626 The American Naturalist. [July, 
would ever be made; some are composed entirely of pebbles few of 
which exceed a goose egg in size while all about them are large boul- 
ders that would materially interfere with any farming operations that 
might be attempted. In only one of the graves opened was there any 
evidence of an excavation more than a few inches in the soil. It 
appears that the body was laid on the surface with a coveriug of brush 
or timber over which the stones were piled. It would seem scarcely 
reasonable that a people as far along toward civilization as the Norse 
were at that time would adopt such a mode of burial; but these cairns 
were beyond doubt intended for this purpose, and it must be remem- 
bered that in their native home the scarcity of soil made it necessary 
that corpses be thus disposed of instead of being interred. People 
tenaciously adhere to what is customary in such matters—as witness 
the wide-spread opposition to cremation 
. What has been so far done in the field is only a beginning; while 
Professor Horsford has seemingly left little for any one else to do in 
collecting maps and collating the evidence of history as embodied in 
the Sagas, it is possible there may yet be among the old Scandinavian 
and Icelandic records something that will throw unexpected light on 
the subject. But there remains a great deal to do in the strictly 
archeologic line. More of the hut sites are to be excavated, and the 
soil immediately around them and the long houses is to be carefully 
examined, as there is always a possibility of the preservation of some 
object that will furnish indubitable proof of what is sought. This is 
necessary not alone in the vicinity of Cambridge, but all along the 
coast from Long Island Sound to the Saint Lawrence, as this whole 
region is said to contain to some extent remains similar to those above 
mentioned. A careful study is desirable also, of the sites of settle- 
ments in other countries where these people have lived ; especially in 
Greenland whence many if not a majority of the earliest settlers of the 
Charles River Valley were derived. 
GERARD FOWKE. 
Progress of field work in the Department of American 
and Prehistoric Archaeology of the University of Pennsyl- 
vania.—The believer in Man's great antiquity in Eastern North 
America is again called upon to explain a serious doubt. The easily 
accessible broad and well lit shelter of the Forge Cave (1 mile below 
Barren Springs, left bank of the New River, Pulaski County, Virginia), 
as explored by us in February, 1894, has astonished us again with the 
modern look of the evidence furnished. 
