NEWLY DISCOVERED RUINS OF CLIFF CITIES IN ARIZONA. 667 
for some distance lined with mounds, made to represent birds and buffaloes. Few 
animal-mounds are found south of the State line, but eight miles below the mouth 
of the Wisconsin River, on the sandy bottom-lands of the Mississippi, where they 
are sufficiently high to secure from all floods, there is a figure known as the Big 
Elephant Mound, which, according to the measurements given, is 135 feet long, 
sixty feet broad (from the bottom of his feet to his back), with a trunk, or pro- 
boscis thirty-one feet long. The head is large and the proportions of the whole 
are symmetrical. Rev. S. D. Peet calls attention to the resemblance between 
the various buffalo mounds and this elephant mound, and intimates that we need 
to be cautious about indulging in confident speculations based upon the reality 
of this being designed to represent the figure of an elephant. Still, Moses Strong, 
of the State Geological Survey, says it resembles an elephant much more closely 
than any other animal, and the resemblance is much more perfect in this than in 
other effigies. 
It should be remarked, with reference to these animal mounds in general, 
that some one feature of the figure is usually greatly distorted. In the figures of 
the human body, for instance, the arms are nearly always of inordinate length. 
A squirrel, on the Wisconsin River, has a body forty-six feet long and a tail 
nearly 100. The wings of the birds are likewise usually of an enormous length, 
as well as the tails of the lizards. I should rather maintain, even in the face of 
the general opinion of the neighborhood, that the so-called Elephant Mound was 
a buffalo with his nose unnaturally prolonged, than to be compelled to maintain 
that the mound-builders of Wisconsin were familiar with the form of the elephant. 
— Chicago Advance. 
NEWLY DISCOVERED RUINS OF CLIFF CITIES IN ARIZONA. 
Mr. James Stevenson, of the Geological Survey, has reported to Maj. Powell 
as one of the results of his last season's field operations the discovery of several 
more ruined cave and cliff cities, differing in some respects from any he had 
before examined. The most remarkable was a village of sixty-five underground 
dwellings, situated near the summit of one of the volcanic foot hills of the San 
Francisco Mountains in the San Juan region of Arizona. The surface stratum 
of the hill had by exposure become hardened and formed the common roof for 
the entire community. The dwellings were excavated after a common pattern, 
and a description of one gives one an idea of the whole. They had no intercom- 
munication beneath the surface, and were only accessible by means of square 
holes leading from the surface by a vertical shaft to the floor of the main room 
of the dwelling. Foot rests — holes at convenient distances — along the sides of 
the shaft served the purposes of a stairway. 
Descending the shaft, the explorers found themselves at the side of an oval- 
shaped, arched roof, room, about twenty feet in its smallest diameter. At the 
ends and in the opposite entrance low doorways connected the main room 
