found it in a small streak of the conglomerate, about fifty feet above the ferruginous conglomerate (zone of Hippotherium antelopinum), and about a quarter of a mile north of where he found the flints. He says that it was no doubt in situ when found, and that it took some time to free it from its resting place in the bed. This find was made while he was mapping the petroleum field at Yenangyoung, and was mentioned by him for the first time in 1895, in his paper on the Tertiary system of Burma,[1] when he described the facets on the bone as a natural result; and said, "That side on which the bone rested was considerably rubbed, thus indicating the result of friction on the underlying sand produced by the gentle rocking of the bone by the waves while lying on the beach." Subsequently, in 1896, he saw a figure of a scapula of Equus which had been similarly rubbed down, and which Prof. Dames considered to have been rubbed by human agency, and, in his article in 'Natural Science,' in 1897—referred to early in this article—he first suggested that the bone he had found was probably an additional witness for the Tertiary origin of the chipped flint flakes, but he gives the layer in which he found it as being "fifteen to twenty feet, perhaps a little more," above the zone of H. antelopinum, instead of fifty feet, as stated in his article in 1897 in the 'Records.'
Whichever may be the correct distance above the bed, it is clear that, as the bone was pulled out of the layer in which it had up till then been undisturbed, there is no necessary connection between it and the flint chips which, as we now see, are to be found lying out on the plateau far above the conglomerate. In fact, if, as seems to me, the flints could not have come from this bed, the bone cannot possibly explain their origin.
Dr. Noetling says, in favour of this bone, that at any rate there is no similar wearing away of substance to be observed in any of the hundreds of specimens which he collected at Yenangyoung, nor in the collection of Siwalik remains in the Museum of the Geological Survey; so that "it is therefore beyond doubt that, whatever the verdict may be as to the origin of these curious facets, the specimen here described is at present unique."
I have already mentioned earlier in this article that on our first visit to Yenangyoung we found, among other remains, an
- ↑ 'Records of Geological Survey of India,' 1895, vol. xxviii. p. 77.
