CHAP. XXX I.] FOSSIL HUMAN BONE. 151 



In company with Dr. Dickeson and Colonel Wales, 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 proprietor 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 earthquake. He himself had plowed 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 quadrupeds, in &quot; the Mammoth ravine,&quot; as to prove 

 that man must have co-existed with the rnegalonyx and its con 

 temporaries. Dr. Dickeson showed me the bone in question, 

 admitted by all anatomists to be part of a human pelvis, and 

 being a fragment of the os innominatmn. He felt persuaded 

 that it had been taken out of the clay underlying the loam, in 

 the ravine above alluded to, about six miles from Natchez. I 

 examined the perpendicular cliffs, which bound a part of this 

 water-course, where the loam, unsolidified as it is, retains its 

 verticality, and found land-shells in great numbers at the depth 

 of about thirty feet from the top. I was informed that the fossil 

 remains of the mammoth (a name commonly applied in the Unit 

 ed States to the mastodon) had been obtained, together with the 

 bones of some other extinct mammalia, from below these shells 

 in the undermined cliff. I could not ascertain, however, that 

 the human pelvis had been actually dug out in the presence of 

 a geologist, or any practiced observer, and its position unequivo 

 cally ascertained. Like most of the other fossils, it was, I 

 believe, picked up in the bed of the stream, which would simply 

 imply that it had been washed out of the cliffs. But the evi 

 dence of the antiquity of the bone depends entirely on the part 

 of the precipice from which it was derived. It was stained 

 black, as if buried in a peaty or vegetable soil, and may have 

 been dislodged from some old Indian grave near the top, in 

 which case it may only have been five, ten, or twenty centuries 



