296 MAN AXD THE GLACIAL PERIOD. 



trating the gravel underneath Table Mountain, near 

 Sonora, there was reported to have been discovered, in 

 1857, a human jawbone, one portion of which was sent by 

 responsible parties to the Boston Society of Natural His- 

 tory, and another part to the Philadelphia Academy of 

 Sciences, in whose collections the fragments can now be 

 seen. 



Interest reached a still higher pitch when, in I860, an 

 entire human skull with some other human bones was 

 reported to have been discovered under this same lava 

 deposit, a few miles from Sonora, at Altaville, in Calaveras 

 County, and hence known as the " Calaveras skull." Per- 

 sistent efforts were made soon after to discredit the 

 genuineness of this discovery. Bret Harte showered upon 

 it the shafts of his ridicule, and various other persons gave 

 currency to the story that the whole report originated in 

 a joke played by the miners upon unsuspecting geologists. 

 These attacks were so successful that many conservative 

 archaeologists and men of science have refused to accept 

 the skull as genuine. 



Eecent events, however, have brought such additional 

 evidence * to the support of this discovery that it would 

 seem unreasonable any longer to refuse to credit the testi- 

 mony. At the meeting of the Geological Society of 

 America, at Washington, in January, 1891, Mr. George P. 

 Becker, of the United States Geological Survey, who for 

 some years has had charge of investigations relating to 

 the gold-bearing gravels of the Pacific coast, presented 

 the affidavit of Mr. J. H. Neale, a well-known mining 

 engineer of unquestionable character, stating that he had 

 taken a stone mortar and pestle, together with some spear- 

 heads (which through Mr. Becker he presented to the 

 Society), from undisturbed strata of gravel underneath 

 the lava of Table Mountain, near Eawhide Gulch, a few 



* See Bulletin Geological Society of America, 1891, pp. 189-200. 



