84 TRAVELS IN THE CONFEDERATION 



Venus Mercenaries. (Clams.) Mya arenaria? (Pis- 

 sers.) Solcncs, Anomiac, My till, Arcae, Patellae, 

 Lepas Balanus (Barnacles) ; Dcntalia, smooth and 

 simplex, and others twisted, Scrpulac; cockle- 

 shells, such as are to be found about Long Island ; 

 remains of madrepores ; large bone-fragments, 

 presumably of whales ; with unrecognizable traces 

 of many other sorts of crustaceans. 



This inland shell-bank, as much of it as has been 

 dug out here, is about 6 feet in depth, and lies beneath 

 a bed of sand at least 30 ft. deep, of a reddish color, 

 containing several strata of grey clay, but absolutely no 

 shells. So if these crustaceans lived at one time on the 

 strand, as their still extant relations * are accustomed 

 now to do, there was requisite a long space of time for 

 the heaping upon them of such a burden of sand ; for 

 this mill stands in a flushed-out bottom much lower 

 than the general surface of this part of the continent, 

 which I have elsewhere described in its bearing and 

 connexion, f 



* There is much similarity, it appears, between these Ameri- 

 can shell-banks and the shell-hills of Bohus, which Linnaeus 

 in his Westgothische Reise describes as miracles of that prov- 

 ince. These are on the main-land, in many places scarcely 

 more than Y\ of a Swedish mile from the sea, but the accumu- 

 lations are found directly beneath the shallow black earth ; 

 the shells (as is often the case here) are perfectly preserved, 

 clean and white, and consist, as these, of varieties still to be 

 seen on the coasts of Sweden, Norway, England, and France. 

 In Sweden these buried shells are used for lime-burning and 

 plaistering, and also for bettering the roads, which in this way 

 are made pretty firm. These shells might be made use of for 

 this purpose in America as well. 



f Vid., Beytrage zur mineralogischen Kenntniss des ost- 

 lichen Theils von Amerika. . 8. 



