-462 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. . 



Kansas City, Mo., Nov. i6, 1882. 



Col. Theo. S. Case, Ed. Kansas City Review: 



Dear Sir, — It is with great pleasure I answer the inquiry of Prof. Putnam 

 addresssd to you through his assistant, Mr. J. Smith, and which you have done 

 me the honor to refer to me for a reply. 



The statement of finding the human remains mentioned in the newspaper shp 

 referred to is correct. The facts may be briefly stated : Mr. Underwood is a large 

 manufacturer of bricks in this city and has an extensive yard near its, eastern 

 limit. In the latter part of June last some of the men employed by Mr. Under- 

 wood, digging clay for the work, found a human skeleton extended in it in a 

 liorizontal position eighteen feet beneath the surface. The bones were kindly 

 given by Mr. Underwood to the Kansas City Institute, and they are now in its 

 ■ collection. I saw the cast of the skeleton and a part of the bones in position in 

 the clay, and can vouch for the depth at which they were found. 



The important question is : Were they resting in the undisturbed natural 

 formation ? I think there can be but one answer to this, and that is that they 

 were. In this opinion Mr. Underwood and other gentlemen who examined the 

 place concur. The bones were found on a loess hill slope and within 250 

 feet of the summit. An obstruction to cause a fill of eighteen feet where they 

 were found would seem almost an impossibility. Besides, the clay around and 

 immediately above them did not differ in any way from the clay in the very ex- 

 tensive excavations made by Mr. Underwood for hundreds of feet around in the 

 same hill-side and which unquestionably remained as deposited before the excava- 

 tions were made. It can hardly be supposed that any people in past or present 

 time would inter their dead so deep. All the facts seem to point to the conclu- 

 sion that the individual whose remains were so mysteriously enwrapped in their 

 mantle of clay, was engulfed in the old lake of the Champlain epoch in which 

 the loess formation took place prior to its completion and was slowly covered in 

 by the continued super-accumulation of that deposit. At the end of the deposit 

 and before the work of attrition began the bones were covered probably to a 



■depth of more than fifty feet. If it be objected that human bones would not not 



■endure so long, it may be answered that several varieties of Helix, in a perfect 

 state of preservation, and the teeth and bones of extinct mammals are found 

 under like conditions in the same formation at depths varying from five to more 

 than a hundred feet and which, evidently, were buried in by its precipitation. 



During my geological and archaeological explorations along the Missouri 

 River in July and August last, I gathered other facts sustaining the opinion I 

 have here expressed. At White Cloud, Kansas, I was informed by gentlemen 



•of intelligence and unquestioned veracity, that a vase of antique pottery was 

 found in a mound standing on the summit of the bluff immediately overlook- 

 ing that city, and that another vase precisely similar, was found in a loess hill 



about a half mile distant from the mound, at a depth of fifteen feet below the 



