88 FOREST RIVER SHELLHEAP ; 



tained scallop shells in our younger days, when the place 

 was famous as a picnic ground, and into which some of us 

 have dug in after years, with a full knowledge of its Indian 

 origin. 



The record of the secretary's book of the society is 

 headed " Report on the presence of shells in great quan- 

 tities near the seashore in Salem, Mass., observed May, 

 1840, by John Lewis Russell." 



From the record it appears that Mr. Russell addressed 

 the society on the subject of raised beaches, and he quotes 

 from several authors accounts of elevations of land in 

 various parts of the world in recent times, caused by earth- 

 quakes, and also mentions several instances of raised 

 beaches on which are great masses of shells. All these 

 deposits, following the opinions of the authors he has 

 quoted, he regards as natural formations. He then states 

 that there have been found " strata of Mya, Mytilus, and 

 Ostrea, several inches thick, from five to ten feet below 

 the surface at Lechmere's Point in Cambridge," and that 

 "S. C. Dana, M. D., the ingenious and accomplished 

 chemist of Lowell .... found them on the site 

 of the Court House [at East Cambridge] and has no 

 doubt that they were raised to their present position 

 from the adjacent beds of the harbor, of which the hill 

 in question was probably at one time the shore of the 

 then sea." 2 



After these preliminary remarks Mr. Russell comes to 

 the special subject of the Pine Grove Shellheap, which he 



8 The remains of an old shellheap were still visible at Lechmere's Point a few 

 years since and' probably can still be traced. 



As an instance of finding shells at considerable depth along the old shore lines of 

 Salem, I may mention that, when a boy, the old North River bank was graded at 

 that part of Federal Street where now stand the houses built by Messrs. Haskell 

 and Walden, and that in the old shore sand-bank, many shells of the large hen- 

 clam, Mactra solidisshnu, were found. These were evidently shells which had 

 been buried on the former beach of North Kiver. 



