Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT? 129

oints of land, and at the base of the ridges or bluffs, Mr. Bertliond thinks the evidence is strongly in favor of the locations having been near some ancient fresh-water lake, whose vestiges the present topography of the region fayors.” I quote the following from the “ Scientific American ” (1880) :

“‘ The finding of numerous relics of a buried race on an ancient horizon, from twenty to thirty feet below the present level of country in Missouri and Kansas, has been noted. The St. Louis ‘ Republican’ gives particulars of another find of an unmistakable character made last spring (1880) in Franklin County, Missouri, by Dr. R. W. Booth, who was engaged in iron-mining about three miles from Dry Branch, a station on the St. Louis and Santa Fé Railroad. At adepth of eighteen feet below the surface the miners uncoyered a human skull, with portions of the ribs, vertebral column, and collar-bone. With them were found two flint arrow-heads of the most primitive type, imperfect in shape and barbed. A few pieces of charcoal were also found at the same time and place. Dr. Booth was fully aware of the importance of the discovery, and tried to preserve everything found, but upon touching the skull it crumbled to dust, and some of the other bones broke into small pieces and partly crumbled away ; but enough was preserved to fully establish the fact that they are human bones.

“Some fifteen or twenty days subsequent to the first finding, at a depth of twenty-four feet below the surface, other bones were found—a thigh-bone and a portion of the vertebra, and several pieces of charred wood, the bones apparently belonging to the first-found skeleton. In both cases the bones rested on a fibrous stratum, suspected at the time to be a fragment of coarse matting. This lay upon a floor of soft but solid iron-ore, which retained the imprint of the fibers. .. .

“ The indications are that the filled cavity had originally been a sort of cave, and that the supposed matting was more probably a layer of twigs, rushes, or weeds, which the inhabitants of the cave had used as a bed, as the fiber-