694 The American Naturadist. [July, 
lessly thrown together, whose exact value will come to view only after 
careful thought and study. Especially does it seem that the concep- 
tion of the circular reaction and its genetic importance in the individ- 
ual will remain a permanent acquisition of psychology. 
ANTHROPOLOGY.’ 
Surprising Discovery of Ancient Rope and Netting in 
Southwestern Florida.—Lieutenant-Colonel C. D. Demford, late 
of the English army, has found in the recent months, a piece 
_of well-preserved rope, a mass of string woven into the meshes 
of a net and several artificially shaped wooden billets, from two 
to three feet deep, in a deposit of soft, black mud, in one of 
the tide-water sea lagoons near Punta Rasso. These objects were 
associated with a necklace of shells and a well-preserved wooden 
dish, evidently of Indian make, and lay at a spot flooded daily by 
the salt tide, and encircled by one of the narrow ridges of oyster 
shells, now familiar to students, made by Indians, who feasted on mol- 
luses at the spot. Here, as at other places on the west coast, the 
shells seemed to have been so arranged upon the low margins of the 
lagoons as to form small canals and water basins, where canoes could 
easily pass shoreward, and land on hard bottom when the tides were 
favorable. As far as I know, no such discovery as this of Lieutenant- 
Colonel Demford’s has come to the notice of students in Florida before, 
but it remains to be proven, beyond reasonable doubt, that none of the 
objects, which rested on the shell bottom in the middle of the basin, 
and completely under the mud, worked their way down in recent times. 
Nevertheless, experience in digging out the bottom of drained lakes 
_ in Switzerland has shown us the effect of mud in preserving perishable 
objects of human make for long periods of time, and there is no reason 
why submarine deposits may not restore to us lost details of the past here 
as well as there. This brilliant and original work in Florida, directing 
investigation into a new channel, leaves us to wonder why no one 
thought of it before. The discoverer, while carrying many of the 
objects found to England, has kindly deposited a series of them at the 
Museum of Archzology of the University of Pennsylvania, to whose 
! This department is edited by H. C. Mercer, University of Pennsylvania. 
