SOME RARE PREHISTORIC RELICS. 45^ 



in books as the auriferous gravel. This is an article ^^ sui generis ^' ; it is not easily 

 imitated. No skill possessed by Mr. Matthewson or any one else could have 

 been sufficient to give the skull the characters which it had as I saw it. It is 

 most certainly no fabrication. 



But it has been said that it is a modern skull which had become incrusted 

 after a few years of interment. This assertion, however, is never made by any 

 one knowing the region. The gravel has not the slightest tendency toward an 

 action of that sort. The skull would either decay and waste away, or it would 

 remain linchanged ; and added to this comes in the fact that the hollows of the 

 skull were crowded with the solidified and cemented sand, in such a way as they 

 <;ould have been only by its being driven into them in a semi-fluid mass, a condi- 

 tion which the gravels have never had since they were first laid down. 



No, no ! Let the skull tell its own story, and believe what it says, because 

 it brings its own proof. Whatever age belongs to the gravel deposit under Table 

 Mountain belongs to the Calaveras skull, entirely irrespective of the question of 

 honesty or dishonesty in the alleged finder. Wherever he found it, I beUeve its 

 ,age to be beyond cavil. 



Its degree of fossilization has not been here insisted upon, because that 

 change is more rapid in some localities than in others, but it is an interesting fact 

 that this Calaveras skull is more thoroughly fossiUzed, a greater proportion of its 

 phosphate of lime has become carbonate, than in either of the European speci- 

 mens which were reckoned of the greatest age. 



We seem then fairly entitled to consider the Ancient Man of Calaveras the 

 ■oldest representative of our race to which we can as yet refer; and being such, is 

 be of a bestial type? Look for yourself. Figures have been published by Pro- 

 fessor Whitney in his work. What is there bestial as shown by them? A single 

 skull cannot, of course, speak for a whole race, but so far as this specimen can 

 testify, what man is now, man was then. It manifests no sign of inferiority to 

 the American race as now existing. Barbarous in habit he doubtless may have 

 been. All the relics of workmanship thus far discovered of those coeval with 

 ihim, indicate a low grade of civilization, and yet one not necessarily much, if at 

 all, lower than that of most of the Indian tribes which formerly occupied the en- 

 tire breadth of the continent. And in intellectual power, judging from his 

 cerebral development, he might assuredly have claimed a fair average rank. — 

 American Naturalist. 



SOME RARE PRE-HISTORIC RELICS. 



PROF. H. A. REID, DES MOINES, IOWA. 



In the REViEW of February, 1882, I gave a pretty full account of a tiny cop- 

 iper ax which I had found on the site of an ancient or pre-historic village at Lex- 

 ington, Missouri. Since that time Mr. Charles Teubner has sent me exact natur- 

 al size drawings of another such ax, found at the same place, which corresponds 



