WOODWORTH: GEOLOGICAL EXPEDITION TO BRAZIL AND CHILE. 127 
able to detect anything like Pleistocene beaches or the work of waves 
at elevations above that of the plain of Concepcion and this plain is 
practically the only evidence of a former stand of the land lower than 
the present sea-level since the time of the Tertiary and older deposits 
which contain marine fossils. 
Darwin was familiar with the fact that the natives carry large 
quantities of shell-fish inland, but in commenting on the fragments of 
shell-bearing forms such as sea-urchins found several miles inland from 
the coast he doubted the human origin of many deposits on the ground 
that it was improbable that the natives would transport such materials 
to any distance from the coast. On the contrary, it is well known that 
sea-urchins are an article of food in Chile. I saw in the market at 
Tamuca baskets of a large sea-urchin with the spines attached. The 
natives use for food many shell-fish which the unnaturalized European 
does not think of utilizing and if one objects that in the Pre-Columbian 
days such stores of food would decay in the course of a distant inland 
journey due allowance must be made for savage tastes. The “hung”’ 
meats and festering cheeses of civilized countries show how much 
latitude must be allowed for aberrant tastes. In the semi-arid and 
arid climatic zones of the Coastal Cordillera many Mollusca would 
become dessicated rather than putrid because of a belated consump- 
tion. In fact the unusual distance to which shell accumulations are 
found back from the coast of Chile appears to me quite compatible 
with the physical environment of an aboriginal people whose hinter- 
land in the Longitudinal Valley was in primitive times less fruitful 
than the adjoining sea. Kitchen-middens occur here in every degree 
of accumulation from the now sparsely scattered shells in the sod 
marking a temporary abode to the thick shell-heap on the site of 
permanent habitations. Shells on the surface or buried in the super- 
ficial subaerial deposits along this coast are no more a criterion of 
submergence beneath the sea than elsewhere and cannot be relied 
upon as proving anything other than the agency of man. 
The Red Soil.— Along the western slopes of the Coastal Cordillera 
there are large tracts with a red soil, the characteristic effect of the 
subaerial decomposition of rocks. The situation of these residual 
deposits, the nature of the topography without beaches or marks of 
wave action, and the abundant traces of the secular leaching by rains 
and moisture, together with the gullying of the ancient surface on 
which these deposits occur, alike bespeak ordinary atmospheric 
processes as conditioning the formation of this red earth. The 
occurrence of shells and other exuviae in this deposit is but an indica- 
