OK EED INDIANS OF NEWFOUNDLAND. 159 



five-eighths of au inch iu thickness. Both these are incised on the one side like the pend- 

 ants, with complicated designs and very delicate v^'orkmanship. (Plate IX, 19-21.) 



The discs of shell strung together are of importance, as they undoubtedly represent 

 the vi'ampum characteristic of the American Indian. Similar ones about | of an inch in 

 diameter are iu the public museum. But there are there also strings of much smaller 

 ones, just like a string of beads. There is one 21 inches long and another 13 inches. The 

 strings are of deer hide, and the discs are about j% of an inch in diameter and about ^- of 

 an inch in length. But driven into the interior this people seemed to have been scarce 

 of shell and substituted bone. They seem to have formed them of cross sections of the 

 leg or wing bones of birds ; some are even of wood. There are imperfect strings where 

 the discs are much smaller, being about one-eighth of an inch iu diameter. (See Plate 

 X.) Mr. Horatio Hale' has traced this back to the money of the Chinese, Japanese and 

 other peoples of Eastern and Central Asia, which consists of rouud pieces of metal 

 strung together by a cord through a hole in the centre. As people pushed forth to 

 the islands of Polynesia they retained the idea, but having no metal, as a substi- 

 tute they fashioned round discs of shell, which they strung together in the same 

 manner. Strings of this kind were, and among the ruder tribes of the Pacific, I haA^e 

 no doubt, are yet used as a medium of exchange, or, in other words, as their money. 

 The strings that I have described are in appearance exactly the same with some 

 that I have seen brought from the South seas. (Plate X.) Thus the practice must 

 have passed from island to island of the Pacific till it reached the American continent ; 

 theu traversed it from West to East, till here we find it beyond the continent in our 

 farthest island stretching forth toward the Old World. We should add that from these 

 graves, as well as those seen by Mr. Cormack at the E,ed Indian Lake, it is plain that they 

 strongly favoured hut or house burial, a practice world wide, manifested in very varied 

 forms from the rude log huts of various Indian tribes and the barrows of Europe to the 

 mounds of Ohio and the pyramids of Egypt. When they were driven into the interior 

 they erected timber huts, probably this being necessary to protect the contents from wild 

 beasts. But previously they seemed to have chosen remote or almost inaccessible islands, 

 probably beca^^se from the absence of such creatures a canopy of birch bark might suffice 

 as a covering. 



We must, however, notice a remarkable resemblance between their mode of burial, par- 

 ticularly as exemplified iu the boy's grave, and what is seen in some very ancient ceme- 

 teries in the East. The modern Warka, near Babylon, the ancient city of Nimrod, Erech 

 (G-en. x, 10), and Mugheir, the ancient Ur of the Ghaldees, were nsed as cemeteries, it is 

 supposed, not only during the time of the early Chaldean supremacy, but during the 

 Assyrian and oven the later Babylonian period. They now exhibit mounds which on 

 being penetrated are found to be the tombs of generations. Mr. Loftus, on digging into 

 those at Wai'ka, found brick vaults, but mainly coffins, generally of earthenware, which 

 had originally been laid on the ground and others upon them, tier after tier, till their 

 remains are found piled to the depth of thirty and it was thought in some cases sixty 

 feet. These are described as "resembling an oval dish cover, the sides sloping outwards 

 toward the base, which rests on a projecting rim. The dimensions vary from four to 

 seven feet long, about two feet wide and from one to three feet deep. On carefully 



' " On the Origin and Value of Wampum," in 'American Naturalist,' Vol. 2, xviii, 1884. 



