Mercer.] ^ Jt) [Xov. 16, 



even in his shy way. At Perugia, Assissi, Arezzo, Bologna, Ferrara, 

 Verona and Padua, he studied the great masters, and at Ferrara he met 

 William Cullen Bryant ; at Florence, Powers ; and each city had its 

 lesson. He studied Titian and Tintoretto and Paul Veronese in Venice, 

 and compares them with careful analysis of their special qualities. Pass- 

 ing l»y Verona and Botzen and Innspruck to Munich, where he saw the 

 works of Cornelius and Kaulbach and Hess, all feeble afier the great 

 Italians, yet noteworthy and carefully criticised by Rothermel, he 

 visited Nuremberg and Dresden, Leipsic and Berlin, returning by way ot 

 Strasburg to Paris, where he exhibited some of his own pictures in the 

 Salon of 1859, receiving honorable mention and escaping (as he puts it) 

 a medal, because the supply was exhausted by the French artists. Re- 

 turning to Philadelphia, Mr. Joseph Harrison gave him a studio, where 

 he painted '• King Lear" (still in Mr. Harrison's gallery) ; he first made 

 a sketch portrait of Forrest for the head, but afterwards made it entirely 

 ideal, the better to express his own fancy. His productions were bought 

 by Messrs. Clarence H. Clark, John Rice, Matthew Baird, H. C. Gibson, 

 Charles Gibson, E. H. Filler, W. Dougherty, James S. Martin, and thus 

 he was honored in his own home. He notes that Sully was reported to 

 have received but seventy-five dollars for his fine portrait of George 

 Frederic Cook, the tragedian, which Rothermel thinks "perhaps the 

 very best life-size portrait in the country." In his autobiographical 

 memoir — only a fragment — he records the fact that he painted his 

 "Gettysburg " in Mr. Harrison's studio, and his intention of describing 

 his preparation, his studies and his gradual progress, but unfortunately 

 nothing of this is preserved. It is greatly to be regretted that he did not 

 thus put on record his own story of his greatest picture, that it might be 

 printed as the artist's own analysis. The picture has a place of honor in 

 Harrisburg in the Hall of Trophies of the State Capitol. 



Jasper and Stalagmite Quarried by Indians in the Wyandotte Cave. 



By H. C. Mercer. 

 {Read hffore tJie American Philosophical Society, November 16, 1S95.) 



I beg to call the attention of the Societj' to these objects from the 

 Wyandotte cave in Indiana, as illustrating one of the features of what 

 might be called the comparativelj^ modern archaeology of caverns, one 

 of the relations of the daily life of the North American Indian to sub 

 terranean galleries in the limestone. 



Before describing the specimens, from the Museum of American and 

 Prehistoric Archaeology of the University of Pennsj'lvania, let me say 

 that I have been drawn into the exploration of caves in the hope of 

 finding in the Oultur Sehichten, as the Germans call them, or the layers 

 of human rubbish superposed in series on the subterranean floors by 



