88 
HUMAN FEMALE SKELETON. 
stance resembling adipocere. All these bones appeared not to have 
been disturbed by the previous operations (whatever they were) that 
had removed the other parts of the skeleton. They were all of them 
stained superficially with a dark brick-red colour, and enveloped by a 
coating of a kind of ruddle, composed of red micaceous oxyde of iron, 
which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the 
distance of about half an inch around the surface of the bones. The 
body must have been entirely surrounded or covered over at the 
time of its interment with this red substance. Close to that part of 
the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn, I found laid together, 
and surrounded also by ruddle, about two handsfull of small shells 
of the nerita littoralis in a state of great decay, and falling to 
dust on the slightest pressure. At another part of the skeleton, viz. 
in contact with the ribs, I found forty or fifty fragments of small 
ivory rods nearly cylindrical, and varying in diameter from a quarter 
to three quarters of an inch, and from one to four inches in length. 
Their external surface was smooth in a few which were least de¬ 
cayed ; but the greater number had undergone the same degree of 
decomposition with the large fragments of tusk before mentioned; 
most of them were also split transversely by recent fracture in digging 
them out, so that there are no means of knowing what was their 
original length, as I found none in which both extremities were un¬ 
broken ; many of them also are split longitudinally by the separation 
of their laminae, which are evidently the laminae of the large tusk, 
from a portion of which they have been made. The surfaces exposed 
by this splitting, as well as the outer circumference where it was 
smooth, were covered with small clusters of minute and extremely 
