Much of the evidence hitherto adduced for the antiquity of the American man has a singularly modern aspect. The human skulls are of the predominant Indian type of the present day, though that need not surprise us. Dr. Usher only notes this in the case of the “human fossils” from the Brazil Caves, to add: “this consideration may spare science the trouble of any further speculation on the _modus_ through which the New World became peopled from the Old; for after carrying backwards the existence of a people monumentally into the very night of time, when we find that they have also preserved the same type back to a remote, even to a geological, period, there can be no necessity for going abroad to seek their origin.”[26] The question of this fancied American type will come under review hereafter. But on a par with this evidence are fragments of baskets and clay vessels submitted to the New Orleans Academy of Sciences in 1867, as contemporary with the elephant and other fossil mammals, the bones of which were found in digging the same salt-pits in which the pottery and basket-work were met with; or a fragment of cane-matting presented to the Smithsonian Institution in 1866 by Mr. J. F. Cleu, along with portions of tusks and teeth of the fossil elephant which lay above it, at a depth of thirteen feet in a Louisiana salt mine. Matting, or basket-work, of split cane is as common among the contents of southern Indian graves as fragments of pottery; and both may be reasonably suspected to carry with them evidence inconsistent with any geological antiquity. [Illustration: FIG. 2.—Lewiston Flint Implement. (5/7).]