138 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



from five feet square and high to ten by twelve feet square and nine feet high. 

 The passage is mostly from, one room to another. The doorways, however, are 

 only about eighteen to twenty-four inches high and twelve to eighteen inches wide, 

 placed on or near the floor and form the only openings into rooms that do not 

 need another for passageway. The walls are made of shale stone, one and one- 

 half to two inches thick, laid in mortar, which is almost as hard as the stone 

 itself. The walls are about nine inches thick and as straight and plumb as any 

 modern brick wall. 



Some of the houses are two stories high. The roofs have all been burned 

 down, the only woodwork escaping being here and there the projecting end of a 

 rafter from the wall and the cross pieces over some doorway. Such projecting 

 rafters are pine, with the bark taken off and about four or five inches thick, the 

 cut end showing stone ax chopping. Some of the interiors are nicely plastered 

 with mortar and decorated with colors and designs, seen on Indian pottery, but 

 I am sorry to say that vandal hands have almost obliterated these decorations by 

 scratching their names over them, perhaps in hope that their names may be per- 

 petuated in photographs that might be attempted of these decorations. As these 

 decorations are so obliterated by vandal inscriptions, and a photograph of them 

 would have simply been a photograph of the vandal names, I did not waste a 

 plate on them but left them to be execrated where they are whenever seen. Bur- 

 ied in the debris may be seen broken pottery, pieces of old rotten arrows, wicker 

 work, remnants and pieces of a coarse cloth made from soap weed fibre, corn 

 cobs the size of pop corn cobs, and innummerable other articles of household re- 

 fuse. In bones I found but a single human molar tooth, with the enamel drop- 

 ping off. Opposite the entrance to the main cave, in the return angle of the 

 cliff, is another smaller cave, also with building (about half a dozen rooms), which 

 probably was a guard cave, commanding and defending the entrance to the main 

 cave. At the other end and a little beyond the main cave, is another large cave 

 with a steep and sloping floor, the debris down which, with the superincumbent 

 huge boulders, plainly show that the buildings in this cave were ground to atoms 

 and carried down the slope with probably everything and everybody in them, by 

 the falling of an immense layer from the ceiling of the cave. An excavation 

 here might a tale unfold. Hanging rocks in the cave still look threatening. 

 Whether this catastrophe caused the abandonment of the adjoining caves and the 

 burning of their remaining homes as propitiatory offerings by their horrified and 

 terrified dwellers is part of the mystery that now alone haunts the caves that were 

 once the home of the cliff dwellers. — Scorro Bullion. 



ANCIENT RELICS IN ILLINOIS. 



On last Friday, May 2d, Prof. R. L. Witherell, of Davenport, and C. A. 

 Dodge, of Albany, assisted by some other of our citizens, dug a hole about eight 

 -by ten feet, and about six feet deep, into one of the Albany mounds. As a result 



