Mr. McGee's misunderstanding of the evidence on one point is so gross, that I must make special reference to it. He says[AB] that this image "is alleged to have been pounded out of volcanic tuff by a heavy drill, ... under a thick Tertiary lava bed." The statement of facts on page 298 bears no resemblance to this representation. It is there stated that there were but fifteen feet of lava, and that near the surface; that below this there was nothing but alternating beds of clay and quicksand, and that the lava is post-Tertiary. The sand-pump I should perhaps have described more fully in the book, as I had already done in the communication to the Boston Society of Natural History. It was a tube eight feet long, with a valve at the bottom three and a half inches in diameter on the inside. Through this it was the easiest thing in the world for the object, which is only one inch and a half long, to be brought up in the quicksand without injury. [Footnote AB: Literary Northwest, vol. ii, p. 275.] The baseless assertions of Mr. McGee, involving the honesty of Messrs. Kurtz and Duffes, are even less fortunate and far more reprehensible. "It is a fact," says Mr. McGee, "that one of the best-known geologists of the world chanced to visit Nampa while the boring was in progress, and the figurine and the pretty fiction were laid before him. He recognized the figurine as a toy such as the neighbouring Indians give their children, and laughed at the story; whereupon the owner of the object enjoined secrecy, pleading: 'Don't give me away; I've fooled a lot of fellows already, and I'd like to fool some more.'"[AC] This well-known geologist, on being challenged by Professor Claypole[AD] to give "a full, exact, and certified statement of the conversation" above referred to, proved to be Major Powell, who responded with the following statement: "In the fall of 1889 the writer visited Boise City, in Idaho [twenty miles from Nampa]. While stopping at a hotel, some gentlemen called on him to show him a figurine which they said they had found in sinking an artesian well in the neighbourhood, at a depth, if I remember rightly, of more than three hundred feet.... When this story was told the writer, he simply jested with those who claimed to have found it. He had known the Indians that live in the neighbourhood, had seen their children play with just such figurines, and had no doubt that the little image had lately belonged to some Indian child, and said the same. While stopping at the hotel different persons spoke about it, and it was always passed off as a jest; and various comments were made about it by various people, some of them claiming that it had given them much sport, and that a good many tenderfeet had looked at it, and believed it to be genuine; and they seemed rather pleased that I had detected the hoax."[AE] [Footnote AC: American Anthropologist, vol. vi, p. 94: repeated by Mr. McGee in the Literary Northwest, vol. ii, p. 276.]