1882.] 63 [Haynes. 



Pine-grove shell-heap, near Salem, Mass. This Mr. Putnam 

 believes to be the oldest one ever discovered in New England. 1 



But most considerable of all is the discovery made in 1877 by 

 Mr. Manley Hardy, at Great Deer Isle, in Penobscot Bay, of 

 " a human femur, and near by some twenty or thirty more bones 

 of legs and arms, a sternum and portions of a pelvis, but no 



vertebrae, or ribs Many of them were broken, and they 



had no more apparent connection with each other than any heap 

 of bones among kitchen refuse would have ; and were mixed with 

 bones of moose and beaver and with ashes and remains of fires." 

 Subsequently two crania, with the lower jaws detached, were 

 found underneath the whole mass. This Mr. Putnam regards as 

 " the only evidence yet obtained of cannibalism among the shell- 

 heap people of New England." 2 



But in this instance, as well as in that of the skeleton stated 

 in the newspapers to have been found in a shell-heap in George- 

 town, Me., and to have been deposited in the cabinet of Bowdoin 

 College, the objection may be raised that possibly these are only 

 examples of intrusive burial. This is undoubtedly the case of 

 the skeleton found by Dr. Chapman in the enormous shell-heap 

 at Damariscotta and Newcastle, Me. 8 Of that I have here two 

 fragments for purposes of comparison, which show from their con- 

 dition and the entire absence of organic matter in them that 

 they are much older than the fragment of a femur from Hull's 

 Cove. 



To this the explanation of burial cannot apply ; and it seems 

 difficult to account for its presence among fragments of bones of 

 animals that had evidently served for man's food upon any other 

 theory than that of the prevalence of cannibalism among the 

 race, whose relics we find so abundantly in the shell-heaps of Mt. 

 Desert. 



Mr. S. H. Scudder read a paper on a second new type of car- 

 boniferous myriapods, which he named Protosyngnatha. He also 

 described a new form of Archipolypoda, remarkable for being 

 hairy. The papers will appear in the Memoirs. 



i Tenth Report of the Peabody Mus., p. 29. 



2 Eleventh do. p. 196. 



3 Proceed, of Sci. Assoc, of Urbana, Ohio, Vol. I, p. 76. 



