716 The American Naturalist. [August, 
ARCH ZOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY. 
Ancient American Bread.—Mr. S. P. Preston, of Lumberville, 
told me on April 1st, 1894, that he remembered his grandfather, Silas 
Preston, telling him how the latter, when a boy living on the farm now 
owned by Benjamin Goss, in Buckingham township, Bucks County, 
Pa, had seen Delaware Indians, about the year 1780, encamped in 
barked-roofed wooden huts near by, pound corn in stone mortars with 
stone pestles. They mixed the meal with water, and patting the dough 
into flattened balls with their hands, baked these cakes in the hot em- 
bers of their open fires. He did not tell his grandson whether they 
salted the meal, or—what was more important, if we want to try the 
experiment—whether the corn grains were pounded when old and well 
dried, which would be a diffieult operation; when green and soft, 
whieh would be easier, or after previous parching, which would be 
easiest of all. 
Franklin (Harshberger on Maize, p. 140) speaks of Indians, prob- 
ably Delawares, parching corn grains in dishes of hot sand and after- 
wards grinding them to a fine powder, which kept fresh a number of 
years. Captain John Smith saw Indians roasting corn on the ear 
green, and when thus parehed crisp, bruising it in a * wooden mortar 
with a polt and lapping it in rowles in the leaves of their corn, and so 
boyling it for a dainty." 
Parehing loose grains well stirred in an open iron dish does as well 
as either of the above methods in my experience and gets over the first 
and main diffieulty of producing the meal or dough with a stone mor- 
tar and pestle. This meal, as I have made it, from freshly parched 
grain, is the easily produced Mexican Pinol, carried invariably on long 
desert journeys in Chihauhua and Sonora—sometimes seasoned with 
herbs or parched cocoa shells and generally mixed with sweetened 
water as a strengthening beverage. 
The taste of cakes made of parched meal, I find on experiment, dif- 
fers as much from that of others made from fresh grain as it does from 
the flavor of bread made by Mexican Indians from Metate crushed 
grains previously softened in hot lime water; but, given the meal, the 
Lenape process of cooking the dough in the embers of an open fire is 
that to-day in use by the negroes of Southern Maryland and Virginia. 
In an ash cake baked in the embers before me at Egglestons’, Giles 
county, Virginia, in February, 1894, they reproduced the mode of the 
SR qeu cc ert he 
