196 KAVINES IN TABLE-LAND. [CHAP. XXXI, 



speed, especially in the course of the last thirty or 

 thirty-five years. Some attribute the increased 

 erosive action to partial clearings of the native forest, 

 a cause of which the power has been remarkably 

 displayed, as before stated, within the last twenty 

 years, in Georgia.* Others refer the change mainly 

 to the effects of the great earthquake of New Madrid, 

 in 1811 12, by which this region was much fis 

 sured, ponds being dried up and many landslips 

 caused. 



In company with Dr. Dickeson and Colonel Wailes, 

 I visited a narrow valley, hollowed out through the 

 shelly loam recently named &quot; the Mammoth ravine,&quot; 

 from the fossils found there. Colonel Wiley, a pro 

 prietor of that part of the State of Mississippi, who 

 knew the country well before the year 1812, assured 

 me that this ravine, although now seven miles long, 

 and in some parts sixty feet deep, with its numerous 

 ramifications, has been entirely formed since the earth 

 quake. He himself had ploughed some of the land 

 exactly over one spot which the gully now traverses. 



A considerable sensation was recently caused in 

 the public mind, both in America and Europe, by 

 the announcement of the discovery of a fossil human 

 bone, so associated with the remains of extinct qua 

 drupeds, in &quot; the Mammoth ravine,&quot; as to prove that 

 man must have co-existed with the megalonyx and 

 its contemporaries. Dr. Dickeson showed me the 

 bone in question, admitted by all anatomists to be 

 part of a human pelvis, and being a fragment of 



* See ante, p. 25. 



