Cushing.] Oif\) [Sov. G, 



b}' wide reefs, paralleled by long-reaching, sea-enclosing, narrow, tide- 

 and wind-heaped sand-islands such as already described ; and that all its 

 hither sliores should be nearly tide-low, traversed by forbidding 

 marshes, and fringed by almost impenetrable swamps of cypress and 

 mangroves. Even the mouths of its creeks, rivers and inlets, are shift- 

 ing and treacherous, and are also filled with shoals, almost if not quite 

 exposed, at low tide. As a consequence, approach, even in light craft, is 

 — save in special places sundered by many miles of unnavigable shal- 

 lows — wellnigh impossible. I regard this feature as having had a pre- 

 ponderating influence in causing the ancient key dwellers — whether 

 they were derived from the mainland or whether, as I have reason to 

 think, they were alien comers to these shores from some distant region 

 over the sea, — to locate as they did, out in the midst of the open 

 waters. 



Again, no waters in the world so teem with food-producing animals 

 — mollusks, fishes, Crustacea and turtles — as do these waters of the 

 lower Florida Gulf-coast. Yet to a people dwelling inland — save in 

 sucli favored, far-sundered sections of the country as I haA^e mentioned — 

 this abundance would be all but valueless, in consequence of the diffi- 

 culty of shoreland navigation. What more natural, then, than, as I have 

 endeavored to picture in earlier chapters of this paper, that these peo- 

 ples should have followed the example of the pelican and cormorant, and 

 located their stations for food-winning, and finally their dwelling- 

 places tliemselves, out in the midst of the navigable, but still uot too 

 deep, shoreland seas'.' That they did so, ages and ages ago, is unques- 

 tionable. That the structures which they reared, more or less modified, 

 in many cases, the further distribution of .shoals, sand reefs, tidal 

 swamps and the lowlier of the fringing islands themselves, is also un- 

 (luestionable — as I might proceed to sIioav by entering into a discussion 

 of the results of my investigations of certain of the keys that, although 

 once free islets, are now connected with the capes of the outer islands ; 

 and of certain others that have, in fact, been almost buried in sand-drift, 

 as was the Ellis Settlement. But suffice it if I say that not onlj' have 

 wide stretches of sandy shoals drifted up between all the humanly con- 

 structed reefs of the olden time that lie near the land — especially those 

 to the south — but also, that wide mangrove swamps have grown up 

 around them, as among the Ten Thousand Islands, evidencing the vast 

 antiquity of the earliest key-building and key -builders here. 



There are, however, other evidences of great antiquity, more directly 

 of interest to us as anthropologists. One of these evidences is manifest 

 in the character of the art displayed on all of the more finished objects 

 we found in the keys ; for this was of a highly, and at the same time dis- 

 tinctively conventional kind. Now I scarcely need state of primitive art- 

 forms, that wherever they have obviously originated and have become 

 highly conventionalized in, and yet are still recognizably characteristic of, 

 a peculiar region — to the degree to which those of this art were character- 



