530 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



' ' The human bones on the table show us that the skeletons from the leaf-mould 

 are those of people of about the average height. The tallest person of all meas- 

 ured five feet eight and a half inches. They were brachycephalia. Their shin- 

 bones show a tendency to flattening. At least half of the upper-arm bones are 

 perforated at the lower end, a peculiarity not often found among civilized people. 

 One femur with its corresponding tibia is thickened by inflammation, while two 

 leg bones show repaired fracture, one near the middle, the other at the, lower 

 end. 



" With one old man were buried a small stone-pipe and a jar. This jar, as 

 well as all the pottery from the leaf-mould, is of a lower type than that from Ten- 

 ness or Missouri, but it has two distinguishing peculiarities. The dishes have 

 broad flat handles, sometimes two, but oftener four, which are wider above at 

 the rim and below where they are joined to the dish than in the center. These 

 handles are often replaced by the moulded forms of salamanders having the head 

 at the rim, or looking into the dish. Besides these peculiar features, the pottery 

 is not remarkable in its ornament, being cord-marked or incised. Occasionally 

 big lozenge-shaped figures are cut upon it. 



" Stone and bone implements are found buried with the skeletons in the leaf, 

 mould, but no implements of copper. Ornaments of copper are not rare. Upon 

 the neck bones of a child buried with an adult a lot of cylindrical copper beads 

 were found, and with them a cross-shaped pendant. Finger-rings were so un- 

 common in American prehistoric times that, in exploring several thousand graves, 

 I have only come upon them in one grave, which was opened this summer in the 

 cemetery at Madisonville. The skeletons with which the rings were found was 

 that of a woman, and the rings were broad bands of copper, two upon each hand, 

 still remaining on the phalanges. 



"In the ashes filling the ash-pits are found the bones of almost every ani- 

 mal known to have lived in Ohio, from the size of the buffalo to that of the 

 woodchuck, but the most common are those or the deer, wolf, bear and beaver. 

 The long bones are broken as if for cooking. Bones of fishes and reptiles qccur, 

 and the spurred leg ol the wild turkey is often met with among other bird bones. 



"Bone implements are very common in the ash-pits. One, whose pattern 

 is unknown anywhere else in the world, was made out of the leg and foot-bones 

 of the deer and elk by cutting a groove along the bone and beveling its edges 

 from within, so as to render them quite sharp. This implement we call a scraper. 

 As the edge became dull it was probably sharpened again and again, until, with 

 continued use and sharpening, it became so thin in the middle as finally to break, 

 and so we get great numbers of the ends of such scrapers, as shown by this tray 

 full. 



" Digging implements, made from the antlers of thedeerand elk, some more 

 like picks and others more like spades, were probably mounted in handles, and 

 may perhaps have served to excavate the pits in which they are found in great 

 quantities. It would require many digging implements to make so many of these 

 large pits in the hard clay, and it has occurred to me that the massive, perforated 



