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476 NOTES OF A BOTANIST CHAP.
the rock, the granite of that region having often three
or more thin coats comparable to those of an onion,
as if the cooling down had not been equable. 1
immediately set to work to copy,
and the Indians
of their own accord cleared out the earth and lichens
which had filled up some of the lines. As it was
impossible to copy all, I selected those figures which
were most distinct, and those which, by their fre-
quent repetition, might be considered typical.
marked A (Fig. 17), for instance, varying only slightly
in the details, was repeated several times. It was
I
That
not possible to draw all by hand to the same scale,
but as I measured most of the figures, that defect
can easily be remedied in recopying them.
In all the drawings which illustrate this chapter,
the small figures give the dimensions in feet and
inches. When underlined they show the entire
length of the object copied, as 3/10
in the centre
figure of Fig. 17 means that it is 3 feet 10 inches
long ;
otherwise
they indicate the length of the line
at which they are written. Thus 2/5 on the right
side of A shows that the longer side of the oblong
is 2 feet 5 inches long, and the cross line on the
right is 4 feet long.
As I sketched, I asked the Indians, "Who had
"
made those figures, and what they ?
represented but
received only the universal reply of the Indian
when he cares not to tell or will not take the trouble to
recollect, "
Quien sabe, patron ?
"
(" Who knows ?
").
Hut I understood enough of Barre to note that in
1
[For drawings of such onion-like rocks see Plate x. in my Amazon and
Rio Negro. It occurs on every scale from tljat of moderate-sized boulders up
to \vh>)e m.iuntnins. It is seen on a great scale in the huge domes of the
Yosemite valley, and is now believed to be the result of a process of aerial
decomposition due to the action of sun and rain. En.]