here 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 skul