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exposed.  I have many pieces of this clay-roofing, showing the impressions on one side and having adhering lava on the other, and will send you some small samples if you wish.  The corn I sent you I found in the like ruin near Farmington,N.M.; save that there is no lava there nearer than some 80 miles toward the south, but above the bed of corn, which was about one foot in thickness, I found the same kind of clay-roof material, not burned as at La Boca, [[underline]] but hard baked[[/underline]], yet having the same vegetable impressions.  Mingled with the corn was much charcoal, but no ashes.  I can cite you to other places where I have found the corn so carbonized, even in Cliff-houses where no wood whatever was used in their construction.
During the past 36 years I have traveled extensively in the southwest, and I have (to me) conclusive proof that the cause of the destruction of these people, whom we call the Mesa or Cliff-dwellers, was due to the heat and noxious gases thrown off from the last lava flow, which covered thousands of square miles in Arizona and New Mexico, and I am equally as certain that they lived there prior to the Glacial drift period, and in the Pliocene division of the Tertiary.  During a portion of the past year I was in the employ of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and shall do more work for that institution.  I visited your museum last April, but did not have the pleasure of meeting you, as I remember you well as a former resident of Denver.
Very respectfully,
Cecil A.Deane.