358 The American Naturalist. [April, 
with the typical palm-thatched roof of the country. Though these 
habitations were built on higher ground which overlooked a lake-like 
expanse of water, two or three platform structures were built directly 
over the water, at a distance of fifteen or twenty feet from the shore. 
The platforms, about ten feet long by three and a half wide, without 
roof, rail, mat or cover, and about three feet above the surface of the 
water, were upheld by four poles driven into the bottom of the estuary. 
On inquiry Mr. Bryant who observed no objects resting upon them, 
learned that the platforms served the Indians as beds when, on warm 
summer nights, an exposed position over the water Seen coolness 
and immunity from mosquitoes. 
Just around the end of the peninsula from the Ten Thousand Islands, 
not, therefore, above ninety miles east of the site of numerous ancient 
pile-built structures recently unearthed among these Keys by the Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania, the modern pile-set platforms of Big City 
seemed to furnish an interesting connecting link between the present 
and the past of Florida. It is hard to see how riparian savages, 
dwelling in any low-lying, submerged region, could avoid setting struct- 
ures on piles. The town of Borneo (Lubbocks Prehistoric Times, p. 
184), is built on piles like many Dayak villages. So is Sowik in New 
Guinea. The Turkish fishermen live in pile-set huts on Lake Prasias 
(near Salonica), just as a pile-built quarter of Tcherkask rests upon 
the Don, while the natives of Celebes, Solo, Aram, Mindanao, the Caro- 
line Islands and the African gold coast continue the building of dwell- 
ings on piles at the present day. 
The desire to escape mosquitoes has not been generally quoted as the 
motive for aboriginal “ lacustrine ” construction, but I myself have ex- 
perienced the efficacy of a water surrounding as an immunity against 
mosquitoes, when house-boating along the mosquito-infested shores and 
islands of the Lower Rhone. Then I invariably escaped the pests that 
often swarmed a few yards away by anchoring for the night twenty or 
thirty feet out from the shore. As at Big City, the desire to escape 
mosquitoes seems to have inspired the pile builder, so in British Col- 
umbia, Lord says, (see Stephens’ Flint Chips, p. 123) that Indians on 
the Suman prairie recently built pile dwellings on a lake in April and 
June to avoid mosquitoes. Venezuela came by its name (Little Ven- 
ice) because of numerous aboriginal pile dwellings seen by Alonso de 
Ojeda in a bay called by him the Gulf of Venice in 1499, while the 
shores of its interior lake, Maracaibo, present native pile-dwellings in- 
habited to-day. Considering these facts, it may be suspected that the 
littoral regions of North and South America will, when thoroughly 
