1883.] 441 [Haynes. 



the bottom of the mound. The whole extent of the layers has 

 not been ascertained ; but an excavation six feet long by four 

 broad disclosed upwards of six hundred of these disks rudely 

 blocked out of a superior kind of grayish, striped flint. They are 

 on an average six inches long by four wide." But the most ex- 

 traordinary find of this character, which I have ever seen re- 

 corded, is the one "mentioned by Dr. Snyder as having been made 

 in Schuyler Co., Illinois, when thirty-five hundred of such im- 

 plements were unearthed without reaching the limits of the de- 

 posit. 1 



The only similar discovery I have ever heard of in New Eng- 

 land occurred about fifty years ago. Mr. Lincoln, of Dennysville 

 (near Eastport), Maine, while employed with an ox team in hauling 

 gravel from a pit, broke into an Indian grave in which were found 

 by the side of the skeleton a large number of flint implements of 

 various kinds. Many of them were unfortunately broken at the 

 time, but among them were several evidently intended for spades, 

 two of which are here for your examination. They were all of 

 the same rectangular shape as these, the largest measuring about 

 six inches long by four broad. 



It will be noticed that they are both colored with a red pig- 

 ment made out of haematite ore, with which the Indians were in 

 the habit of painting themselves. Such a use of red paint, made 

 from the same material, for personal decoration was equally com- 

 mon among the primitive races of the old world, and pieces of the 

 ore are often found in the European caves associated with stone 

 implements. In both hemispheres alike it was a funeral custom 

 to stain with it the bodies of the dead and the various objects 

 interred with them. The famous " fossil man," of Mentone, now 

 in the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, had his head thus colored, and 

 also the chaplet of shells with which it had been adorned. 2 Car- 

 ver, in his " Travels through North America," gave an account 

 of an Indian burial in which it was so employed ; and from this 

 narrative Schiller drew the allusion which occurs in his famous 

 " Indian Death-Dirge " which has been so admirably translated by 

 Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton : — 



u The paints that warriors love to use 

 Place here within his hand, 



i Smithsonian Report, 187fr, p. 437. 

 2 Riviere, Decouverte d' un squelette humain dans les grottes de Menton, p. 26. 



