16 | BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BULL. 33 
IV:—THE, QUEBEC SKELETON 
According to Doctor Usher ® a fossil human skeleton, * which was 
dug out of the solid schist-rock on which the citadel stands,” was 
preserved in the museum at Quebec. There are no particulars in 
print concerning the find; the skeleton is not preserved in the Laval 
University Museum, the only museum in the city containing objects 
of natural history, and nothing could be learned concerning it 
during the writer’s recent visit to Quebec. The absurdity of the 
statement that a. human skeleton was “ dug out of the solid schist- 
rock ” will be apparent when it is remembered that the rock is 
Silurian. 
V—THE NATCHEZ PELVIC BONE 
In 1846 Dr. M. W. Dickeson exhibited at the Academy of Natural 
Sciences at Philadelphia a collection of fossil bones obtained by him 
in the vicinity of Natchez, Mississippi, among which was a piece of a 
human pelvis. An account of this specimen, which appeared in the 
Proceedings of the Academy in 1846 (page 107), reads as follows: 
This ancient relic of our species is that of a young man of about 16 years 
of age, as determined by its size and form, and by the fact that the epiphyses 
have separated from the tuberosity of the ischium and from the crista of the 
ilium. Nearly all the os pubis is wanting, the upper posterior part of the 
ilium is broken away, and but half the acetabulum remains. That this bone 
is strictly in the fossil state is manifest from its physical characters, in which 
it accords in every. respect of color, density, etc., with those of the Megalonyx 
and other associated bones. That it could not have drifted into the position 
in which it was found is manifest from several facts: 1. That the plateau of 
blue clay ® is not appreciably acted on by those causes that produce ravines in 
the superincumbent diluvial; 2. That the human bone was found at least 2 feet 
below three associated skeletons cf the Megalonyx, all of which, judging from 
the apposition or proximity of their several parts, had been quietly deposited in 
this locality, independently of any active current or other displacing power; 
and lastly, because there was no admixture of diluvial drift with the blue clay, 
which latter retains its homogeneous character equally in the higher part that 
furnished the extinct quadrupeds, and its lower part that contained the remains 
of man. 
The find obtained a wide publicity and received the particular 
attention of Sir Charles Lyell on the occasion of his visit to this 
country in 1846. Lyell examined the locality and in his report ¢ 
thereon took a rather skeptical view as to the antiquity of the 
«W. Usher, Geology and Paleontology in Connection with Human Origins, chap. xi, in 
Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind. 
>The stratum that contained this and the megalonyx bones “is a tenacious blue clay 
that underlies the diluyial drift of Natchez, and which diluvial deposit abounds in bones 
and teeth of the Mastodon giganteum ” (p. 106). 
© Second Visit to America, I1, 191 et seq., 1846. 
