456 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



began its work. But the blueness of the chasm is only a faint index of the dim- 

 ness which comes across the mental vision. It is idle to suggest to one thus 

 standing and looking down the canon of the Yuba, or the American, or the Tuo- 

 lumne, that water can have done that work (and water certainly has done it) 

 within an interval which, reckoning years by thousands, must not have written 

 against it very, very many. We will not specify how many, but the number sure- 

 ly is great. 



And all this scooping out of canons, this furrowing the western Sierra slope 

 into its configuration of the present era, has been done since the Table Mountain 

 lava flowed. Of that there can be no question. The evidence is too plain to 

 admit a doubt. 



If now we find the remains of man, or works which none but man could 

 have made, among the gravel-beds beneath Table Mountain, or in any other 

 place amid the undisturbed pay-dirt, we cannot fail to know that human hands 

 and human brains had done their work before the immense canons of the Sierra 

 Nevada commenced their formation in the little furrows near the summit down 

 which the waters trickled. 



We can take the proof only in brief, and we will take none but those which 

 are absolutely established and authentic. 



Dr. Perez Snell, of Sonora, had in his collection (this collection has unfortu- 

 nately perished by fire) a human jaw which was brought out in a carload of 

 "pay-dirt" from a shaft stretching far in beneath the Table Mountain, and with 

 it were several stone implements. Dr. Snell did not himself see this bone in the 

 car as it was drawn to the surface, and in the minds of some a doubt might thus 

 be thrown on its authenticity. The specimen was given to him by a miner. If 

 it were an isolated instance this would be possibly worth considering, but is only 

 one of many, and at the same time it is only fair to state that there could not 

 well have been found a miner in all that region who would have thought it worth 

 his while to attempt a deception, nor even one who had any doubt in his own 

 mind as to the point we are considering. They saw the products of man's work 

 come out with the gravel too often to pay commonly any attention to them. The 

 only wonder is that he even took the trouble to pick out the bone at all. There 

 can be no question that for one such that has been preserved, dozens and perhaps 

 hundreds have gone down in the current of water in the sluice washing. 



In 1857 Col. Hubbs, who was afterward State Superintendent of Instruction, 

 found in a load of " dirt" as it came out from his claim under Table Mountain, 

 portions of a human skull. He was on the ground himself, and saw the frag- 

 ments as they were taken out of the sluice. They had come from a distance of 

 180 feet beneath the lava. One of the pieces is now in the collection of the 

 Boston Society of Natural History ; the other in that of the Philadelphia Academy. 



Mr..O. W. Stevens certifies that in 1853 he found in a shaft under Table 

 Mountain, "about two hundred feet in," a relic that resembled a large stone 

 bead, of white marble, about an inch and a half long and an inch and a fourth 

 in diameter, with a hole through if a fourth of an inch across. 



