476 NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
the rock, the granite of that region having often three 
or more thin coats comparable to those of an onion, 
as if the cooling down had not been equable/ I 
immediately set to work to copy, and the Indians 
of their own accord cleared out the earth and lichens 
which had filled up some of the lines. As it was 
impossible to copy all, I selected those figures which 
were most distinct, and those which, by their fre- 
quent repetition, might be considered typical. That 
marked A (Fig. 1 7), for instance, varying only slightly 
in the details, was repeated several times. It was 
not possible to draw all by hand to the same scale, 
but as I measured most of the figures, that defect 
can easily be remedied in recopying them. 
In all the drawings which illustrate this chapter, 
the small figures give the dimensions in feet and 
inches. When underlined they show the entire 
length of the object copied, as 3/10 in the centre 
figure of Fig. 17 means that it is 3 feet 10 inches 
long ; otherwise they indicate the length of the line 
at which they are written. Thus 2/5 on the right 
side of A shows that the longer side of the oblong 
is 2 feet 5 inches long, and the cross line on the 
right is 4 feet long. 
As I sketched, I asked the Indians, ''Who had 
made those figures, and what they represented ? " but 
received only the universal reply of the Indian 
when he cares not to tell or will not take the trouble to 
recollect, " Quien sabe, patron ? " (" Who know^s ? "). 
But I understood enough of Barre to note that in 
^ [For drawings of such onion-like rocks see Plate x, in my Amazon and 
Rio Negro. It occurs on every scale from that of moderate-sized boulders up 
to whole mountains. It is seen on a great scale in the huge domes of the 
Yosemite valley, and is now believed to be the result of a process of aerial 
decomposition due to the action of sun and rain. — Ed.] 
