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STONE IMAGE FOUND IN OHIO

T. W. Kinney, of Portsmouth, Ohio, writes as follows: 

“Last summer, while digging a vault for drainage, at the depth of twenty-seven feet, the workmen found the tusk of a mastodon.  The piece was about four feet long and four inches in diameter at the thickest part.  It was nearly all lost, having, crumbled very much when exposed to the air.  I have a large piece of it; also several flakes of flint found near the same depth.

“I also have several of the flakes from other vaults, some of which show evidence of work.

“We also found a log at the depth of twenty-two feet.  The log was burned at one end, and at the other end was a gap, the same as an axeman’s kerf.  Shell-banks below the level of the base of mound-builders’ works, from six to fifteen feet."[1]

Was this burned log, thus found at a depth of twenty-two feet, a relic of the great conflagration?  Was that

[1.  “American Antiquarian,” April, 1878, p. 36.]

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axe-kerf made by some civilized man who wielded a bronze or iron weapon?

It is a curious fact that burned logs have, in repeated instances, been exhumed from great depths in the Drift clay.

While this work is going through the press, an article has appeared in “Harper’s Monthly Magazine,” (September, 1882, p. 609,) entitled “The Mississippi River Problem,” written by David A. Curtis, in which the author says: 

“When La Salle found out how goodly a land it was, his report was the warrant of eviction that drove out the red man to make place for the white, as the mound-builders had made place for the Indian in what we call the days of old.  Yet it must have been only yesterday that the mound-builders wrought in the valley, for in the few centuries that have elapsed since then the surface of the ground has risen only a few feet—­not enough to bury their works out of sight.  How long ago, then, must it have been that the race lived there whose pavements and cisterns of Roman brick now lie seventy feet underground?”

Mr. Curtis does not mean that the bricks found in this prehistoric settlement had any historical connection with Rome, but simply that they resemble Roman bricks.  These remains, I learn, were discovered in the vicinity of Memphis, Tennessee.  The details have not yet, so far as I am aware, been published.

Is it not more reasonable to suppose that civilized man existed on the American Continent thirty thousand years ago, (the age fixed by geologists for the coming of the Drift,) a comparatively short period of time, and that his works were then covered by the Drift-débris, than to believe that a race of human beings, far enough advanced in civilization to manufacture bricks, and build pavements and cisterns, dwelt in the Mississippi Valley, in a past so inconceivably remote that the slow increase of the soil,