1134 The American Naturalist. [December, 
these trails down to what was once the water’s edge of the lake (which 
was even now so marshy that I could not excavate it with so limited a 
force) I found more than a hundred of the typical pierced busycon 
shells or conchas, such as had once (I later determined) served as the 
armatures or heads of hammers, clubs, picks, hoes and chisels or celts,. 
etc., as was even then manifest to me in the various forms (pecked 
or ground) of their more tapering portions or whorl ends." Thus I was. 
at once convinced that this was another such place,—shell heaps, canals, 
central lagoon and all, as Colonel Durnford had described, yet on a 
scale so vast that I could scarcely believe it to have been artificial, 
wholly the work of human hands. What I have here described was 
more or less typical of no fewer than eleven others of these shell settle- 
ments later examined on various keys or on out-lying reefs of Pine Is- 
land, and the mainland below Punta Rassa. In the lagoon of one of 
the lower keys (off Pine Island), I was able to excavate sufficiently to 
determine that it too, contained the remains of objects of arts as was 
evidenced by a wattling plummet, a hammer stone (rare indeed in those 
parts where shell and bone seem to have replaced to a great extent the 
stone so common in other ancient camp sites) and a busycon shell pick 
still mounted on its original handle of mango wood! With this find I 
was convinced of the typical nature of the original Collier muck-bed as 
described in Colonel Durnford’s notes, even ere I saw it, and the dis- 
covery here, and later in the edge of one of the great canals of the con- 
tiguous island, of the remains of pile work, suggested that these great 
shell settlements had been surrounded inside and out by post-supported 
platforms, from which alike implements, etc., now found in the mud as 
described by Colonel Durnford, and the shell rows or heaps alongside, 
which I have designated winrows, had been dropped. This, eked out. 
by many later observations, solved the problem of the origin, as well as 
of the structural character of these great shell settlements. On reach- 
ing Collier’s, I was most courteously received by Mr. and Mrs. Collier. 
Excavations alongside the diggings of Mr. Wilkins and Colonel 
Durnford, and still further in toward the center and one side of the 
muck bed, although made under water mostly (for the rainy season had 
set in) revealed within the few hours I could devote to the work other 
relics of the kind Colonel Durnford has described—net-pins, seine- 
1 I find, and it gives me pleasure to state here that in some of his earliest admir- 
able communications to this Magazine relative to the Mounds of St. John’s River, 
Florida, Mr. Clarence Moore arrives at almost identical conclusions regarding the 
uses of these pierced shells, and that my later finds in the mucks beds of old 
lagoons on Demorest’s key and at Collier’s fully confirm these conclusions. 
