142 The American Geologist. Feb. i89i 
pina glacier, partly in subglacial courses, partly in canon-like chan- 
nels, which are often underlaid by ice. A large stream, of which 
lantern views were shown, issues from an ice-tunnel and after Hew- 
ing a considerable distance in a channel open to the sky disappears 
in another ice-tunnel, about 150 feet wide and 50 feet high. 
The age of the shales and sandstones which form Mt. St. Elias 
and the neighboring ranges is found to be late Pliocene or more 
probably Quaternary. Plentiful marine shells occur in these 
strata up to an elevation of 5.1100 feet on the Hitchcock range and 
Pinnacle pass, the species being the same that now inhabit the 
sea-shore of Alaska. The mountains have been formed by pro- 
found faulting, with upthrusts and tilting ; and the pyramidal 
sharp peak of St. Elias is found to be the uplifted corner of a 
great orographic block. There is no evidence of general glacia- 
tion upon the highest ranges, but the valley glaciers have been 
1,000 feet thicker than now. From their known recession at 
Disenchantment bay within the last hundred 3'ears, Mr. Russell 
concludes that the maximum extension of the Alaskan glaciers 
was attained only a few hundred years ago. 
Tuesday evening Mr. George F. Becker read a paper on ' ' An- 
tiquities from under Tuolumne Table Mountain, California." 
The authenticity of the discoveries of stone mortars and pestles, 
spear heads, human bones, and the famous Calaveras skull, in the 
deep auriferous gravels of California, capped by lava-sheets, 
seems to be fully established. Mr. Becker therefore thinks that 
these gravels are probably no older than the glacial drift of other 
parts of North America and Europe in which the earliest other 
traces of man's existence are found. The uplifting of the Sierra 
Nevada and changes in the courses of streams there were appar- 
ently in part or wholly earl}' Pleistocene ; and the much later 
glaciation of the Sierra Nevada is probably to be correlated with 
the second Glacial epoch of the northeast part of the continent, 
or indeed may have occurred since the departure of the north- 
eastern ice-sheet. 
This was followed by a display of stereopticon views from Idaho 
and California, by Prof. G. F. Wright, with description of the 
Pleistocene lava deposits of the Snake river valle}\ The special 
interest of this paper related to the image found in an artesian 
boring at Nampa, Idaho, which is figured, with notes of the geo- 
logic section, in the G-eologist, vol. iv. , p. 387, Dec, 1889. 
Professor Wright also gave additional statements confirming the 
discoveries of human implements in the lava-capped gravels of 
Table mountain, California. 
Wednesday afternoon Prof. Edward Orton spoke of the recent 
discovery, less than two weeks before the meeting, of many of the 
bones of a Megalonyx jetfersonii Harlan, in central Ohio, during 
the excavation of a ditch for drainage. Several of the bones, in- 
