XVI FOSSIL HUMAN RELICS 395 



bed, from its wide extent and smoothness, must have been 

 deposited beneath the sea ; but I afterwards found in one spot 

 that it lay on an artificial floor of round stones. It seems, 

 therefore, most probable that at a period when the land stood 

 at a lower level there was a plain very similar to that now 

 surrounding Callao, which, being protected by a shingle beach, 

 is raised but very little above the level of the sea. On this 

 plain, with its underlying red -clay beds, I imagine that the 

 Indians manufactured their earthen vessels ; and that, during 

 some violent earthquake, the sea broke over the beach, and 

 converted the plain into a temporary lake, as happened round 

 Callao in 171 3 and 1746. The water would then have 

 deposited mud, containing fragments of pottery from the kilns, 

 more abundant at some spots than at others, and shells from 

 the sea. This bed with fossil earthenware stands at about the 

 same height with the shells on the lower terrace of San 

 Lorenzo, in which the cotton thread and other relics were 

 embedded. Hence we may safely conclude that within the 

 Indo-human period there has been an elevation, as before 

 alluded to, of more than eighty -five feet ; for some little 

 elevation must have been lost by the coast having subsided 

 since the old maps were engraved. At Valparaiso, although 

 in the 220 years before our visit the elevation cannot have 

 exceeded nineteen feet, yet subsequently to 1 8 1 7 there has 

 been a rise, partly insensible and partly by a start during the 

 shock of 1822, of ten or eleven feet. The antiquity of the 

 Indo-human race here, judging by the eighty-five-feet rise of 

 the land since the relics were embedded, is the more remark- 

 able, as on the coast of Patagonia, when the land stood about 

 the same number of feet lower, the Macrauchenia was a living 

 beast ; but as the Patagonian coast is some way distant from 

 the Cordillera, the rising there may have been slower than 

 here. At Bahia Blanca the elevation has been only a few feet 

 since the numerous gigantic quadrupeds w^ere there entombed ; 

 and, according to the generally received opinion, when these 

 extinct animals were living man did not exist. But the rising 

 of that part of the coast of Patagonia is perhaps noways 

 connected with the Cordillera, but rather with a line of old 

 volcanic rocks in Banda Oriental, so that it may have been 

 infinitely slower than on the shores of Peru. All these 



