916 The American Naturalist. [November, 
animals, were not upon a single occasion, among several hun- 
dred excavations, met with below two feet from the surface. 
It will be remembered that upon one occasion only were 
human remains found by Prof. Wyman at a considerable 
depth; namely those at Osceola Mound (now Crow’s Bluff, 
Lake County), and that they were not particularly broken. 
The articular portions of several had been severed by a cutting 
instrument, a suspicious circumstance. The writer, however, 
until farther facts are adduced, will remain of the opinion that 
cannibalism, as a custom, was practiced only towards the close 
of the period of the shell heaps. 
Another conclusion arrived at by Prof. Wyman seems based 
upon the strongest probability. When after a long and care- 
ful search in a shell heap no pottery is brought to light, it may 
be considered that the makers of the heap lived at a time 
when the method of its manufacture was unknown. Pottery 
filled so great a want in the lives of the aborigines and was so 
extensively used by the makers of the shell heaps where it is 
found at all, that it seems impossible to account for its absence 
upon any hypothesis other than the one suggested. One fact 
relating to pottery which Prof. Wyman neglects to state is that 
in many shell heaps pottery is found to a certain depth only, 
after which it entirely disappears. In other shell heaps 
pottery, plain and ornamented, is found in association for a 
time, after which unornamented pottery alone is found. These 
points in connection with the pottery of the shell heaps have 
been noticed in so many scores of cases that the writer is con- 
vinced that many shell heaps were in process of formation con- 
temporaneously with the first knowledge of the art of pottery 
making and its subsequent development. It will be remem- 
bered that Prof. Wyman was hampered in his researches by 
inadequate assistance in respect to the manual labor of dig- 
ging, and it is likely that certain facts buried deeply beneath 
the surface escaped him. It is to be regretted that in nearly 
every case he neglects to state the depth at which weapons and 
other implements were found, and whether pottery ornamented 
or plain, or both, was met with in association. It is well 
known that later Indians occupied the shell heaps as places of 
