known geological past, could have been weighed. 
1894.] Archeology and Ethnology. 1065 
hole, had to break through a stalagmitic floor hard as marble and cut 
five feet into a breccia nearly as hard, to find the famous skull now in 
the University of Liege. 
But the presence of these crusts, though serving satisfactorily to sep- 
arate diverse accumulations on cave floors one from another, is no 
longer regarded in Europe as evidence of the great age of relics so 
entombed. 
In the Wyandot Cave (right bank of Blue River, 5 miles from its 
mouth in the Ohio, Crawford Co., Indiana) a hole has been artificially 
battered in the side of one of the innermost large stalactites called 
“ The Pillar of the Constitution,"and it appeared from the observations 
of Professor Collet (Ind. Geolog. Survey, 1876-77-78, p. 467) and Mr. 
Hovey who found (as I did in June, 1894) granite pebble hammer- 
stones lying in a mass of splinters near the hole, and Mr. H. W. Roth- 
rock, who (in 1877-78) found besides hammerstones, a deer horn 
* pick " or prying tool, close by, that Indians had battered out the hole 
with the stone hammers to get fragments of carbonate of lime for 
some purpose (possibly trinket making) not yet determined. 
A crust of stalactite 10 inches thick has since crept over the bruised 
edge of this unique quarry, and Mr. Hovey thought (Celebrated 
American Caverns, p. 139) that “at the known rate of increase, it 
must have required 1000 years for the wrapping to attain its present 
thickness of 10 inches, and that length of time has, therefore, elapsed 
since this ‘alabaster’ quarry was worked.” 
Professor Adami’s above statement which omits, however, a chemi- 
cal analysis of the cement referred to, is one of the sort of valuable 
observations which hasshaken faith in the worth of all age tests based 
on stalagmite or stalactite. If for a thousand years the still standing 
forests have helped dampen the roof of Wyandot Cave, if rain has 
kept falling at an equal rate all that while, and if water always equally 
charged with lime has gone on trickling through the ceilings ever 
since, then what happened in twenty years to rain water and cement 
at Bayreuth might have taken fifty or a hundred times as long to hap- 
pen to rain water and limestone in Indiana. But we can hardly 
imagine a case where in a cave care enough would have been taken, 
and time enough spent in measuring the yearly increment, or still more 
where the inferred conditions of uniformity reaching back into a little 
H. C. Mercer. 
