ANTHROPOLOGY. 
Antiquity oF Man ry America.— The discoveries that are con- 
stantly being made in this country are proving that man ex- 
isted on this continent as far back in geological time as on the 
European continent; and it even seems that America, really the 
old world geologically, will soon. prove to be the birthplace of 
the earliest race of man. One of the late and important discov- 
eries is that by Mr. E. L. Berthoud, which is given in full, with a 
map, in the Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences 
for 1872, p. 46. Mr. Berthoud there reports the discovery of an- 
cient fireplaces, rude stone monuments, and implements of stone 
in great number and variety, in several places along Crow Creek in 
Colorado, and also on several other rivers in the vicinity. These 
fireplaces indicate several ancient sites of an unknown race differ- 
ing entirely from the mound-builders and the present Indians, 
while the shells and other fossils found with the remains make it 
quite certain that the deposit in which the ancient sites are found 
is as old as the Pliocene and perhaps as the Miocene. As the 
fossil shells found with the relics of man are of estuary forms, and 
as the sites of the ancient towns are on extended points of land 
and at the base of the ridges or bluffs, Mr. Berthoud thinks the 
evidence is strongly in favor of the locations having been near 
some ancient fresh water lake, whose vestiges the present topog- 
raphy of the region favors. 
MICROSCOPY. 
Funcous Growrn IN SHeris.—‘‘In a paper read before the 
Manchester Philosophical Society on the 26th of February, Mr- 
Mark Stirrup exhibited sections of shells of mollusca, showing 
so-called fungoid growths. He referred to Dr. Carpenter’s report 
on shell structure, presented to the meeting of the British Associa- 
tion in 1844, in which especial mention is made of a tubular struc- 
ture in certain shells, Anomia being cited as a characteristic sil 
ample. In the last edition of ‘The Microscope,’ Dr. Carpenter 
he said, withdraws his former explanation of this structure, and — 
now refers it to the parasitic action of a fungus. Mr. Stirrup 
showed sections of this shell penetrated by tubuli from the outer 
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