144 FOSSIL MEN. 



regarded in the same light as that in which we view 

 our most precious national archives. The treaty of 

 the Lenni-Lenape with Penn in 1682 is commemorated 

 by a great belt of white and purple wampum, still 

 preserved in Philadelphia, and probably made of the 

 Venus shell. The great charter of the Iroquois 

 league, according to Morgan, was made of fresh- 

 water univalves, and in the early records of New 

 France we constantly read of belts or strings of 

 wampum as being presented in confirmation of 

 engagements or claims. Wilson well states the ana- 

 logy of all this with the quipus, or knotted strings, 

 which formed the records of the Peruvians, and which, 

 like the wampum of the north, were sometimes buried 

 in their graves as records of their lives and deeds. 

 Of this use of wampum as a substitute for letters we 

 have, I believe, as yet no trace in Europe ; but may 

 we not hope yet to find the buried quipu or historic 

 wampum of some pre-historic man or tribe ? 



Among the most mysterious of the objects found 

 among the ancient relics in European caverns, are 

 slender bones, marked with notches or scratches in 

 variable number. They have been held to be tallies, 

 or aids to memory, and it has even been suggested 

 that they make a rude approach to the beginning 

 of historical writing. This may be so ; but of the 

 American objects which they resemble, the most 

 striking are the gambling sticks used by the Western 

 Indians. In the Queen Charlotte Islands, for example, 

 the Haida carries a leather bag containing, perhaps, 



