Judge Holmes remarked as follows upon 



MAN AND THE ELEPHANT IN NEBRASKA. 



In Dr. Hayden's Annual Report of the U. S. Geological Survey for the 

 year 1874 (recently published) appears the report of Dr. Samuel Aughey 

 on the Loess deposits of Nebraska. It is stated that the Loess covers 

 three-fourths of that State, ranging in thickness from 40 to 150 feet, and 

 extending westward from the Missouri River to a limit beyond Kearney 

 and the Republican Foik. 



The more important fact which he desired to notice was, that Dr. 

 Aughe^', after some years of careful searching, had succeeded in finding 

 imbedded in this deposit two distinctly shaped and well-worked arrow- 

 heads, which are figured in his report (p. 255). One of them, a small 

 arrow-head, was found at a depth of 15 feet at a place three miles east of 

 Sioux City; the other, nearly four times larger, might very well have been 

 a spear-head, and it was found at a place two and a half miles southeast 

 of Omaha, and at a depth of 20 feet ; and "thirteen inches above the point 

 where it was found, and within three inches of being on a line with it, in 

 undisturbed Loess, there was a lumbar vertebra of an elephant (^Elefhas 

 americanus)." The material is not named, nor are measurements given. 

 Flint chips are mentioned as found "in the bluffs" in Dakota County, but 

 as not certainly of human origin. 



The discovery is important as going to show the contemporaneity of 

 man and the elephant on this continent during the period of the Loess. 

 They must have inhabited together the shores of the great inland fresh- 

 water sea or expansion of the rivers, in which the Loess formation was 

 deposited. It furnished the first distinct and incontrovertible proof of this 

 fact that he was aware of. Bones of mastodon, elephant, and other extinct 

 animals had been frequently found in the Loess of the Mississippi Vallev, 

 but hitherto no human remains had been ascertained with certainty to 

 belong to it. Mr. Worthen of the Illinois Geological Survey had reported 

 an instance of arrow-heads being found together with bones of extinct 

 mammalia in an altered drift covered by Loess near Alton ; but the 

 circumstances, geologically considered, seemed to admit of some doubt 

 on the question of their contemporaneousness. But here no room would 

 seem to be left for any other rational hypothesis. Both the arrow-head 

 and the vertebra must have been deposited in the still waters of the lake, 

 or been drifted to the spot by the same moving waters of the Loess period. 

 The arrow-head, certainly, could not have got there if it had belonged to 

 a more recent period. But it is still possible that the vertebra may have 

 been washed out of some older deposit, by the action of a river, and been 

 swept down into the lake; or it may have been frozen into a mass of ice, 

 and been carried down by the river and dropped to the bottom on the 

 melting of the ice. The presence of mastodon bones with the arrow-head, 

 in the Benton County case, has been accounted for in this way. The pres- 

 ence of the arrow-head proved the existence of man in the alluvial period 

 only; but, in this instance, the arrow-head must have been contemporary 



