[147] Eleventh Annual Report of the Peabody Museum, p. 226, Cambridge, 1878. Dr. Abbott concludes his interesting report by citing a letter from Mr. Thomas Belt, dated Grant, Colorado, June 29, 1878, in which the writer reports the discovery of “a small human skull in undisturbed loess, in a railway cutting about two miles from Denver, near the watershed between the South Platte and Clear Creek. All the plains are covered with a drift deposit of granitic and quartzose pebbles, overlaid by a sandy and calcareous loam closely resembling the diluvial clay and the loess of Europe.” The skull was found at a point three and a half feet from the surface.—Ibid., p. 257.
[148] Tenth Annual Report of Peabody Museum, Cambridge, 1877, vol. ii, pp. 30–43; American Naturalist, June, 1876, p. 329.
[149] Tenth Annual Report of Peabody Museum, p. 47.
[150] Grote, The Peopling of America, American Naturalist, April, 1877.
[151] Primitive Industry, by C. C. Abbott, M.D., 1881, p. 551. A truly scientific work.
[152] Sixth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, under Dr. Hayden in 1872, p. 657.
[153] General Thomas gives the following account of this form of skull discovered by him, p. 657: “It is unlike that of any human being to-day alive on this continent; the frontal bone being low, receding, growing narrow and pinched from the brows up; the top of the head depressed in the centre. The cavity of the cranium is full seven inches long, and a scant four and a half inches wide. The orbital ridges or eyebrows are excessively developed, like those of the great Gibbon monkey. In fact the whole skull resembles that of the great Gibbon monkey. The malar or cheek bones run down very low and deep toward the lower jaw, are set very far to the front, and are not wide at top, but widen very much toward the bottom. The nose, and here is the anomaly, is much more aquiline than that of the Indian. The superior maxillary is one-third deeper and much more prominent than the Indian’s. The inferior maxillary is of uncommon prominence, depth, and power, far exceeding that of the Indian. The mouth is narrow and long, more dog-shaped than the Indian’s. The foramen magnum or aperture at base of skull, where the spinal cord enters the head, is peculiarly small. The condyloid processes are full, oblong, flat on the working surfaces, and at such an angle as to set the head upward and back more than any race we know to-day on this continent. Set one of these skulls, without the lower jaw, on the table, and a line drawn from the upper jaw perpendicularly upward would be a good inch and a half in front of the forehead. Set on the lower jaw and it would be two inches.” Mr. R. D. Guttgisal, formerly an engineer on the Mexican Central Railroad, in connection with some friends, opened a mound at Chihuahua, on the line of that railroad. The skulls resembled those I have described (so he informs me) in every particular. He especially remembers the somewhat bird-shaped head, and the excessively small foramen magnum. The bodies were not interred horizontally there, but leaning backward as if in a rocking-chair. Professor H. H. Smith, University of Pennsylvania, has one of the skulls.
[154] Professor James Orton, The Andes and the Amazons, third ed., p. 109, New York, 1876.
[155] Sir John Lubbock, alluding to the changes that have transpired in the condition of man from his first appearance in America, says: “But even if we attribute to these changes all the importance which ever has been claimed for them, they will not require an antiquity of more than three thousand years. I do not, of course, deny that the period may have been very much greater, but in my opinion, at least, it need not be greater.”—Pre-Historic Times, p. 234, London, 1865.
Dr. Foster, after giving many of the reputed proofs of man’s antiquity here, sums up the argument in the following language: “The evidence, it must be confessed, rests, in most cases, upon the testimony of a single observer, and besides, there has not been a recurrence of ‘finds’ in the same deposit (except in the gravel beds of Colorado and Wyoming, which require further investigation to command an unqualified belief), as in the valley of the Somme and in the European caves, which is so conclusive as to the existence of man as contemporary with the great Pachyderms.”—Foster’s Pre-Historic Races, p. 71.