THAT DIGGER INDIAN SKULL.
THAT ghastly skull turns its eyeless sockets toward the sun once more. Why not let it rest? The silly hoax has been again and again exposed. The facts, as I recall them after so many years, are substantially these: As early as 1852 or 1855 a theory obtained that Table Mountain covered the bed of an ancient river, which bed, if it could be reached, would be rich in gold. Attempts were made at various points along that extended and often divided formation—attempts to tunnel under and to sink shafts through the hard rock. Near what was then called Jimtown, a few miles from Columbia, some miners sank a shaft, with great labor and expense, to a depth of seventy or eighty feet, when resources and courage failed, and they abandoned the work. It was a custom of the Digger Indians in that region to deposit their dead on scaffolds set up ten or twelve feet from the ground, where the flesh fell away and the bones not infrequently became scattered. I used often to see those scaffolds in that early time. It so happened that one of the skulls fell or was thrown into the abandoned shaft. After some time a new set of prospectors, finding so much work done to their hand, entered the shaft to sink it deeper, in the hope of finding the hypothetical river. In clearing out the accumulated rubbish they brought to the surface this same skull. Two young fellows, one a doctor and one a brother of Revs. James and W. W. Brier, seized the opportunity to test the gullibility of so-called scientists, and published the startling fact that a human skull had been found seventy odd feet beneath the trap-rock of Table Mountain. The effect was magical. Some scientific men hastened to get possession of the bone. They at once detected such craniological peculiarities as proved that it must have belonged to a prehistoric,501and probably a pre-Adamic, man. It was clearly the skull of a human being who (or which?) existed hundreds of thousands of years ago, when the race had advanced a comparatively short way toward the prevalent type of our favored day. The cheat was heartily laughed at in Jimtown and vicinity, and the rogues who perpetrated the imposition published the facts; but the skull had set off on its travels. In company with the Neanderthal skull (I write the name from memory) it has made the rounds of Europe, and demonstrated the immeasurable length of the human period. It is unhappily true that the poor skull has left a few unsettled differences in the field of scientific speculation, such, for instance, as the trifling disagreement between Chevalier Bunsen and Mr. Geikie as to the past existence of the human race. But as the difference is unimportant, being only a billion and two or three hundred million years, it ought not to stagger our credulity. It is enough that the Digger's skull has proved the scriptural record a weak fable, and has exalted the certainty of science.—California Christian Advocate.