396 SOME ETHNOGRAPHIC PHASES OF CONCHOLOGY. 



the Selden MSS. in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, a native 

 figure is represented carrying a large univalve shell in his hand. 

 He is barefooted, and dressed only in a short, spotted tunic, reaching 

 to his loins. In his right hand he bears a spear, toothed round the 

 blade, — it may be vdth inserted flints or points of obsidian, — while 

 he holds the large shell in his left hand. A river which he is passing 

 is represented by a greenish stripe winding obliquely across the 

 drawing, and his track, as indicated by alternate footprints has pre- 

 viously crossed the same stream. On this trail he is followed by 

 other figures nearly similarily dressed, but sandalled, and bearing 

 spears and large fans ; while a second group approaches the river by 

 a different trail, and in an opposite direction to the shell-bearer. 

 Other details of this curious fragment of pictorial history are less 

 easily interpreted. An altar, or a temple, appears to be represented 

 on one side of the stream ; and a highly colored circular figure, like 

 a shield, on the other, may be the epitomised symbol of some 

 Achaean land or Sacred Elis of the New "World. But whatever be 

 adopted as the most trustworthy interpretation of the ancient hiero- 

 glyphic painting, its general correspondence with other migratory 

 depictions is undoubted ; and it is worthy of note, that, in some re- 

 spects, the most prominent of all the figures is he who is represented 

 as fording the stream, bearing one of the large tropical univalves in 

 his hand. 



The evidence which such a remarkable native record affords of an 

 importance attached to the large sea shells of the Grulf of Mexico, 

 among the most civilized of the American nations settled on its 

 shores, is well deserving of notice ; but the same class of tropical 

 marine products acquire a new and still more important significance 

 when they are met with among the relics pertaining to Indian tribes 

 settled in the northern regions of this continent, some of them two 

 to three thousand miles distant from the native habitat of the mol- 

 lusca by which these coveted treasures of the ocean are produced, 

 and separated by hundreds of miles from the nearest sea coast. 



Tracing them along the northern route through the Mississippi 

 and Ohio valleys, these sheUs have been found in the ancient graves 

 of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana, and northward to the regions 

 of the Grreat Lakes. Dr. G-erard Troost, in a communication 

 to the American Ethnological Society,* has described a singularly 



* Transactions Amer. Ethuol. Soc., Vol. I. pp. S55 — 365. 



