52 The American Geologist. July, 1897 
EDITORIAL COMMENT. 
Man and the Megalonyx in North America. 
Mr, H. C. Mercer has been exhuming what are probably the 
last relics of the Megalonyx which has been from time to time 
partially disentombed from the Big Bone cave in Van Buren 
county, Tennessee, and has given an account of the work in 
the last number of the Proceedings of the American Philo- 
sophical Society. The first found specimens came to light in 
1835, the next in 18G4. and these last in 1896, by an expedi- 
tion sent out from the University of Pennsylvania with the 
object of determining the antiquity of man by correlating his 
remains with those of some of the extinct mammalia of North 
America. The cost of the expedition was generously defrayed 
by the vice-president of the university, Dr. William Pepper. 
This and other caves had been rifled for saltpetre during 
the wars of 1776, 1812, and 1863, and the relics of the Megn- 
lonyx were found at the very end of one of the subterranean 
galleries after all the earth had been removed up to that 
point. Hence they were not much disturbed. 
Mr. Mercer deserves much credit for his perseverance in the 
diflicult and excessivel}' unpleasant task of the disinterment 
of the bones. They were completely embedded in a layer of 
dung of the cave-rats which have evidently frequented the 
cave from time immemorial. But the results add nothing to 
our knowledge of ancient man. No evidence of his presence 
was discovered with two doubtful exceptions which will be 
mentioned later. The skeleton lay a thousand feet from the 
entrance where the cave is perfectly dry and dusty and where, 
unfortunately several openings exist to the surface through 
which much of the lighter material may have been carried in. 
Though the deposit can be divided into several layers with 
much distinctness it is obvious that in a dry cave that is fre- 
quented by rats and porcupines and has been ransacked again 
and again for saltpetre there must exist much uncertainty re- 
garding the relation of objects merely buried in the dry rats' 
dung in a layer thirty inches thick and only covered with 
another two inches in thickness. 
But in fact the explorations tend to show rather the recen- 
