1038 The American Naturalist. [November, 
about two years before; first by two of the local hunters and guides, 
including one of the Weeks brothers, who came afterwards with our 
party, and again by one of the guides named Walker, who was also 
with us. These told the same story, viz.: that it was covered in by a 
regular “bottle” top of cement—hard stone cement—smoothed and 
even on the inside at the point where the men had got through, which they 
had accomplished at the summit. They found one skeleton which was 
described as lying about 4 feet below the cement. The cement was said 
to be more than a foot thick, and so hard that they could only cut 
just enough away to allow the passage of a man. Below it was a soft, 
fine, dry sand. They soon had to stop digging when they began piling 
up this sand on the edge of the hole, as it came falling in again. They 
did not get more than 4 or 5 feet below the cement, and found nothing 
but this fine, soft sand ; in some parts it was “just the color of dripping 
blood, so red, not ordinary sand red, but as if it had been painted red, 
just like dripping blood,” so said Bill Weeks, one of the hunters. They 
were looking for treasure, of course. This cement work and the blood- 
red sand being quite out of the common, Dr. Durrett, of Louisville, 
Ky., and myself, with a party of boatmen and hunters, therefore set 
out one morning, prepared to cut more deeply into this mound, and 
did so. We did not, by any means, fully explore it, but we cut into 
and across the “cement” dome, and found the guides’ account to be 
practically correct. The dome is composed of a gray-colored close- 
binding mud. The blood-red sand or powder we did not come upon, 
but it is quite possible that that found by the hunters was some of 
the same hematite found by Professor Othniel Marsh in the Taylor 
Mound near Newark, Ohio, and which he supposed to have been used 
as paint. A description of this will be found in the American Journal 
of Science and Arts, Vol. XLII, July, 1866. 
The remains of the hunters’ former dig for treasure lay about the 
mouth of the small man hole made by them through the cement, and 
in clearing away these and the shrubs near, we came upon several of 
the old and whitened bones that had been thrown out at that time, in- 
cluding half an arm bone that had been splintered, apparently, by 
some sharp weapon. Later on, the other half of the same bone, the 
fractures fitting perfectly, was produced, yellow from the sand below 
where it had been sheltered by the cement from all rain, except the 
direct fall into the small man-hole. 
I am writing this description of our partial examination of this 
mound, solely on account of the curious, and, I believe, unique, rude 
dome formed over, so far as we know at present, one skeleton buried in 
