182 
miles. Many of them are so low and well cov- 
ered with scrub palmettos that their presence 
is not detected unless they are near to the 
water, when their base is loosened by the 
waves and their structure exposed. They are 
nearly all composed of nothing but the shells 
of the common oysters of Florida, which is, I 
think, a variety of our common oyster of New 
York, and though some contain a mixture of 
bones, it is an exception to find bones numer- 
ous ; still this scarcity may result from the fact 
that the bones may be entirely disintegrated 
and thus hard to find. 
These mounds, apparently rising from the 
water’s edge, when on the shore and washed 
out at their bases by the waves, are sometimes 
twenty feet high, and one that I measured was 
quite twenty-three feet tall. This mound, the 
most perfect in its purity of clean oyster shells 
and freeness from dirt, is opposite to the peli- 
cans’ island below St. Sebastian River. It is 
over four hundred feet long and from thirty to 
sixty feet deep, back from™the water. It has 
large palmettos growing upon it, some of which 
must be nearly a hundred years old. A house 
NATURE'S REALM. 
is perched on its highest point, twenty feet or 
so back from the edge of the nearly vertical yet 
crumbling cliff, and the proprietor has had to 
put up signs to prevent the curious from under- 
mining the rattling, unstable pile and thereby 
endangering his house. Several palmettos 
have succumbed to gravity and settled in wry 
positions to the water’s edge. 
In several mounds skeletons have been dis- 
covered, thus proving comparatively recent oc- 
cupancy; but this does not prove that the 
mounds were made for burial purposes, for 
perhaps the tribes selected the sites because of 
their elevation and dryness. 
From several of these tumuli beads were 
taken, which were always found on top. The 
beads were of glass in no instance, but were of 
a hard substance resembling stone but quite 
light. 
The reader is left to draw his own conclu- 
sions, and we hope to hear from others, and 
those who have studied on the subject, either 
in the line of archeology or as regards geol- 
ogy, and Florida’s formation in particular. 
