260 ETHNOLOGY. 



twenty were found, " all closely huddled up together," as my informant 

 described them. They were about three feet below the surface, and a 

 " foot deep " in the gravel underlying the soil. They were surrounded 

 by, and entirely covered with, a bright brick-red powder. Again, in dig- 

 ging the receiving-vault of the Eiverview Cemetery, near Trenton, N. 

 J., "a bushel-basketful of these axes was found, packed closely to- 

 gether, six feet deep in the ground." On the face of the bluft' fronting 

 the Delaware Eiver, immediately below Trenton, N. J., several such 

 instances have come to the notice of the writer. In the first two 

 instances, the specimens were all grooved cobble-stone axes. In another 

 instance, the " axes (?)," fifty in number, were of the ungrooved pattern, 

 all of porphyry, well polished, and appeared to have been carefully 

 deposited, and not thrown pell-mell into the hole dug to contain them. 



Dr. Daniel Wilson, in " Prehistoric Man," page 412, gives an illustra- 

 tion and comments on an " inscribed ax " that was found in New 

 Jersey, and so claims a notice here. We will quote the doctor in full con- 

 cerning it. He says: "In 1859, Dr. John C. Evans, of Pemberton, N. 

 J., communicated to the American Ethnological Society an account of a 

 stone ax inscribed in similar [that is, to the ' Yarmouth Bay Stone,'] 

 unknown characters, which had been recently plowed up on a neigh- 

 boring farm. The ax, which measures about six inches long by three 

 and a half broad, is engraved from a drawing furnished to me by Dr. 

 Evans. Dr. E. H. Davis, after carefully examining the original, informs 

 me that, though the graven characters have been partially retouched 

 in the process of cleaning it, their edges present an appearance of age 

 consistent with the idea of their genuineness, and the circumstances 

 attending its i>roduction furnish no grounds for doubting its authen- 

 ticity. Two of the characters are placed on one side in the groove for the 

 handle 5 the others apparently form a continuous line, running round 

 both sides of the ax-blade, as extended here, (figure 50.)" 



We probably spoke too hastily in attributing to plow-scratches, such 

 a case as this, of an inscribed ax ;* but, nevertheless, we have no fiiilh 

 in an ancient foreifjn origin of these figures. If not intended as a hoax 

 by some witless idler, then it is the meaningless fancy of some eccentric 

 aboriginal. But one single fact has come under our own notice that 

 in any way bears upon the subject of the age of these relics. 



The instance referred to was as follows : On the 3d of July, 18G9, a 

 large white-oak, measuring twenty-seven feet in circumference at three 

 feet from the ground, during a high gale of wind was blown down. 

 A short time afterward the immense stump was uprooted, preparatory 

 to leveling the ground. The hole that the extracted roots left measured 

 seven feet in depth and thirty-three in circumference. FourTeet below 

 the bottom of this hole, or eleven feet from the surface of the ground, 

 we found a very rude stone ax, that was entangled in a mass of fibrous 

 roots that had been cut off from the main mass of roots of the tree. In 

 *Amer. Nat., vol. vi, page IGO. 



