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 oe labors of nations of Indians that 
inhabited this region man es since, are remarkably numerous about 
St. Louis. Those tumuli praseacds 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 oe 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. ie 
In 1830 and 1831 George Catlin,’* the well known In- 
14Notes relative to George Catlin. Ann. Rept. Smith. Inst. 1872: 
53-54. 1873. 
Donaldson, Thos. The George Catlin Indian gallery in the U. 8. 
National Museum (Smithsonian Institution) with memoir and statis- 
tics. Rept. U. S. Nat. Mus. 1885. 
Matthews, Washington. The Catlin collection of Indian paintings. 
ept. 0. 1891. 
oumans, 
Sey 1896, 
