An interesting cave in Calaveras County, California, which had been used for burial purposes, is thus described by Prof.  J.D.  Whitney:[27]

The following is an account of the cave from which the skulls, now in the Smithsonian collection, were taken:  It is near the Stanislaus River, in Calaveras County, on a nameless creek, about two miles from Abbey’s Ferry, on the road to Vallicito, at the house of Mr. Robinson.  There were two or three persons with me, who had been to the place before and knew that the skulls in question were taken from it.  Their visit was some ten years ago, and since that the condition of things in the cave has greatly changed.  Owing to some alteration in the road, mining operations, or some other cause which I could not ascertain, there has accumulated on the formerly clean stalagmitic floor of the cave a thickness of some 20 feet of surface earth that completely conceals the bottom, and which could not be removed without considerable expense.  This cave is about 27 feet deep at the mouth and 40 to 50 feet at the end, and perhaps 30 feet in diameter.  It is the general opinion of those who have noticed this cave and saw it years ago that it was a burying-place of the present Indians.  Dr. Jones said he found remains of bows and arrows and charcoal with the skulls he obtained, and which were destroyed at the time the village of Murphy’s was burned.  All the people spoke of the skulls as lying on the surface and not as buried in the stalagmite.

The next description of cave burial, by W.H.  Dall,[28] is so remarkable that it seems worthy of admittance to this paper.  It relates probably to the Innuits of Alaska.

The earliest remains of man found in Alaska up to the time of writing I refer to this epoch [Echinus layer of Dall].  There are some crania found by us in the lowermost part of the Amaknak cave and a cranium obtained at Adakh, near the anchorage in the Bay of Islands.  These were deposited in a remarkable manner, precisely similar to that adopted by most of the continental Innuit, but equally different from the modern Aleut fashion.  At the Amaknak cave we found what at first appeared to be a wooden inclosure, but which proved to be made of the very much decayed supra-maxillary bones of some large cetacean.  These were arranged so as to form a rude rectangular inclosure covered over with similar pieces of bone.  This was somewhat less than 4 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 18 inches deep.  The bottom was formed of flat pieces of stone.  Three such were found close together, covered with and filled by an accumulation of fine vegetable and organic mold.  In each was the remains of a skeleton in the last stages of decay.  It had evidently been tied up in the Innuit fashion to get it into its narrow house, but all the bones, with the exception of the skull, were minced to a soft paste, or even entirely gone.  At Adakh a fancy prompted me to dig into a small knoll near the