1032 The American Naturalist. [November, 
ANTHROPOLOGY: 
The Discovery of Aboriginal Netting Rope and Wood 
Implements in a Mud Deposit in Western Florida.—I was 
in Florida, last April, tarpon fishing, and had been drawn down in the 
course of this pursuit to the neighborhood of the settlement of Marco— 
a few frame houses on the south-east coast, collected near the pass of 
the same name through the reef. This pass is an important one, as 
importance goes in this thinly-peopled region, it being a road to the safe 
shelter in Marco Bay, and also to the little wooden pier in Collier’s 
Creek, leading from Mr. Collier’s store and house. And Marco has 
clearly, for very many years, been thus important. A Spanish settle- 
ment was remembered by a friend of the “oldest inhabitant,” and, 
from the more distant past, numerous kitchen middens, formed chiefly 
of shell-heaps, bring us heavy conch axes or clubs sharpened at the 
point and bored for handles, smaller conch and other shell implements, 
bits of black pottery, shell sinkers, and various ornaments, all pre- 
sumably relics of the mysterious Mound-Builders. Hard cement-like 
floors of former huts or cottages are reported to be visible in the local- 
ity—Collier’s is, infact, built on Mound-Builders’ débris, and the rows 
of these shell-heaps show the extent of their occupation of the place, 
both in time and numbers. Yet, withal, there has been hitherto a 
complete absence of wooden articles or of any textile fabrics from the 
discovered remains. 
Here and there shell-heaps form the banks of what are locally called 
“muck ” tracts, former creeks or inlents, now filled with peaty mud, 
ill-smelling when first disturbed. The drier of these have been for 
years overgrown with trees and bushes, some of which trees are old and 
dead. This peat muck is valuable as a fertilizer, and it is this prop- 
erty that originally brought the special basin, that I shall describe 
later on, particularly under notice. 
I had been looking with curious eyes at a somewhat similar forma- 
tion in the neighborhood of Naples City, a Floridian watering place, 
of from ten to fifty inhabitants, according to the season of the year, 
where we had been staying at its comfortable little hotel. At Naples 
there is an ancient waterway now in various stages of peat muck and 
stagnant pool—an artificial canal, cut with the clearly deliberate pur- 
pose of forming a canoe or boat pass from the sea to the lagoon or bay. 
1 The department is edited by Henry C. Mercer, University of Penna , Phila. 
