of San Lorenzo, in which the cotton-thread and other 

 relics were embedded. Hence we may safely conclude, that within 

 the Indo-human period there has been an elevation, as before 

 alluded to, of more than eighty-five feet ; for some little elevation 

 must have been lost by the coast having subsided since the old 

 maps were engraved. At Valparaiso, although in the 220 years 

 before our visit, the elevation cannot have exceeded nineteen feet, 

 yet subsequently to 1817 there has been a rise, partly insensible 

 and partly by a start during the shock of 1822, of ten or eleven 

 feet. The antiquity of the Indo-human race here, judging by the 

 eighty-five feet rise of the land since the relics were embedded, is 

 the more remarkable, as on the coast of Patagonia, when the land 

 stood about the same number of feet lower, the Macrauchenia was 

 a living beast; but as the Patagoniau coast is some way distant 



