78 The American Naturalist. [January, 
—motives to understand which is to half reveal the scheme of primitive 
existence, whose features, faintly suggested by archeology, elude the im- 
agination. He best knows them who, searching deep, dares, like Mr. 
Cushing, the dreadful initiation of the Indian Priest. 
When the mound-makers buried pots with the dead, they often 
knocked holes in them, not to render them worthless for grave robbers, 
since valuables often lay close by, but inferably for a religious reason. 
Sometimes they made the holes before the pottery was baked. 
Like the Nanticokes, of Maryland, it appeared that they had dried 
the flesh of corpses off the bones, stored the latter in charnel houses, 
and, at given times, buried the store, for, though the interred skeletons 
found lay sometimes in anatomical order, as if they had been buried 
with the flesh on the bones, or before the ligaments had rotted, at other 
times (Duval’s) the bones lay scattered in disorder or in bundles 
(Gunn’s Grove), when, occasionally, the remains of one man (Orange- 
dale) got mixed with those of another. 
But, in all this, there was nothing extra Indian. Other mound- 
building tribes had been known to do all or most of these things, and 
we come to the second question— 
(b) DIFFERENCE IN AGE OF THE SITES. 
Following the rivers’ course, there were two kinds of sites exam- 
ined—sand mounds built deliberately by piling up loads of sand and 
earth on one spot, for burial or other pnrpose, and shell heaps (which, 
by the way, occur on the river only from its source half way down) 
made by people eating fresh water mollusks on one spot and throwing 
the shells under foot. At Tick Island, Bluffton, Thursby’s, Thornhill 
Lake, Mulberry Mound, Gunn’s Grove, Fort Taylor, and Raulerzon’s, 
the sand mounds were later than the shell heaps, for they were built 
directly upon the shell heaps. On the other hand, at Orange, the shell 
heap is later than the sand mound, for it rests upon the sand mound. 
If we go by the comparative test of contents, some of the sand 
mounds and shell heaps must have been contemporaneous, as where, at 
Mulberry Mound, there were the same kind of tobacco pipes in the 
sand mound as in the shell heap. A few shell heaps contained plenty 
of pottery, though, as a general rule, they contained none, and we are 
left to infer that the art of pottery was unknown at their date, or, more 
reasonably, as I venture to suggest, (having examined several small 
sherdless shell heaps at York Harbour, Maine,) that some heaps may 
have been made entirely of roasted clams, where the cooking process 
(unlike boiling) required no pot. On the other hand, some sand 
