lO TRANSACTIONS OF THE WAGNER FREE 



in figure i, plate II. It differs in no respect fi-om an ordinary average speci- 

 men of the corresponding recent bone of man. At the time of the first 

 published notice of the discovery of the specimen, when the attention of 

 naturali.sts was awakened to the importance of such evidences of the 

 earlier existence of man than had previously been believed, it so much 

 interested Sir Charles Lyell, that on the occasion of his last visit to 

 this country he was induced to extend his trip and examine the locality in 

 which the bone was found. The specimen, with its associated fossils, was 

 obtained, in a ravine, from a deposit of clay, the talus of a neighboring cliff, 

 on the top of which were some old Indian graves. In a subsequent inter- 

 view with the writer, Mr. Lyell expressed the opinion that although the 

 human bone may have been contemporaneous with those, of the extinct 

 animals with which it had been found, he thought it more probable it 

 had fallen from one of the Indian graves and had become mingled with 

 the older fossils which were dislodged from the deeper part of the cliff. 

 At the time of making his communication. Dr. Dickeson intimated that the 

 human bone was found at a lower level, beneath bones of the Megaloiiyx, 

 etc., but this would not prove its age to be greater than or contemporaneous 

 with the latter. In the wear of the cliff the upper portion, with the Indian 

 graves and human bones, would be likely to fall first and the deeper portion 

 with the older fossils subsequently on the latter. 



In the spring of 1886, Mr. Joseph Willcox and Prof Angelo Heilprin, 

 while cruising in Sarasota Bay,']on the west coast of Florida, were informed 

 by the captain of their vessel that fossil human bones had been found on 

 the eastern shore of the bay. Prof Heilprin visited the locality, where 

 from a partially indurated ferruginous sandstone he obtained a rock frag- 

 ment containing a pair of human vertebrae, of which he has given an 

 account in his interesting article, " Explorations on the West Coast of 

 Florida," published in'the first volume of these Transactions. The follow- 

 ing spring Mr. Willcox visited the locality and obtained several additional 

 specimens of human fossils, of which the best preserved is a calcaneum, 

 represented in figure 2, plate II. The bones are well preserved and are actu- 

 ally converted into hard limonite. They do not differ in any resjject from 

 corresponding recent human bones. Mr. Willcox again visited the locality 

 last February, but found no other human fossils. He informs us that the 

 bones were found in a hard, ferruginous sandstone, which is exposed on the 

 shore of the bay and is there subjected to the action of the water at high tide. 

 The formation is overlaid by the surface soil from fifteen to eighteen inches 

 in depth. In one position, in which a trench was dug through the rock, it 

 was found to be from two and a half to three feet thick, with sand beneath. 



Human bones, of the .same kind, from Sarasota Bay, are noticed in the 

 Seventh Annual Report of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and 

 Ethnology, Cambridge, 1874, p. 26, remarkable for their weight, due to the 



