1835.] FOSSIL HUMAN RELICS. 371 
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 1713 and 1746. The water would then have deposited 
mud, containing fragments of pottery from the kilns, more abun- 
dant 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 Val- 
paraiso, although in the 220 years before our visit, the elevation 
cannot have exceeded nineteen feet, yet subsequently to 1817 
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 re- 
markable, 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 were there entombed ; 
and, according to the generally received opinion, when these ex- 
tinct 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 speculations, however, must 
be vague; for who will pretend to say, that there may not have 
been several periods of subsidence, intercalated between the 
movements of elevation ; for we know that along the whole coast 
of Patagonia, there have certainly been many and long pauses 
in the upward action of the elevatory forces, 
