474 



Account of the Boring Operations 



[April 



Note hy James Prinsep, Esq. Secretary. 



As a. postscript to the above report, I have now to announce a most 

 curious and unexpected discovery, communicated to me this very 

 morning by Colonel MacLeod, the Engineer officer, who has suc- 

 ceeded to the charge of the experiment hitherto so successfully 

 conducted by Major Taylor. 



On a former occasion the Society was shewn metallic iron reduced 

 from ore extracted from a depth of 150 feet, and sharp angular quartz 

 and felspar from 175 feet ;— but here is som elhing which will excite 

 much more surprise, a fossil bone brought up by the auger from a 

 depth of 350 feet below the surface of Calcutta, 



When it is considered how many million ciiances there were against 

 an auger only a few inches in diameter, impinging upon the precise 

 spot where a bone lay in the understratum, — the risk, too, of such a 

 fragile object being ground to atoms by the tool, or pushed aside, and 

 missed, — it may be regarded as the most extraordinary good fortune 

 that the relic should not only have been met with but brought up en- 

 tangled in the valve of the scoop without the slightest injury ! The 

 bone is the fractured lower half of a humerus of some small animal 

 like a dog : it resembles the drawing of the corresponding bone of 

 {he hyena in Cuvier, but it is impossible precisely to identify it for 

 want of skeletons for comparison. 



The interior is filled with the micaceous sand in which it was im- 

 bedded, and scales of the same adhere to the exterior surface. The bone 

 is not thoroughly fossilized, for when heated by the blow-pipe it be- 

 comes slightly charred and emits a perceptible odour :— but the animal 

 matter left is exceedingly small, and the whole loss on heating a portion 

 to a white heat was only 7 per cent., the greater part being moisture 

 from the hydrate of iron with which it is impregnated. The greater 

 part of the phosphate of lime remains with a proportion of carbonate: 

 the specific gravity is 2.63, just the same as that of a fine specimen of 

 polished ferruginous odontoliie from the Himalaya : it requires the 

 heat of an oxygen blow-pipe to fuse a fragment per se on platina foil. 



Of the relative age of this deposit, compared with that of the 

 Sewalik Nerbuddaios's>\\s, it is impossible to form any exact con" 

 elusions, but it is worth while to recapitulate briefly the conditions 

 undei which each are found. 



The continuous stratum of lower sand in which our bone was buried 

 at a depth of a hundred and fifty feet, may be regarded as the gradual 



