gg The Amenca?i Geologist. February, i89& 
cumstances attending the discovery; of these survivors, two hold thc 
skull to be a genuine fossil, while the others regard the affair as a 
joke, and several of them independently recount a history of the plant- 
ing of an Indian skull, taken from the vidnity of a saline warm spring 
a few miles away, in the shaft to deceive a miner, and of later jocular 
conspiracies to deceive a local collector, and, in turn, the state geo- 
logist — indeed, one of the most substantial and highly-respected citi- 
zens of Aneel's (a leading merchant and the present postmaster) de- 
clares that the skull lay in his store for six weeks before it was plant- 
ed in the shaft, during a midday nooning, as a joke on the miner who 
innocently brought it to light on resuming work in the afternoon. 
Thus, so far as the contemporaneous human testimony goes, the rec- 
ord of the finding cannot be regarded as above question; and tht- 
authors pointed out the desirability of resting conclusion on the firm 
basis of observation and comparison, which any patient worker can 
verify. It was held to be inherently improbable — so improbable a< 
not. to be acceptable without abundant and unimpeachable testi- 
mony — that man, the most variable of all organisms, could have ex- 
isted at a period so remote that no other animal species and few 
animal genera have survived, while even the more stable flora ha^ 
been greatly modified; it was held even more firmly that, if Homo sap- 
iens be admitted to have survived since the close of the Miocene, it 
is incredible that his skeletal characters should have remained so lit- 
tle modified as to permit identification of his cranium with that of 
the local modern tribe, a^nd most firmly of all was it held to be in- 
credible that the distinctive culture-stage represented by the mortars 
and pestles of the present California Indians could have survived 
throughout the vast period represented by the volcanic outflows and 
the subsequent erosion of the profound Sierra canyons, with the con 
current transformation of floras and extension of faunas, i. c, that 
an acorn culture could have begun at a time when the nascent 
Quercus flora was probably not yet fruit-bearing, and survived un- 
changed while the region was transformed from the Miocene pene- 
plain to the present labyrinth of profound canyons. 
In answer to an inquiry as to the supposed cumulative character 
of the evidence ofifered by relics from the gravels, it was pointed out 
that nearly all of the records were made by inexpert observers or 
second-hand collectors, not guided by scientific principles; and it was 
shown to be natural and even inevitable that untr^ned observers 
should fall into error as to the associations. The most common source 
of error was the misleading association produced in hydrauHcking 
gravels buried beneath a heavy covering of tufT; in such' cases, a 
great part of the material washed into the sluice-boxes really comes 
from far above the gravel horizon, some of it. indeed, from the sur- 
face. In one instance, the authors found more than a dozen mortars 
and a score of pestles within stone's throw of the clifif formed by hy- 
draulicking the great Dardanelles mine near Dow's flat, where relics 
have been reported by the miners — indeed, in working down the 
