142 FOSSIL MEN. 



In his universal use of wampum the American was 

 but kin to all men from the beginning. If we turn 

 to the pages of Genesis, we find the gold, pearls, and 

 agate of Havilah as the riches of primitive man. If 

 we turn to those old graves of the Mammoth age, 

 which reveal to us the habits of the oldest men known 

 to geology, wampum appears to be the universal 

 treasure. Perhaps one of the most curious illustra- 

 tions of this is the skeleton discovered by Dr. Kiviere, 

 in a cave at Mentone, on the borders of France and 

 Italy. This and some companion caves are situated 

 in a rocky cliff bordering a narrow terrace overlooking 

 the sea, and which seems to have been a highway, or 

 pass, from pre-historic times to those of modern rail- 

 ways. Among the earliest lodgers to whom these 

 caves afforded a resting-place in their wanderings, and 

 a place of sepulture, were some of those tribes who 

 are believed to have used only roughly chipped imple- 

 ments, and to have been contemporary with the now 

 extinct mammoth and woolly rhinoceros of the Post- 

 pliocene period. A man of one of these tribes had 

 been buried here, having probably died from wounds 

 while on the march. As we shall find when we 

 come to consider physical characters, this man was 

 essentially in face and frame an American, as were 

 also his contemporaries in other parts of Europe, and 

 their habits and modes of sepulture were American 

 as well. His head had been covered with a cap or 

 chaplet, ornamented with the perforated shells of a 

 Nassa, thickly plaited into the network of the head- 



