Haynes.] 62 [May 17, 



The heaps themselves were mainly composed of the shells of 

 the common clam, the whelk and the mussel, and in them occurred 

 the bones of the following species of animals, which have been 

 already determined : the Moose, Deer, Bear, Dog, Beaver, Otter, 

 Seal, Dog-fish, Goose, and the Great Auk, now extinct. This list 

 agrees substantially with that given by Dr. Wyman. 



But what I wish especially to bring to the attention of this 

 Society at the present time is the fragment of a human bone, which 

 I dug out of the shell-heap at Hull's Cove in the summer of 1880. 

 It is a portion, about three inches in length, of the left femur, 

 between the lesser trochanter and the foramen, according to the 

 determination of Mr. F. W. Putnam. It was found under pre- 

 cisely the same circumstances as the bones of animals obtained at 

 the same time from the heap, all of which were broken into 

 pieces such as would come from portions of flesh of a size suitable 

 for cooking in the pots, whose fragments abounded there. Like 

 these it appears to have been broken for a similar object, and thus 

 it would seem to furnish substantial evidence of the prevalence 

 of cannibalism among the people, whose kitchen refuse makes up 

 these shell-heaps. 



Although Mr. Francis Parkman, in his various historical writ- 

 ings, has given many narratives derived from early Jesuit sources, 

 which show that this practice existed among the Iroquois, the 

 Algonquins, and other north-eastern tribes, yet the practical proof 

 of it hitherto brought to light in New England amounts to but 

 very little. All the shell-heaps of this region that have thus far 

 been investigated, so far as my information extends, have afforded 

 only six instances in which fragments of the human skeleton 

 have been found. 



At Cotuit-port, in Barnstable, Mass., Dr. Wyman came upon a 

 metatarsal bone of the great toe of the human foot. 



Mr. J. Eliot Cabot dug out of a shell-heap at Ipswich, Mass., 

 a portion of a lower human jaw and also the upper part of a 

 humerus, which had been fashioned into an implement. This is 

 now preserved in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge. 1 



A human skull was found by Mr. Caleb Cooke, under the 



1 Second Annual Report of the Peabody Museum, p. 16. 



