TH

HE novel and somewhat startling hypothesis put forth by the Japanese Consul, Charles Wolcott Brooks, before the Academy of Sciences, Monday evening, May 3d (to which I was a listener), namely, that the Chinese people, said to be possessing hieroglyphs and deified heroes identical with those of the ancient American people who built the pyramids of Peru and Central America, may have derived these from America, instead of the Americans having derived theirs from China, will appear less farfetched and perhaps really entitled to serious consideration in connection with the following records, which are transcribed from an old book to which I would refer, and which all Californians may read. I allude to the Geology of the Ancient Rivers.

The sources of Mr. Brooks' informa tion and inspiration ought to be understood. He was a former resident of China and Japan, and is serving in the capacity of Consul of Japan residing at San Francisco. Several years ago he traveled with the Japanese embassy that first "discovered" us, so to speak, comprising a number of the most intelligent and highly educated men of the East, through America, Europe, and Egypt; and he made it his special business to solicit their attention to the interpretation from an oriental stand-point of the American and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The result is the identifications claimed -which are not involved, otherwise than suggestively, in the conclusions to be drawn from the considerations below. I presented the California Academy of Sciences with some specimens of the hieroglyphs of California; also, some marine fossils, along with a stone mor

tar, both of which I obtained recently at Cherokee, Butte County.

The records in this book have several advantages over the sculptured blocks of Central America and Peru. They tell a simpler but a positive and an unequivocal story, of but one possible construction. The record is multiplied and indestructible. It is the original record, unmodified by copy, and it is open and legible to all who will take the trouble to go and look at it.

The mortar is from the hydraulic mines, where from half a dozen to a dozen or two have been found-enough to establish the presence of a large population in the vicinity, taken in connection with all the surrounding facts and circumstances. Several of these mortars I was able to trace through the finders to the particular spot where they were found. They belong to the undisturbed white and yellow gravel of a subaqueous formation, not fluviatile, underlying the volcanic outpourings from the northern Sierra, all of which is seen to have been water-lined by the inland sea of the gravel period to an altitude of not less than 1,500 and probably nearer 2,000 feet above the present sea-level, at the point where these mortars were found.

One of the mortars, found by Mr. R. C. Pulham, of the Spring Valley Mining Company, was taken out of a shaft which he dug himself in 1855, and was found, according to his testimony, twelve feet underneath undisturbed strata, the character of which is still visible in the bank adjacent. He is certain that the mortar was placed there before the overlying gravel.

This mortar was found standing upright, and the pestle was in it, in its

proper place, apparently just as it had been left by the owner. The material around and above it was fine quartz gravel intermixed with a large proportion of sand; in short, just the material of an ordinary sea-beach. This was forty or fifty feet above the bed-rock and about thirty feet above the blue gravel.

About 300 feet east of this shaft Mr. Frederic Eaholtz took out in 1853 a similar mortar at a greater depth. I visited both places with Mr. Pulham, and found several mortars still lying around on the top of the blue-gravel bench which is not yet mined away. The locality is about seventy yards east of Charles Waldeyer's house. Mr. Eaholtz was sent for, and he told me further, that in 1858, while engaged with Wilson and Abbott in mining in the south-westerly flank of the Sugar Loaf, he found in place, forty feet under the surface, a mortar of the same sort in unbroken blue gravel. This blue gravel nowhere comes near to the surface, and it extends with the before-mentioned white and yellow gravel, under the Sugar Loaf and under the Oroville volcanic mesa. It appeared only in the bottom of this claim. He was picking the blue gravel to pieces with a pick, when he found the mortar, which was a portion of the mass of cemented bowlders and sand. He picked it out with his own hands.

Both these witnesses are trustworthy men, widely acquainted in the county, and they are willing to appear before a notary to certify to the above.

The fossils are from two different gravel-beds immediately underlying the auriferous gravel formation and the volcanic outflows, at a distance of about one and a half and two and a half miles from Cherokee, in a south-westerly and northwesterly direction respectively. The latter is only about thirty feet underneath the volcanic capping of the Dogtown and Mesilla Valley table-land, in a

ravine immediately back of Van Ness' house, on Dry Creek.

I will not enumerate all the additional cases of mortars and Indian relics and hieroglyphics of a comparatively recent date which I happened upon near Cherokee, nor attempt to describe at this time their geological position in detail, on which the conclusions are based. The conclusions are:

1. That there was a village or city on the sea-beach, near Cherokee, before Table Mountain was in its place.

2. That the early and middle tertiary sea-level had receded before that time to the position of the coal-beds underlying Table Mountain, and to fully 1,000 feet below Cherokee.

3. The land then sunk into the sea about 1,500 feet in the Pliocene-tertiary, and about 600 feet after these people of the most ancient town in geological history abandoned their mortars on the beach.

4. This subsidence took place before the volcanic outflows appeared which covered up all the ancient detritus of the region, including that of the ancient rivers.

5. The vegetation of that period is extinct. It was determined by Lesquereux, from specimens collected in the survey of the ancient rivers of California, as Pliocene, having retained even some of the forms that are characteristic of the Miocene.

6. The new emergence, embracing the glacial period, and the new eroding period in the Sierra (during which the slates and the hard metamorphic greenstones and the granites of the western slope were eroded to a depth of 3,000 feet), took place after the volcanic period.

7. The time which has elapsed since ancient Cherokee was buried under the sea, calculated by the average rate of two and a half feet per century assumed by Lyell for Europe in his Antiquities

of Man, and considered by Darwin as the highest rate we can assume for the western coast of South America, would not be less than:

a. From the abandonment of the mortars to the displacement of the rivers by volcanic matter, a subsidence of 600 feet, 240 centuries.

b. During the erosion of the new cañons 3,000 feet deep, assuming, in the absence of observed data, the same rate for erosion as for subsidence and upliftnamely, two and a half feet per century -1,200 centuries: Total, 180,000 years. This goes back perhaps nearly twice as far as the glacial epoch; the beginning of which, according to Lyell's calculation, from known oscillations in Europe (testified to by regular and systematically deposited sedimentary formations), can not have been less remote, according to his own figures, than 180,ooo years.

Hence I am safe in ascribing to ancient Cherokee the age of at least 180,ooo years, as calculated from independent data intended to be under the mark. The glacial epoch in America and in Europe is considered by geologists to have been contemporaneous. If Mr. Brooks can go back 3,500 years before Christ with the Chinese records, and prove that three or more principal radicals of the 246 Chinese ideographs are natives of Peru, and that the hero Tahi Foke was the common property of the Chinese and ancient Americans-if a close and thorough scrutiny can make out a real case of identity—it would not be necessary to infer that the ancient Americans of Peru navigated all the way to China, for in going back 180,000 years we traverse geological changes of an astounding character. Elevations and subsidences on a scale demonstrated to have taken place, by the records of the Pliocene and post- Pliocene, show that the South Sea islands and the Chinese coast may have been nearly adjoining.

The migrations of races of a pre-glacial date will have to be studied, of course, from a geological stand-point. We may begin with the fact that all the other mammalians of the period in which the human race originated have become extinct, and that from similar causes all the early races of mammalians most nearly allied to mankind, also became extinct. Only the brightest and fittest, even of the stone age of humanity, were able to hold their own throughout the volcanic and the glacial revolutions which followed the Pliocene. The way they did it was just as all other animals do when they survive natural changes like these-by emigration principally, but partly by adaptation.

The glacial period, in Europe and in California (it is now demonstrated by unequivocal geological evidence), was accompanied by vast continental subsidences and oscillations of level. Geology will probably unravel at an early day the geographical order of these subsidences of land-whether from east to west, or from north to south, or vice versa. An impression of the fact of subsidence could hardly fail to come down to us in the traditions of the human race of floods. Archæologists and ethnologists can trace the identities, geologists can trace the order of succession and the direction of these emigrations. The accompanying fauna and flora of ancient drainage systems and their detritus, related to and following that of the ancient rivers of California, may be unraveled by the hydraulic miner and the geologist in other countries. Nature has concentrated gold and piled up the inducements mountains high, in the form of auriferous gravel deposits filling ancient cañons, and bordering ancient sea-beaches, not only in California but in British Columbia, in Venezuela, on the Brazilian slopes of the Andes, in Thibet, in the Ural Mountains, in Australia, and in Africa. There are miners,

mining engineers, and geologists in California who have been to all these regions.

If the alleged Egyptian and Hebrew resemblances in the ancient mounds of the Mississippi Valley can be substantiated; if similar identities can be traced in the ideographs of Peru and China, the question will then arise, Which was the older geologically, and where lies buried the trunk of our genealogical tree? Of all the ancient races that have become extinct with the extinct mammalians peculiar to the two last-concluded geological epochs, which of the branches was it that grew from the common trunk into the land of the Aryans, our immediate ancestors? In what country did its root find congenial soil and surroundings from which a tree so noble could grow, when kindred rootlets, not so favored, either became extinct or grew only into an ugly apehood? These are all questions that appear capable of satisfactory solution, and the data already collected toward it are very considerable.

The higher organization of the soul evinced in the earliest invention of hieroglyphics; the earliest natural records of the development of articulate speech; its development into the magnificent religious conceptions of Moses and the Hebrews, along with the tracing of the oldest known systems of hieroglyphic writing to Egypt, to the orient, and to Peru; their alleged identities; the fact that oscillations of the sea-level have taken place which must have closed Behring Straits (only 200 feet in depth), and probably connected America and Asia as far south as the Aleutian Islands; and that a Polynesian continent appears to have sunk out of sight since the founding of ancient Cherokee (see J. D. Dana's geological studies of Polynesia); these are a few of the threads of geological and ethnological fact which, if followed up, may lead to the unearth

ing of the trunk of our genealogical tree down to its very root, and the soil from which it sprung.

It must not be forgotten that there are arrested types of the most ancient forms of creation, as well as of civilization, found still existing, down to the very lowest original planes of organization. But we can readily distinguish the kinds now existing from the more ancient, especially in the higher animal and human planes of organization, by a specific difference—a difference arising from the fact that the types so nearly related to the ancient ones which are still found surviving did not have to undergo, in the course of their history, such schooling and discipline of vicissitude or of necessity as fell to the lot of their contemporaries and brothers, who were thereby gradually raised to a higher plane. Hence it happens that we have typical representatives still existing of every period of extinct civilization and of every past geological age. We have in the older States still living among the stay-at-homes, or among certain classes, the typical representatives of A.D. 1776; in the mines and bogs of old England those of A.D. 1676; in Russia, the typical representatives of A. D. 1076, now living in the monastic caves or painting pictures of saints at Troitska, near Moscow; in Finland, the typical representatives of the reindeer period of France and Germany; and in many parts of America, the typical representatives of the old stone age; in Australia, the marsupials of the tertiary; in the tropics of America, Africa, and the East Indies, the bright and cunning little mammals with hands,* also of the tertiary; in Borneo, a people who live in trees; in Australia, a race that never knew the uses of fire until they learned them from Europeans; all agreeing typically with, but differing in their specific characters

*The Simian has a hand almost as perfect as a lady's.