42 BUREAU OF AMERICAN&quot; ETHNOLOGY [BULL, ec 
but little further Could be learned ; yet there are a few points of in 
terest and, in one or two cases, of real importance, that call for 
discussion. 
The -first skeleton. Mr. Ayers, who discovered the first skeleton, 
was kind enough to accompany the writer to the southern exposures, 
where he indicated the location of the find (pi. 2). He remembered 
that the bones were not regarded at first as human or as of greater 
consequence than others in the banks, and no special attention was 
paid to the exact condition of the deposits about them, which, how 
ever, seemed to show nothing peculiar. The bones lay between about 
2 and 2J feet below the marl of the surface, a hardened section of 
which had broken off at this point and was still lying on the sand 
in front of the bank at the time of our visit. They &quot; were all close 
together, the whole space which they occupied not being over one 
and a half feet in width; they were not scattered at all, nor piled up, 
but lay side by side as they would in the body.&quot; 1 The bones were ex 
tracted by Messrs. Ayers and Weills, the latter of whom also spoke 
to the writer of their &quot; natural relations,&quot; particularly in the case 
of a lower limb, where the tibia, patella, and femur were found in 
the relative positions they occupy in the skeleton. 
Remarks. Taking all this into consideration, with the fact that 
although the upper parts of the skeleton have been lost in all proba 
bility as the result of the dredging yet enough remained to repre 
sent most of the parts of the two lower limbs, the presence of the 
human remains can be explained satisfactorily in only two ways, 
namely, by sudden complete accidental inclusion of a human body 
into the deposits, or by a burial. 
But the sudden inclusion of a body would necessitate the presence 
of either bog or quicksand, which it is plain did not exist in the Vero 
formations, or a great inundation of waters charged with the heavy 
sands that were found to inclose the remains, in such quantities that 
on settling they w r ould completely and permanently cover the corpse. 
In this latter case, however, practically the whole or most of the 
homogeneous and not very thick layer No. 2 would have to be re 
garded as the result of such an inundation, while the animal bones 
therein, which would necessarily have been brought in by the current, 
might be of any derivation and age ; hence the human remains would 
lose all claim to age commensurate with that of the fossil vertebrates 
which these bones represent. They would be only as old as the inun 
dation, while the animal bones might be of any antiquity. 
A slowly flowing water charged with silt will cover with more or 
less sediment any submerged immovable object in its course, and the 
suggestion might be made that something of this nature may have 
happened to the human body during some ordinary overflow of the 
1 Quoted from a subsequent letter of Mr. Ayers to the writer. 
