PREHISTORIC MAN IN BURMA. 335 



upper premolar of a small species of Rhinoceros. This specimen, 

 which is being sent to the Natural History Museum at South 

 Kensington, together with the collection made by Col. Nichols 

 and myself at Yenangyoung and Mandalay, was brought to us at 

 Twingon village by a Burman oil-well owner. Oil is the only 

 industry there, and certain tracts are reserved for native owners 

 to work by their primitive methods. They are not allowed to 

 drill by machinery, but they dig wells and get oil at about three 

 hundred feet. On asking whether they do not sometimes come 

 across fossils, one man produced the above tooth, saying that he 

 had found it at about one hundred and fifty cubits down, and he 

 had never found anything else. The specimen is black, and 

 beautifully polished from lying in the oil-sands, and on one side 

 it had been rubbed down on some level surface, producing facets 

 on three separate prominences. There is, however, no question 

 in this case, as the man said he had rubbed it down himself to 

 find out of what it was made. He apparently did not know it 

 was a tooth, but kept it as a curiosity. I do not, of course, 

 suggest that the femur was rubbed down in this way, but it is no 

 longer unique ; and, if Dr. Noetling is by any chance in error in 

 supposing that it had not been previously disturbed when he 

 found it, there is always the chance that it came by its peculiarities 

 in this way. 



Now as to this, surely the most remarkable thing about the 

 bone is that it should have remained intact — that is, unbroken — 

 in a stratum in which, so far as I know, all other bones are 

 reduced to rolled fragments. The femur of a Hippopotamus is 

 not a small bone by any means, and if such animals as Rhinoceros 

 perimensis and Hippotherium antelopinum are represented in the 

 conglomerate only by isolated teeth and fragments of bone, how 

 comes it that this bone alone exists unbroken ? And the diffi- 

 culty is not made less by the consideration that this very specimen, 

 thus curiously preserved, is found to be one on which Tertiary 

 man has been exercising his ingenuity. I am aware that Dr. 

 Noetling found it in a subordinate patch, either fifteen or fifty 

 feet above the zone of H. antelopinum, and not in that zone itself, 

 but he himself describes such patches as made up of " small 

 pieces of drift-wood fossilized into hydroxide of iron, small 

 pebbles of white quartz, or of a ferruginous claystone, and rolled 



