XVI 
FOSSIL HUMAN RELICS 
395 
bed, from its wide extent and smoothness, must have been 
deposited beneath the sea ; but I afterwards found in one spot 
that it lay on an artificial floor of round stones. It seems, 
therefore, most probable that at a period when the land stood 
at a lower level there was a plain very similar to that now 
surrounding Callao, which, being protected by a shingle beach, 
is raised but very little above the level of the sea. On this 
plain, with its underlying red-clay beds, I imagine that the 
Indians manufactured their earthen vessels ; and that, during 
some violent earthquake, the sea broke over the beach, and 
converted the plain into a temporary lake, as happened round 
Callao in 1713 and 1746. The water would then have 
deposited mud, containing fragments of pottery from the kilns, 
more abundant at some spots than at others, and shells from 
the sea. This bed with fossil earthenware stands at about the 
same height with the shells on the lower terrace of San 
Lorenzo, in which the cotton thread and other relics were 
embedded. Hence we may safely conclude that within the 
Indo-human period there has been an elevation, as before 
alluded to, of more than eighty-five feet; for some little 
elevation must have been lost by the coast having subsided 
since the old maps were engraved. At Valparaiso, although 
in the 220 years before our visit the elevation cannot have 
exceeded nineteen feet, yet subsequently to 1817 there has 
been a rise, partly insensible and partly by a start during the 
shock of 1822, of ten or eleven feet. The antiquity of the 
Indo-human race here, judging by the eighty-five-feet rise of 
the land since the relics were embedded, is the more remark¬ 
able, as on the coast of Patagonia, when the land stood about 
the same number of feet lower, the Macrauchenia was a living 
beast; but as the Patagonian coast-is some way distant from 
the Cordillera, the rising there may have been slower than 
here. At Bahia Blanca the elevation has been only a few feet 
since the numerous gigantic quadrupeds were there entombed ; 
and, according to the generally received opinion, when these 
extinct animals were living man did not exist. But the rising 
of that part of the coast of Patagonia is perhaps noways 
connected with the Cordillera, but rather with a line of old 
volcanic rocks in Banda Oriental, so that it may have been 
infinitely slower than on the shores of Peru. All these 
