66 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



wheat field glistens with fragments, yellow, blue, purple, red, lav- 

 ender, and veined in many hues. The forest, too, has set its stamp 

 of age upon the scene, and an old chestnut stump growing on the 

 side of one of the excavations, upon which we counted one hun- 

 dred and ninety-five rings, proves that the workman must have 

 abandoned his shaft to the growth of underbrush about the time 

 (1682) that William Penn bought his first tract of land from In- 

 dians on the Delaware. 



And then, as, standing before the ancient works of the mound- 

 builders at Grave Creek, Marietta, and Newark, a strange feeling 



FIG. 2. PART OF or, FIG. 1, ENLARGED, SHOWING STONE TOOL MARKS. 



born of awe steals over us, so here by degrees the scene assumes 

 its true hue of wonder. We have had a glance beyond the bound- 

 ary lines of history into the unillumined darkness of this conti- 

 nent's past, and for a moment heard the echoes of that vast forest 

 mysterious with the fate of lost races that for ages darkened the 

 New World before the coming of Columbus and De Soto. 



It was important to learn that at Vera Cruz and Macungie, 

 farmers, believing the excavations to have been the work of early 

 Spanish gold-seekers, had dug deep trenches across several of 

 them to find that some, judging from traces of disturbance in the 

 soil, had reached a depth of forty feet ; that one was square rather 

 than round ; that in those examined there had been no tunneling 

 done, the lateral enlargements having been made from the surface 

 downward. 



In the bottom of two pits it was alleged that charcoal was 

 found, and in one case, deep buried in clay at the very bottom, the 

 remains of a textile fabric, and several decayed billets of wood 

 about two feet and a half in length, with points at one end, black- 

 ened by charring. In all instances pure nodules of jasper were to 

 a great extent wanting in the pits, but were found imbedded in the 

 soil as soon as the un worked edges of the excavations were reached. 



Our own preliminary work proved that in one of the diggings 

 at least the miners had not attacked a solid vein of jasper, but, 

 finding it in bowlders on the surface, had removed these, to work 

 out others imbedded beneath them ; and when in the undisturbed 

 bottom of our shaft, at a depth of nineteen feet, we dug out a 

 small, yellow-coated nodule, we were but continuing the long-sus- 

 pended process of the quarryman, who, prying out the masses one 



