188 Shells as evidence of the Migrations. 
with the shell ornaments of the Gulf Coast.... So 
mayhap the five little shells were bestowed, by Colum- 
bus’s own hands, upon a native of the isles, were 
carried across to the mainland on some trip of trade 
or of pleasure, and thence, from hand to hand, as 
curios, journeyed northward with an ever-growing 
wonder-tale of the great white chiefs from the East. . .” 
“If not thus, then they had journeyed in dangling 
from the trappings of one of those noble steeds that 
shared the perils of the early explorers of the main- 
land... 
“Certain it is that they date from the close of the 
fifteenth or the early days of the sixteenth century.” 
But Mr. Wardle omits the most wonderful episode of 
his wonder-tale—I refer to the fact that after all these 
imaginary wanderings and episodes on sea and land, the 
cowries should eventually have come to rest ‘in the heart 
of the American continent, and, “of course purely by 
accident,” have become linked up with the identical beliefs 
and fantastic practices with which they are associated in 
Africa, India and Eastern Asia ! 
To such lengths does the American ethnologist go 
rather than admit the patent fact that these shells 
and the associated beliefs and practices were taken 
from Eastern Asia to America long before the time of 
Columbus! 
According to Mr, Charles C. Willoughby, the Peabody 
Museum, Cambridge, Mass., contains a dress of a Cree 
woman, collected by the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 
1804-5, on which are four dozen cowries (see American 
Anthropologist, 1905, for picture of the dress). 
The shells from the Roden mound, Moore informs us, 
“differ from those on the Cree dress, which are of a larger 
variety and much more distinctly humped than are our 
