THE 
AMERICAN NATURALIST 
VoL. KAXI. January, 1897. 361 
A GROOVED STONE AXE FROM THE OHIO DRIFT. 
BYE C Menceé 
Mr. E. W. Claypole in the American Geologist for No- 
vember, 1896, says that Mr. Elmer E. Masterman, in the sum- 
mer of 1896, found a grooved greenstone axe of common ab- 
original American type, in situ, twenty-two feet down in a de- 
posit of what Mr. Claypole regards as glacial gravel, near 
New London in southeast Huron County, Ohio. The latter 
quotes the finders narrative which declares that he, Master- 
man, while digging a well, without witnesses, found the axe 
bedded in a stratum of tough blue clay, in which, after re- 
moval, it left its impress. Above it rested one foot of coarse 
gravel, covered by thirteen feet of silty material banded with 
films of sand, and overlaid finally by a superficial covering 
eight feet thick of clay and stones. 
Mr. Claypole who has wisely examined the case on the spot: 
cites in favor of the genuineness of the discovery, the extra- 
ordinary decomposition of the greenstone specimen, which 
when sawed in half was found to be rotted or leached (he 
thinks by contact with sulphurous water) almost entirely 
through its interior, a process lasting probably a long time, 
while a series of concentric limonite stains like the year marks 
ona oe exposed on the sawed cross section, seemed fur- 
