The New Dominion

Destructibility of Human Bones.

An instance of the readiness with which human bones disappear is shown in the fact that the Dutch Government in 1853 drained off the great Haarlem lake, on which there had been many shipwrecks and naval fights, and where thousands had found a watery grave. The canals and trenches dug to a considerable depth through the rescued land are estimated to have an aggregate length of thousands of miles, and yet not a single human bone was exhumed from first to last. Some weapons and a few coins, and one or two wrecked vessels alone rewarded the efforts and researches of the curiosity-hunters. Here, as in cavern deposits and river gravels generally, works of art alone furnished evidence of the existence of man, even though no part of the deposit could be more than 300 years old, as the lake was formed by an inundation toward the end of the sixteenth century.