C orrespondence. Oe 
twenty feet high, of the finest loess. Recently I have been able to gather 
some information concerning relics of man from this deposit. Mr. Chas. 
Freeman, a brick-maker, says he took from the loess, on the north side 
of Eighth street, near St. Mathias church, at a depth of about twelve feet, 
an arrow point. 
In answer to my questions he said it eould not have fallen from the 
top, for he took it out himself and noted especially the print in the loess. 
There seemed to be no possible chance that it could have gotten there 
through a hole or crevice. The loess at this place is very fine-grained, of 
a yellowish brown color, exhibiting slight indications of strata. At 
another yard, about two blocks from the above, on Iowa avenue and 
Ninth street, this same gentleman was moulding brick in the old fash- 
ioned way. In thrusting the clay into the mold he felt something sharp, 
and an examination brought to light an arrow-point. 
At first sight it would seem as if this find would have been worth little or 
nothing, but on cleaning the arrow point it was found to be largely covered 
with blue clay, quite different from the rest of the loess at this place. 
A bed of this same blue clay was strikingly shown here about ten 
feet below the surface, showing that this arrow-point was well covered 
by this same clay. 
I examined this bank, and unless the arrow-point could have been so 
covered in the process of mixing, it must have been originally buried in 
the blue clay, which is ten feet or more belew the present surface. 
In the suburb of this city, about one mile from where it enters the 
Mississippi, Mad creek has cut away a hill forming a bank forty to fifty 
feet high. At about twelve feet from the top isa bed of gravel and 
sand. In this gravel Mr. Joe Freeman, a young man in the third year 
class in our high school, found a considerable fragment of the tooth of 
an elephant. In this same bed I observed numerous flint chips. The 
upper portion of this hill is loess. At the foot of the bank the creek 
runs over an argillaceous or arenaceous limestone of Devonian age. 
On both sides of the Mississippi in this locality on the most command- 
ing bluffs are numerous mounds of earth, the work of men. These are 
believed to be very ancient. So far I have not observed mounds on the 
loess. May not these arrow or spear points mentioned above, have been 
made and used by the builders of these mounds? F. M. WITTER. 
THE SERPENTINES OF THE Coast RANGES IN CALIFORNIA.—In a paper 
on “ The Pre-Cretaceous Age of the Metamorphic Rocks of the Califor- 
nia Coast Ranges,” published in the March number of the AMERICAN 
GnoLocist, Mr. Harold W. Fairbanks states that his view that the ser- 
pentine in the Coast ranges is an altered eruptive, is in opposition ‘to 
the views of others who have studied those rocks, except those given in 
a few brief statements published in the Bulletin of the Geological 
Society of America, in 1891. He also states that professor Whitney and 
his assistants held that the serpentine is an altered silico-argillaceous 
rock, referring to Whitney’s “Auriferous Gravels” in support of his 
statement. On turning to page forty-two of the last mentioned work, it 
