BONE CAVE AT PORT KENNEDY. 285 



heavily upon the softening mass of bones and whirling them as in a boiling 

 cauldron, reduce many to small fragments and finally deposit them in their 

 present position with stones, mud, plants and trees. 1 



On the other hand, the presence of bones of birds and of tortoises (if of 

 water species) and frogs, which, following the currents of the flood, might have 

 avoided partnership in a stampede of land animals caused by a water catastrophe, 

 are facts of weight in opposition to the hypothesis advanced. 



Relation of the Deposit to Anthropology. 



Six months work, leaving the chasm incompletely excavated, had failed to 

 reveal traces of humanity in the deposit. If man had existed at the period, we 

 might have expected, not unreasonably, that the waters which gathered together 

 and poured into this tomb so many living creatures had seized him also, and that at 

 some unexpected moment our discovery of a fragment of his skeleton, a hand-made 

 implement of bone, a potshred or a chip of jasper, would have settled the much 

 vexed question of his presence in pleistocene America. But no such sign appeared, 

 and this fact is negative evidence of weight. 



Yet it is not to be overestimated, first, because we had not demonstrated that 

 no human trace existed in the unprobed depths of remaining debris ; and second, 

 because the cave was, as before noted, in no sense a place fitted for human habita- 

 tion, and hence a site where human remains would have accumulated. 



Nevertheless, though our labor had thus no direct bearing upon anthropology, 

 Port Kennedy must retain a strong indirect interest for the student of primitive 

 humanity in the New World. As if preserved in a bottle the remains of so many 

 bears, cats, herbivores, rodents and reptiles of extinct race help to illustrate the 

 conditions of the geological time immediately preceeding the present and known 

 as the pleistocene, the period when early man is known to have existed in Europe, 

 and in which he has been alleged to have existed in America. Judged by the 

 presence of such animals as the sub-tropical tapir and peccary, a winter climate 

 milder than the present probably then prevailed. Then, as at the discovery of 

 America, Pennsylvania must have been a land of trees, where abundant sloths of 

 gigantic size, ranging under the yet familiar shade of the pine, the beech, the oak 

 and the hazel, tore their green fodder to the ground, and where the elephantine mas- 

 todon fed upon bushes still familiar to modern eyes If bears of formidable size 

 were abundant, feline carnivores, like the sabre-tooth tiger and the jaguar were 

 comparatively rare, and this fact, together with the abundance of the large grass- 

 eating milder animals, indicates a region less dominated by brutes hostile to primi- 

 tive humanity than pleistocene Europe. 



1 Under the present drainage system, granted subterranean connection with the river only one-quarter of 

 a mile away, the galleries if free of debris, would have been full of water at depths greater than the present 

 dammed Schuylkill level, or at about fifty-five feet below the brink of the fissure. Without such communication 

 the level of inflowing water in the fissure might have been expected to rise as high as water will now rise in 

 the quarry, or to within, perhaps, twenty-five or thirty feet of its rim. 



