Klem — The History of Science in St. Louis. 95 



of the graves a skull without teeth had been found, giv- 

 ing rise to another local theory that these prehistoric 

 residents of the Meramec had jaws like a turtle. Dr. 

 Say found that the graves were walled in and covered 

 with flat stones. He opened several of them and saw 

 that the bones were of ordinary size, seemingly having 

 been buried after the flesh had been separated from them, 

 according to the custom of certain Indian tribes. The 

 skull of the turtle-like jaw was that of an old man who 

 had lost his teeth. 



They also devoted a great deal of time to the Indian 

 mounds of St. Louis, locating twenty-seven along a line 

 leading north of the city and on what they called the sec- 

 ond bank of the river. Each of these mounds was 

 measured with care. On the Illinois side of the river, 

 within five miles from the river bank opposite St. Louis, 

 they found seventy-five mounds. Their report reads as 

 follows : 



"Tumuli, and other remains of the labors of nations of Indians that 

 inhabited this region many ages since, are remarkably numerous about 

 St. Louis. Those tumuli immediately northward of the town, and 

 within a short distance of it, are twenty-seven in number, of various 

 forms and magnitudes, arranged nearly in a line from north to south. 

 The common form is an oblong square, and they all stand on the sec- 

 ond bank of the river." 



"In the prairies of Illinois, opposite St. Louis, are numbers of large 

 mounds. We counted seventy-five in a course of a walk of about five 

 miles, which brought us to the hill a few years since occupied by the 

 monks of La Trappe. This enormous mound lies nearly from north 

 to south, but it is so overgrown with bushes and weeds, interlaced 

 with briers and vines, that we were unable to obtain an accurate ac- 

 count of its dimensions." 



In 1830 and 1831 George Catlin, 14 the well known In- 



i* Notes relative to George Catlin. Ann. Rept. Smith. Inst. 1872: 

 53-54. 1873. 



Donaldson, Thos. The George Catlin Indian gallery in the U. S. 

 National Museum (Smithsonian Institution) with memoir and statis- 

 tics. Rept. U. S. Nat. Mus. 1885. 



Matthews, Washington. The Catlin collection of Indian paintings. 

 Ann. Rept. U. S. Nat. Mus. 1890: 593-610. 1891. 



Youmans, W. J. George Catlin. Pioneers of Science in America. 

 336-346. 1896. 



