150 GLEANINGS FROM NATURE. 



Indians, or some prehistoric race in ages past, hun- 

 dreds of cubic feet of this material. 



Up to 1877 it was generally supposed that the 

 whites had made this excavation. In 1864 J. P. Stelle 

 wrote of it as follows : " For fifty years the people of 

 a civilized aye, a Christian nation, have visited the 

 Senate Chramber, not as admirers of the great God 

 who has reared for himself such a magnificent temple, 

 but as vandals. All the most interesting formations 

 within their reach have been broken up or carried 

 away ; and even the great pillar itself has not been 

 exempt from their attack, for an excavation has been 

 made in its side which must have required days of 

 hard labor, and from which large quantities of the 

 purest white stone have been taken and scattered 

 over the floor of the cave." 



Prof. Collett, in 1877, found three glacial bowlders 

 in the Senate Chamber, which, "from indications, 

 such as wear and bruises, had been used as hammers 

 or grinding pestles, and proved conclusively that that 

 part of the Old Cave had been visited, if not occupied, 

 by men of the Stone Age." 



Eev. H. C. Hovey, in 1882, first claimed that the 

 excavation had been made by Indians " more than 

 1,000 years ago," and that the "round or oblong bowl- 

 ders" of granite rock were the implements with 

 which the ancient quarrymen wrought, being used 

 "in breaking from this alabaster quarry blocks of a 

 portable size and convenient shape." 



H. C. Mercer, in 1894, visited the quarry and men- 

 tions the finding, by Mr. Rothrock, of a pick made of 

 stag's autlers and states that "the proof of Indian 



