FOREST RIVER SHELLHEAP ; BY F. W. PUTNAM. 87 



early writers on the habits of the Indians of the Atlantic 

 coast as the refuse piles of the Indians, and even fifty 

 years ago there were local traditions of their being the 

 camping grounds of Indians, but these statements were 

 not among the general possessions of the geologists, who 

 were obliged to study these recent deposits in the same 

 way that they studied the beds of fossils. Some fossil 

 shell-beds were known, and as great stress had been laid 

 upon the uprising of sea beaches, it became the accepted 

 theory that all similar beds or heaps of shells were owing 

 simply to the uprising of the coast. 



In 1841 Mr. Lardner Vanuxem, a distinguished geolo- 

 gist on the New York Survey, made a communication 

 before the meeting of American Geologists and Natural- 

 ists in which he gave his reasons for differing from Mr. T. 

 A. Conrad, who seems to have persisted in the theory that 

 the shell-beds were of natural origin, 1 and showed that 

 the association of the shells with stone arrowheads and 

 fragments of pottery proved their artificial origin, which 

 was confirmed by the fact that the shell-beds were depos- 

 ited upon the natural surface of the soil, and that under 

 them were the remains of cedar trees which had formerly 

 grown on the spot. Thus, seven years after the statement 

 by Ducatel the question of the natural or artificial origin of 

 the shell heaps was still under discussion. 



In this connection, and with these facts before us, it is 

 of interest to read in the unpublished records of 1840, of 

 the Essex County Natural History Society, to which my 

 attention was directed by the honored president of the 

 Institute, Dr. Wheatland, the first account of the shell- 

 heap at Pine Grove, from which so many of us have ob- 



1 Vanuxem and Ducatel both agreed with Conrad in stating that some beds were 

 of natural origin, but they were true fossils. 



