564 DISCOVERIES IN THE SANDSTONE ROCKS OF COLORADO. 



deprived of this element. Indeed it was^ even a marketable commodity^ 

 and some tribes still carry living embers, as they camp. Fire was per- 

 haps originally produced, as Indians still practise, by rubbing a pointed 

 stick in a hole in wood. It appeal's clear, that fire was known to man, when 

 he was contemporaneous with the mammoth, but the earliest traces of cook- 

 ing utensils date from his association with the cavern bear and reindeer. 

 A pot represents a certain civilization ; often the animals were cooked in 

 their own skins, as ostriches still are; or a hole was dug in the ground^ 

 coated with claj^, filled with water, into which heated stones were plunged. 

 Punch is thus warmed in some parts of Germany, and it was formerly a fa- 

 vorite plan in Ireland, to boil milk. It was woman who was in early times, 

 trusted to make the earthen pots, then to employ them, and finally to 

 guard them, and hence, to be queen of the fire side. 



Professor Ecker, of Fribourg, concludes, that the greater length of the 

 index, over the ring finger, is a proof of physical perfection and evidence of 

 superiority of race. F. C. 



SCIENTIFIC MISCELLANY, 



WONDERFUL DISCOVERIES IN THE SANDSTONE ROCKS 



OF COLORADO. 



"Nature has borne strange children in her day," says Shakspeare, and 

 he is not far wrong, if we may judge from some recent discoveries in the 

 rocks of our neighborhood. While exploring some rocks in the white sand- 

 stone hogback of the cretaceous period, near Morrison, Bear Creek — the 

 same stratum as at Colorado Springs, a few yards west of old Colorado City 

 — we came suddenly upon a huge vertebra, lying as if it were carved out 

 in bas relief on a slab of sandstone. It was so heavy that it required two 

 men to lift it. Its circumference was thirty-three inches. We stood for 

 some moments looking in astonishment at this prodigy, and then hunted 

 around for more relics. Present]}^ one of the party, a little in advance, 

 cried out, " Why, this beats all !" At his feet lay a huge bone, resembling 

 a Hercules war-club, ten inches in diameter by two feet long. On digging 

 beneath it, a number of smaller vertebrae were discovered, and at the base 

 of a cliff two enormous fragments, reminding one of the broken columns of 

 some ancient temple, or a couple of saw-logs, lay on the ground, possibly 

 thigh bones, fifteen inches in diameter at the butt end ; and in the cliff 

 above them was another fragment sticking out of the rock like the stump 

 of a tree. With the help of a sledge-hammer and crowbar, the rock was 



