am 
1886. | The Peabody Museums Explorations in Ohio. IOIQ 
perceptible ridges, similar to other slight irregularities here and 
there over the field. Owing to the cultivating of this place for 
many years and to the tramping of cattle in the barnyard, these 
ridges have been more or less worn down, and a few water-worn 
stones have been exposed on the surface. These were first no- 
ticed by Dr. Metz about a year ago. As soon as our camp was 
pitched we took a look at these water-worn stones. They were 
fragments of limestone filled with fossils of the Silurian age 
lying ona deposit of gravel over which, long ago, had flowed 
the waters of the Little Miami. What more could these stones 
have said, had they been endowed with speech, than that which 
was evident to our eyes: “ We were long ago brought here by 
men.” Here, then, was something more to be revealed in con- 
nection with the history of these great earthworks of an ancient 
race, and here we would dig a trench on the morrow. We started 
Our trench sixty feet west from the wall of the circle, and well 
outside of the slightly elevated portion, which, we were afterward 
told by Mr. Snyder who remembers the place fifty years ago, 
Was formerly much more marked, and had the appearance of a 
long low mound. Digging down to the hard pan, we carried our 
trench westward for about ten feet, when we came to three large 
_ Water-worn stones regularly arranged, side by side, in the gravel 
hard pan. 
It is necessary to fully understand the character of the earth in 
which we were working in order to appreciate the labors of the 
ancient people at this place, and I may well add our own in 
Making these researches. First, the surface consists of a few 
inches of dark soil overlying from eight to ten inches of clay. 
Under this clay is a layer of coarse gravel containing many peb- 
bles, some of considerable size, but all colored and firmly ce- 
mented by an amount of iron which, from some natural cause, is 
far in excess of that in the gravel all about. This iron-cemented 
§tavel forms an irregular layer of from one to four feet in depth, 
: _ and under it is a loose, uncolored gravel mixed with sand which, 
_ Judging from a pit near by, is certainly thirty feet in depth, and 
Probably much more. It may be that this is part of the great 
terminal glacial moraine which Professor Wright has been tracing 
across the State of Ohio. In this iron gravel the stones we found | 
_ Were imbedded. On cleaning off these stones we found that 
there were others at right angles to them, and soon we made out 
