42 BUEEAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull, ec 



but little further could be learned ; yet there are a few points of in- 

 terest and, in one or two cases, of real importance, that call for 

 discussion. 



The first skeleton. — Mr. Ayers, who discovered the first skeleton, 

 was kind enough to accompany the writer to the southern exposures, 

 where he indicated the location of the find (pi. 2). He remembered 

 that the bones were not regarded at first as human or as of greater 

 consequence than others in the banks, and no special attention was 

 paid to the exact condition of the deposits about them, which, how- 

 ever, seemed to show nothing peculiar. The bones lay between about 

 2 and 2^ feet below the marl of the surface, a hardened section of 

 which had broken off at this point and was still lying on the sand 

 in front of the bank at the time of our visit. They '* were all close 

 together, the whole space which they occupied not being over one 

 and a half feet in width ; they were not scattered at all, nor piled up, 

 but lay side by side as they would in the body." ^ The bones were ex- 

 tracted b}' Messrs. Ayers and Weills, the latter of whom also spoke 

 to the writer of their " natural relations," particularly in the case 

 of a lower limb, where the tibia, patella, and femur were found in 

 the relative positions they occupy in the skeleton. 



Remarlis. — Taking all this into consideration, with the fact that 

 although the upper parts of the skeleton have been lost — in all proba- 

 bility as the result of the dredging — yet enough remained to repre- 

 sent most of the parts of the two lower limbs, the presence of the 

 human remains can be explained satisfactorily in only two ways, 

 namely, by sudden complete accidental inclusion of a human body 

 into the deposits, or by a burial. 



But the sudden inclusion of a body would necessitate the presence 

 of either bog or quicksand, which it is plain did not exist in the Vero 

 formations, or a great inundation of waters charged with the heavy 

 sands that were found to inclose the remains, in such quantities that 

 on settling they would completely and permanently cover the corpse. 

 In this latter case, however, practically the whole or most of the 

 homogeneous and not very thick layer No. 2 would have to be re- 

 garded as the result of such an inundation, while the animal bones 

 therein, which would necessarily have been brought in by the current, 

 might be of any derivation and age ; hence the human remains would 

 lose all claim to age commensurate with that of the fossil vertebrates 

 which these bones represent. They would be only as old as the inun- 

 dation, while the animal bones might be of any antiquity. 



A slowly flowing water charged with silt will cover with more or 

 less sediment any submerged immovable object in its course, and the 

 suggestion might be made that something of this nature may have 

 happened to the human body during some ordinary overflow of the 



1 Quotod from a subscqurnt Icttpr of Mr. Ayers to the writer. 



