THE ANIMAL REMAINS OF THE GRAVEL SERIES. 239 
gravel, which was about two feet thick, stems of bushes and grass-roots, form- 
ing bogs, all standing in the place where they grew, the stems of the bushes 
being sometimes two or three feet high, although the tops were generally 
gone. The grass is said to have been well preserved, and the form and out- 
lines of the whole thing unmistakable. 
In a hydraulic pit opened at Kentucky Flat, two or three miles southeast 
of Mount Gregory, there is a stratum exposed which is very full of fossil 
wood, a part of which is carbonized and a part petrified by iron pyrites. 
The sticks are very numerous, and the texture of the wood is generally weil 
preserved. 
In Bear Hill, at Diamond Springs, fossil wood has been very plenty, and 
is generally converted into semi-opal. 
Section IV.— The Animal Remains, not Human, of the Auriferous Gravel Series. 
The reasons which have been given in the preceding section for finding 
the fossil plants of the gravel beds in a more or less fragmentary and imper- 
fect condition apply with equal force to the animal remains which have been 
imbedded in these deposits. The collecting of fossil bones has been, in some 
respects, an exceedingly unsatisfactory business. No locality has, as yet, — 
so far as the writer has observed, — ever been discovered in the hydraulic 
mining region, where animal remains seemed to occur in the position in 
which they had been left at the time of the death of the individual. The 
only entire skeletons which have been observed were found quite low down 
in the foot-hills, where conditions were more favorable to their preservation 
than was the case higher up among the gravelly beds. Still, a considerable 
amount of material has been obtained, and enough, with the aid of the 
plants, to throw considerable light on the age of the formations in which 
they occur. The presence of the works of man and of human bones at 
various points, however, has made the geological relations of the strata in 
question an object of very great interest, so that it becomes desirable to lay 
before the reader as complete an account as possible of what has been 
observed, and what has been learned from the miners themselves, in regard 
to their discoveries. The testimony of uneducated men, not accustomed to 
take into consideration all the conditions necessary for insuring accuracy of 
observation, must, of course, be taken with caution. The statements of one 
person must be weighed against those of another, and from the whole body 
