42 MOUNDS OF SANTOS IN BRAZIL. CHAP. m. 



Mounds of Santos in Brazil. 



I will next say a few words respecting certain human 

 bones embedded in a solid rock at Santos in Brazil, to which 

 I called attention in my Travels in America in 1842.* I then 

 imagined the deposit containing them to be of submarine 

 origin, an opinion which I have long ceased to entertain. 

 We learn from a memoir of Dr. Meigs, that the River Santos 

 nas undermined a large mound, fourteen feet in height, and 

 about three acres in area, covered with trees, near the town 

 of St. Paul, and has exposed to view many skeletons, all 

 inclined at angles between 20 and 25, and all placed in a 

 similar east and west position.f Seeing, in the Museum of 

 Philadelphia, fragments of the calcareous stone or tufa from 

 this spot, containing a human skull with teeth, and in the 

 same matrix, oysters with serpulse attached, I at first con 

 cluded that the whole deposit had been formed beneath the 

 waters of the sea, or at least, that it had been submerged after 

 its origin, and again upheaved; also, that there had been 

 time since its emergence for the growth on it of a forest of 

 large trees. But after reading again, with more care, the 

 original memoir of Dr. Meigs, I cannot doubt that the shells, 

 like those of eatable kinds, so often accumulated in the 

 mounds of the North American Indians not far from the 

 sea, may have been brought to the place and heaped up with 

 other materials at the time when the bodies were buried. 

 Subsequently, the whole artificial earthwork, with its shells 

 and skeletons, may have been bound together into a solid 

 stone by the infiltration of carbonate of lime, and the mound 

 may therefore be of no higher antiquity than some of those 

 above alluded to on the Ohio, which, as we have seen, have in 

 like manner been exposed in the course of ages to the 

 encroachments and undermining action of rivers. 



* Vol. i. p. 200. f Meigs, Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc., 1828, p. 285. 



