236 Report Progress of Boring [March, 



quartz and felspar from 1 75 feet ; — but here is something which will 

 excite much more surprise — a fossil bone brought up by the auger 

 from a depth of 350 feet below the surface of Calcutta ! 



When it is considered how many million chances there were against 

 an auger only a few inches in diameter, impinging upon the precise 

 ?pot where a bone lay in the understratum, — the risk, too, of such a 

 fragile object being ground to atoms by the tool, or pushed aside, 

 and missed, — it may be regarded as the most extraordinary good for- 

 tune that the relic should not only have been met with but brought 

 up entangled in the valve of the scoop without the slightest injury ! 

 The bone is the fractured lower half of a humerus of some small ani- 

 mal like a dog : it resembles the drawing of the corresponding bone 

 of the hyena in Cuvier, but it is impossible precisely to identify it 

 for want of skeletons for comparison. 



The interior is filled with the micaceous sand in which it was im- 

 bedded, and scales of the same adhere to the exterior surface, as is 

 shewn in the accompanying sketch, (see Plate XVIII.) The bone 

 is not thoroughly fossilized, for when heated by the blow-pipe 

 it becomes slightly charred and emits a perceptible odour : — but the 

 animal matter left is exceedingly small, and the whole loss on heat- 

 ing a portion to a white heat was only 7 per cent., the greater part 

 being moisture from the hydrate of iron with which it is impreg- 

 nated. The greater part of the phosphate of lime remains with a 

 proportion of carbonate: the specific gravity is 2.63, just the same 

 as that of a fine specimen of polished ferruginous odontolite from 

 the Himalaya : it requires the heat of an oxygen blow-pipe to fuse 

 a fragment per se on platina foil. 



Of the relative age of this deposit, compared with that of the Se- 

 walik and Nerbudda fossils, it is impossible to form any exact con- 

 clusions, but it is worth while to recapitulate briefly the conditions 

 under which each are found. 



The continuous stratum of lower sand in which our bone was buried at 

 a depth of a hundred and fifty feet, may be regarded as the gradual 

 deposit at the mouth of a primeval river : the excess of mica contained 

 in it would seem to indicate its derivation from a gneiss or schistose 

 source, such, indeed, as the present Himalayan or Vindyan range 

 might still furnish. It was evidently anterior to the general and ex- 

 tensive alluvial deposits of the yellow kankary clay which entirely 

 cover, or rather form, the Gangetic plain, and which the auger in Fort 

 William had passed through before it attained the depth of 100 feet. 

 Now the fossil bones of the Jamna were also found under the kankar 

 clays of the Dodb, 150 feet below the surface, so that in this respect 



