198 G. F. BECKER ANTIQUITIES FROM TABLE MOUNTAIN. 



nant of Pliocene mammals survived on the Pacific coast loner after the acre 

 which they characterized was past. For such an hypothesis there are cer- 

 tainly analogies. The Australian fauna (and its flora, too) represents a 

 survival, at least, to a certain extent, and the fauna of this hemisphere is of 

 an older type than that of Eurasia. So, too, the tapir of tropical South 

 America nearly resembles the extinct tapir of California. Perhaps he 

 escaped through Mexico when ice appeared on the Sierra. Barrande was 

 driven to the theory of colonies to account for Paleozoic faunal distribution, 

 and the theory is surely as legitimate on the border line between the Tertiary 

 and the recent period as when a more equable distribution of climate gave 

 less incentive to migration. Dr. C. A. White, too, has done much to show 

 that great caution must be exercised in assuming the simultaneous extinction 

 of species in different regions. Finally, Professor Joseph Leidy, to whom I 

 communicated an abstract of this paper, writes to me from Philadelphia : 



" In the Academy here are some bones of the Megalonyx, from a Tennessee cave, 

 retaining portions of articular cartilage and tendinous attachment, and in one in- 

 stance a nail, apparently indicating the perpetuation of the animal under favorable 

 conditions to a period closely verging on that of the human era." 



Conclusion. — 'As a trial hypothesis, then, the suggestion of a survival of 

 Pliocene animals in California to relatively late Pleistocene times seems 

 worthy of consideration; but it cannot be definitely adopted or rejected until 

 the faunas of the auriferous gravels and allied horizons are more fully in- 

 vestigated. <:^That human remains are really associated with an extinct fauna 

 in these gravels seems to me thoroughly established.^ 



Washington, D. C, December, 1890. 



