Chapter C: W. Wilmerding (1)

THE PEABODY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY.

In respect to her facility and opportunities for advancing the cause of scientific knowledge, Harvard University certainly stands pre-eminent. She has a splendid astronomical observatory, and laboratories for chemistry and physics unexcelled elsewhere. Her botanical garden is the only one for instruction of any consequence in the Union, and its director, Asa Gray, is the chief of American botanists. In the Museum of Comparative Zoology, founded by Louis Agassiz and sustained by his son, Alexander Agassiz, Cambridge possesses the most productive, and in some respects the completest, museum of animal life in the United States, while it offers to the laboratory student of natural history advantages which he can find equalled nowhere else in the whole world. Last, and most modern, it has a museum of anthropology which in point of material is rivalled only by the National Museum at Washington, and in point of instructiveness is probably in advance of anything yet attained in the United States, despite its youth and small resources. This school and storehouse is the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, whose merits deserve a wider recognition than they have yet received.

When, in 1866, George Peabody, of philanthropic fame, was distributing his bequests among the educational institutions of the Eastern States, he was desirous of giving to Harvard a certain sum of money, but was puzzled as to its proper application. It was suggested to him to endow a department of archaeological research, and his proposition to that effect was considered by several friends of the university. The institution had peculiar needs at that time. Its finances generally were weak. The library and the zoological museum especially needed money, and the idea of a special department of prehistoric science was entirely new. It was decided, however, not to attempt to influence Mr. Peabody away from his own plan. President Walker saw that European minds were eagerly turning toward studies of primitive man, that the interest in the subject would grow from year to year, and that, as the first museum in the country devoted to this branch, it would have the best chance for securing collections rapidly going to destruction or distributed through private cabinets. More than all, the fittest man to take charge of it was at hand, in the person of Professor Jeffries Wyman. On the 3d of November, 1866, therefore, the arrangements were completed, and Mr. Peabody delivered to a board of trustees one hundred and fifty thousand dollars as an endowment. On the first of the following month Dr. Wyman began his curatorship.

As yet, of course, there was no museum. As a nucleus, Professor Wyman contributed some Indian implements and crania, the nooks and corners of the college were ransacked for stray skulls, stone axes and arrow-heads, pottery that had been ploughed up in the suburbs, and relics of colonial days, all of which, when brought together, served to fill a few empty cases in a room of Boylston Hall. Soon afterward, printed circulars were issued, and gifts began to flow in from the neighborhood, illustrating the life of the native races at and just before the time of the Pilgrims' landing. Several societies in Boston made permanent deposits of ethnological accumulations in the infant establishment; Mr. E. G. Squier, the Peruvian explorer, sent a Peruvian mummy of great value, with seventy-five crania, and promised larger gifts; the Smithsonian Institution gave a lot of duplicates, many of which were gathered by the great Wilkes Exploring Expedition; the Honorable Caleb Cushing forwarded antiquities gathered by his command during the Mexican war; and several famous collections were bought in Europe, illustrating the stone and bronze ages. Thus public interest was stimulated, and even at the end of the first year a very presentable sketch of a picture of the aboriginal people of the world was to be seen in that small room in Boylston Hall. It was accessible to any interested visitors, and began to receive attention from the scientific world, particularly after the first annual report appeared in January, 1868, containing an original essay by the curator and a full statement of the growing importance of the museum.

From this beginning the work went steadily on. Contributions from private and public sources came without stint. The fund of the museum available for explorations and the purchase of collections was judiciously expended year by year, and each annual report contained news of great interest to _savants_. The amount of material gathered speedily outgrew its original quarters, and a new story was added to Boylston Hall for the reception of the museum. At the end of seven years the catalogue showed over eight thousand entries, one entry in many cases covering a series of objects. Then a great calamity happened: Jeffries Wyman died.

Wyman had been the soul of the whole enterprise. At the founding of the museum he gave up those studies in anatomy and natural history which had made him famous and furnished him so sure a foundation as an anthropologist, in order to devote himself entirely to the new enterprise. His death occurred in September, 1874, closely following that of his great associate in Cambridge, Louis Agassiz.

Dr. Wyman had found an eager companion in his studies and excursions, during several years preceding his death, in Frederick W. Putnam, who was almost the only man in the neighborhood of Boston having either interest or capability (not to speak of opportunity) for such pursuits. A Salem lad, he was one of that group of students whom the elder Agassiz gathered round him when he began teaching at Harvard,--a group comprising Alpheus Hyatt, A. E. Verrill, J. A. Allen, Edward S. Morse, N. S. Shaler, A. S. Packard, Jr., and others now of worldwide reputation. Putnam was an all-round zoologist, but his specialty was fishes. Accident, nearly thirty years ago, turned his attention to the shell-heaps and the primitive implements of his home-neighborhood. The only man to whom he could go for guidance in studying these was Dr. Jeffries Wyman, at that time his instructor in comparative anatomy. Thus the two men were drawn more and more together, and when Wyman organized the new museum Putnam found much time for helping him, although at that time he was in charge of the Salem Museum, an editor of "The American Naturalist," a publisher, and the permanent secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a position which he still retains. It happened, consequently, that upon Dr. Wyman's decease Mr. Putnam was the only man suitable and available to become his successor, and he was quickly appointed to fill the vacancy.

Sixty thousand dollars of the original fund had been set aside by Peabody as a building-fund, but he decreed that this sum should be allowed to grow until it amounted to at least a hundred thousand dollars. This limit was attained in ten years, and in 1876 a building was begun for the accommodation of the museum. The college gave the ground,--a lot on Divinity Avenue, nearly opposite the old Divinity School, and close to the great structure occupied by the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Surrounded by green lawns and avenues of old trees, it is the pleasantest spot in all that charming city. The building was completed and entered in 1878. It is of brick, four stories in height, thoroughly fire-proof, simple in design, and tasteful in ornamentation. The present structure is only a fifth of what the whole building is designed ultimately to be. Two rooms yet remain to be opened to the public, but their fitting will not long be delayed. Its spacious doors open on Divinity Avenue, and there let us enter and glance at its treasures.

The entrance-hall is a square well in the centre of the building, accommodating the broad stairways and galleries, and affording room for many large objects, such as carved figures of stone and the models of the ruined houses and present pueblos of the village Indians of the Southwest. The walls are of finished brick.

On the left a large room is devoted to the office, to the reception of new specimens, and to the library, which is intended to include only works pertaining to this special study. On the right opens the room where naturally and properly begins our survey of the museum. Like the other apartments, it occupies the whole of one side of the building, and is about thirty-five by forty feet in dimensions. Its ceiling is twenty-two feet in height, but a broad gallery runs around all four sides, which adds almost as much exhibition-space as would a second story, without spoiling the open and well-lighted effect of a lofty room. Glass cases cover the walls above and below; upon the floor stand combined upright and table cases, resting upon long cabinets of interchangeable drawers, and the gallery-rail supports a line of narrow, flat cases. In each room is a fireplace, while all are well heated in winter and comfortably ventilated in summer, so that they are attractive to visitors.

This first room holds what is regarded by the curator as the most important series of objects ever brought together illustrative of that ancient people who built the mounds and the singular stone graves of the southern and central portions of the United States. The contents of each mound and grave are arranged by themselves, so that as one passes from case to case a picture of the human life of the past is presented as nearly perfect as can be constructed out of that part of the handiwork of the people which has escaped decay. Here can be seen and studied the many singular results of the potter's art, simple and complex in form and varied in style of ornament; carvings in stone, shell, and bone; implements and ornaments of stone, shell, bone, mica, clay, copper, and other substances; fragments of cloth and twine twisted from vegetable fibres, which have been preserved through charring. One case in this room is devoted to a collection of objects from caves in Kentucky and Tennessee, and contains many interesting fabrics, including a large piece of cloth woven from bark-fibre, shoes formed by braiding leaves of the cat-tail rush, and many other things kept for us in the dry air of the caves through uncounted centuries. In the gallery are grouped several collections from Mexico and Central America, which are especially rich in pottery.

In the room, on the second floor, over this one are stored the most ancient--most primitive--evidences of man's presence yet discovered in the Atlantic States,--evidences in the shape not only of chipped stones of his fashioning, but relics of his very frame, which incontestably extend the period of human occupation along our Atlantic coast back at least to the glacial era. I refer to the palaeolithic remains exhumed by Dr. C. C. Abbott from the terraces of river-drift in the valley of the Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. These deposits of pebbles and sand owe their origin to the continental glacier, whose front reached in solid mass almost to that locality; through them was worn the bed of the present river, and whatever is contained in their undisturbed mass can belong to no more recent date than the later days of the glacial period.

In these gravels near his home, when cut through by railway-building and the wearing of the river-bank, Dr. Abbott found his palaeoliths under such circumstances as left no doubt that they were quite as old as the formation of the bed itself. If you are inexperienced, and take in your hand one of these specimens by itself, it may seem to you simply a small, broken boulder or a fragment from some ledge; but the trained eye sees (what observation and experiment confirm) that fractures like those on these specimens are not such as are made by accident; and when a hundred specimens are displayed before you, all doubt as to their origin vanishes at a glance.

Some of these relics are deeply eroded by the weather, others much less so; some are pebbles that have required only a slight chipping to adapt them to their owner's need, others sharp-edged, elaborately flaked, "turtle-backed" weapons, similar in shape to much of the more modern and finished work in flint. With few exceptions, however, these are made of argillite, and in many cases they have lost the fineness of edge and angle by weathering and by attrition against the gravel in which they were rolled under glacial floods. They bear about the same relation in their roughness and shapelessness to the carefully-worked relics of the red Indian found on the surface, or in the accumulation of soil resulting from the decay of countless generations of forest and herbage which everywhere covers the old gravels, as the matchlock of the Pilgrim Fathers bears to our target-rifle. But they are of human origin, and assert the presence of humanity on the Atlantic coast of America at the close of the glacial period just as logically as the teeth in the green-sand argue sharks in the Cretaceous sea.

In these gravels are entombed scattered bones of the mastodon and other extinct mammals, but it was long before there appeared any relic of a human frame concerning which there could be no misapprehension. At last, quite recently, Dr. Abbott exhumed a tooth, worn and washed and sunken deep in the undisturbed drift,--a tooth of a contemporary of the mastodon and of one of the makers of the argillite implements that presupposed him; a man who never got beyond the palaeolithic stage,--the earliest rudiments of a culture far beneath any savagery of historic times in the Atlantic States. This silent witness of man's antiquity in America is among the treasures of this museum which are unique and priceless.

Who were these earliest men? and what has the museum to show similar to this from other parts of the world? are questions that naturally present themselves.

The only attempt at an answer to the first, with which I am acquainted, is suggested by Dr. Abbott in chapter xxxii. of his "Primitive Industry." After showing that during the last glacial epoch there were no climatic conditions southward of the actual ice-cap which would preclude the existence of men, since they would gradually become used to the slow change (as did so many surviving forms of animal and vegetable life), Dr. Abbott further clears the way by demonstrating that a strong line of demarcation exists between the remains of these people and the earliest traces of the "red Indian" race which Europeans found in possession of the body of the continent; this gap is not one of stratification, or, perhaps, of time, but is shown by a strong distinctness in the character of the worked stones forming the weapons and implements of each people in respect to both material and degree of perfection. Considering further the probability (from known evidence) that the Innuit (Eskimos) once occupied all the interior of the continent, together with the ascertained fact that on the Atlantic coast this people quite recently extended as far south as Cape Cod, and comparing the drift-implements with the exceeding rudeness of the stone implements possessed by the Eskimos when first seen by the whites, Dr. Abbott concludes that in the palaeolithic men we have the ancestors of the Innuit, who were driven to Arctic fastnesses by a new and more powerful race of invaders, who retained possession of the great mass of the continent, and whose descendants remain among us yet.

Now, to examine what the Old World has to show, if anything, similar to these rudiments of civilization, we must go to the opposite gallery, where we shall find, in the collections from the river-drift of England and Southern France, implements equally rude and old-looking, but made of flint instead of the inferior argillite with which the American autochthones contented themselves. Next, a little better on the whole than these, we shall see the relics of stone and bone--the latter not only whittled and broken, but often ornamentally carved--which came from caves in England and Southern Europe: some have been dug from beneath thick layers of stalagmite.

In Europe, then, palaeolithic man is separately considered as the River-drift man and the Cave man, the former believed to be much the older people, and known by the series of simplest patterns of stone implements found in the late Pleistocene river-beds. This River-drift man wandered over the greater part of Europe and Asia, leading a nomadic, feral life,--a hunter of very low order, like the modern Australian. The Cave man, on the contrary, seems to have been restricted in his range, which of itself is considered indicative of different age and race, and he was far in advance of the River-drift man in the variety and workmanship of his weapons and implements. Between both, or rather between the era of the latter and that of the men who made implements of polished stone and chipped flint, there is just such a broad distinction as obtains in the United States between the traces of palaeolithic and those of neolithic man.

The exact parallelism of the palaeolithic ages in the Eastern and Western hemispheres is still more or less disputed by anthropologists, but the general opinion seems to be this: If not two peoples, the River-drift men and the Cave men were certainly distinct sections of the same race which found their way into Europe at widely-separated times, the former having far the higher antiquity. It is believed by Dr. Boyd Dawkins (from whose celebrated cave-explorations in Great Britain has been derived a representative series of specimens for the museum) "that the River-drift man is as completely extinct at the present time as the woolly rhinoceros or the cave bear" which he fed upon; but all authors identify the men of the caves with the Eskimos, who there, as well as here, were forced to retreat by the pressure of a race of new-comers, superior in prowess and cultivation, whose traces we call _neolithic_.

In America, however (where the Atlantic coast, at least, does not afford caverns like those of Western Europe), the evidence all goes to show that palaeolithic men were in continuous possession of the region from the time when they first appeared until driven northward by the Indians, perhaps close upon the retreat of the great glacier. Returning to the Abbott collection, we shall find that it contains a large quantity of rude arrow-points, scrapers, and other forms of stone implements, some of which are much better than any of the "turtle-backs" or other palaeoliths from the lower gravels. These are found in the upper part of the drift, resting upon them and buried in the humus _above_: in the latter position they are, of course, more or less intermixed with the jasper and quartz relics of the modern Indian; but these are always made of argillite, are ruder, are much weather-worn, and never occur in the "open-air workshops" of the Indians, where quantities of flint-flakes and unfinished implements of jasper and quartz and of superior pattern are found lying together within a limited space. These argillite points and scrapers seem to belong to the palaeolithic man toward the end of his "age," manifesting a higher stage of culture reached by gradual improvement. It thus appears that while in Europe the rude-stone age was divided into two eras,--the River-drift and the Cave,--in Eastern America the aboriginal Eskimos held sway without interruption, and slowly bettered themselves through unnumbered centuries, until at last they were driven into icy exile by merciless conquerors, where, no doubt, they lost much of the advancement they had gained under more gracious conditions.

It will be observed that we were obliged to go to another part of the building in order to see what remains came from palaeolithic Europe and make our comparisons. This is in accordance with the plan of the museum, which arranges its treasures according to locality, and not according to shape, utility, relative age, degree of finish, or any other style of classification. All the objects found in a particular spot--taken from one grave or a single shell-heap, or, in wider range, belonging to the same geographical region--are kept together, no matter how dissimilar the associated articles may be. Arrangement on any other plan must necessarily become to a greater or less extent the exponent of the views of the one man or clique that controls the matter,--must involve a theory, and hence prove an obstacle to the student who seeks an unbiassed interpretation of the truth. If it does nothing more, it destroys the proper perspective. For example, one of the cases in this museum contains the contents of graves opened in an Indian cemetery on Santa Catalina Island, California, comprising native work, mortars and pots of stone,--for no native pottery occurs in the Californian graves,--beads, flint arrow-heads, etc., together with Spanish swords, stirrups, glass, and other articles of European manufacture. Separate these associated articles,--put the arrow-heads and stone pots with a vast number of other arrow-heads and stone pots,--and there would have been nothing to show, except at the expense of long study, that their date of use was no older than the Spanish invasion of California, or, in the case of the iron-ware, that it had belonged to Indians who yet clung to many of their native customs and manufactures. Shown together as they were collected, one perceives at a glance, and the brain appreciates in true perspective, the picture of life on Santa Catalina Island when those graves were dug, perhaps three centuries ago. The importance and value of this plan become more and more apparent as the student advances. In the publications of the museum, and elsewhere, the curator draws such conclusions as seem to him just from the materials he possesses; but he regards it as due to the public that the specimens themselves shall be exhibited as found, for the verification of his explanations and the investigation of those who come afterward. The first and foremost object of this museum--as it should be of every such institution--is the preservation of historical evidence; the second, the making it accessible in its original aspect for study. Ornamental display, when in the least degree inconsistent with scientific uses, has no place in any of the rooms. Nothing is put up because it is pretty; and if the history of any specimen is at all doubtful, it is kept out of sight, or else its label contains the proper cautions and queries.

Having scanned the relics of that far-away time which seems to have preceded the coming even of the red men into the United States, let us now see what the museum has to show of the arts and industries and amusements of those "Indians" who were found in possession when Europeans came to the New World.

The whole continent was inhabited by what was substantially the same race of men, divided into many language-stocks, subdivided into a still greater number of more or less cohesive tribes, and segregated into innumerable bands or villages. As they varied in dialect, organization, and environment, so were they greatly diversified in mental accomplishments and in outward customs and belongings. In subordinate points the characteristics of some divisions contrasted most pointedly with those of others; yet in certain cardinal aspects the whole population known in historic times from Tierra del Fuego to Eskimo-land was a unit. All were red-skinned Americans, "tarred with the same stick."[1] Moreover, it has been supposed that no race other than these red men has ever permanently occupied any portion of the United States between the departure of the palaeolithic Eskimos and the advent of Europeans,--the "Mound-Builders" not excepted.

To the prehistoric relics and the modern manufactures of these natives of America the Peabody Museum is chiefly devoted. The material preserved was obtained by its original collectors in a variety of ways. Much of it was gathered in farm-fields, where it had been turned up under the plough one piece at a time. All parts of the United States are represented, but some regions more plentifully than others, not only because one district may contain more persons interested in the matter, but because of the comparative scarcity of relics in some parts. One of the most densely populated districts in the whole Union in Indian life was the Atlantic slope of the Alleghanies; and the valleys of the fishing-rivers draining this slope have yielded an enormous quantity of examples of primitive wares, in the shape of architecture, pottery, weapons, tools, and ornaments of stone, shell, horn, and metal.

No one point, probably, has yielded more than the farm and immediate neighborhood of Dr. C. C. Abbott (heretofore referred to), at Trenton, New Jersey. This farm occupies a bluff and wide meadows facing the Delaware River. It was a location unexcelled in advantages for the mild-mannered, sunshine-loving Leni-Lenape. On the dry high ground they could build their lodges underneath great trees and find themselves upon the highway of travel, while the rich bottom-lands gave them never-exhausted planting-ground for their fields of maize. Better than all, they could overlook not only these fields, but far away down the river, and scan the approach of strangers, or watch the approach of the returning parties of hunters and fishermen, whose canoes came up the creeks to moorings at the very foot of the bluff. That this spot was long tenanted by an Indian village there seems ample proof. Almost every species of Indian handiwork, in stone, bone, and clay, known to the Atlantic coast has been found in and about this farm during the past ten years, and the total yield of a square mile in that locality has been nearly twenty-five thousand specimens. The great majority of these are now in the Peabody Museum, and they have furnished Dr. Abbott with the material for our most valuable book on the stone age in North America, entitled "Primitive Industry" (George A. Bates, Salem, 1881). They consist of varied series of axes, celts, hammers, bolas, knives, drills, scrapers, mortars and pestles, food-vessels and agricultural tools, fishing- and hunting-implements, spear- and arrow-points, club-heads, daggers, and other weapons, pipes and gaming-stones, ceremonial and ornamental objects,--all of stone,--besides a deal of pottery (chiefly in fragments), bone-work, and implements of copper, probably procured from other tribes.

Then there is another source of supply,--the shell-heaps. It was the custom of all the aborigines who lived anywhere near the sea to go to the shore in summer--the whole band or a group of families together--and camp there for weeks or months. Certain spots were resorted to annually, just as we go year after year to our favorite sea-side hotel. The time there was spent chiefly in catching and eating salt-water food, and, most of all, oysters and clams. Our "clam-bake" is a survival of their feasts on the beach. Of course under such circumstances extended heaps of castaway shells and fish-bones would accumulate, and become of dimensions which seem extraordinary only when we forget the lapse of time since they were begun. Many objects, some castaway, some lost, would become intermixed with the loose surface shells and be rapidly buried beyond further disturbance. Thus an exploration of these heaps of refuse might be expected to disclose, and really does show, a great variety of indestructible indications of the people around whose summer-lodges they were formed,--how they lived, what they fed upon, and the degree of skill and culture to which they had attained. Scores of these shell-heaps from Maine to Texas have been excavated by private persons or by the agency of the museum, and the yield of each, however miscellaneous, is accessible to us. We may make out from the bones a list of the animals upon which the makers fed, we may tell from the stone implements how the men hunted and fished, from the awls, needles, skin-dressers, etc., of bone and horn with what skill the women worked, and largely what materials they used, while the bits of baked clay mark their position in the ceramic scale,--a well-accepted standard of progress. Nor are these things mixed and confused when deposited in the museum. All from each shell-heap are kept together, and specimens may thus be compared with one another all along the coast-line; or the visitor may go to another room, where the great Rose collection from Denmark is displayed, and compare them with the relics from the shell-heaps (_Kjoekken-moedings_) and village-sites of Jutland, where a parallel life was lived and the monuments of savage homesteads line the Baltic beaches.

Similarly the sites of villages, towns, and cities have contributed largely to this collection of native antiquities. This is especially true of the Southwest, of Central America, and the Andean region, where the Aztec, the Maya, the Quichuas, the Aymaras, and other highly-organized nations held sway over wide regions. The greatest remains of these people lie in their architecture, the ruins of which astonish the traveller in Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru. Beyond fragments of carving, this, of course, is unavailable to a museum; but beside the images and fragments of representative ornament engraved in stone that have been brought from these ruins hang pictures of the entire building or city, so that the visitor's memory is refreshed, and he is enabled to place the relics in their proper relation to the whole.

In regard to the remarkable remains of the ancient "cliff-dwellers," who inhabited the canons along the south-western boundary of Colorado, and are considered the ancestors of the pueblo-building Indians whose terraced community-houses crown isolated buttes in the midst of the Arizona deserts and along the Rio Grande, a more effective mode of representation has been adopted. Upon several of the large hall-tables will be seen, under glass, models in plaster, colored with exactness, of those great houses and all their externals. These models were made by Messrs. Jackson and Holmes, of the United States Geological Survey, and are wonderfully truthful and instructive. A similar plan has been adopted in a few other cases to show savage architecture, and it has proved so effective and interesting that its use should be extended. The little model of a lacustrine village restored from the vestiges discovered in the Swiss lakes gives one a better notion of how the lake-dwellers really conducted their peaceful life and guarded themselves against their savage enemies of the forest and mountains than any amount of verbal description could do.

Beyond any one of these in importance as a source of mementos illustrating the life and art of the aborigines is the burial-place. Not only do well-recognized graves and cemeteries yield valuable material whenever explored, but a large part of that gathered in ploughed fields and on ancient town-sites was undoubtedly put there with the dead, or as a subsequent offering. Nothing is more fortunate for the science of archaeology than that the primitive Americans held the notions they did respecting death and the hereafter; for through these theories and the practices to which they gave rise an enormous amount of material has been preserved to us which otherwise would have been lost. It is not too much to say, I feel sure, that were all other traces of prehistoric America obliterated from our knowledge and possession save that which has been and may be derived from burial-places, we might still reconstruct nearly as complete a picture as can now be outlined.

The modes of disposal of the dead were various among the native races of America, and most of them may be matched by customs obtaining in the Eastern hemisphere or the Polynesian islands. The commonest method was some form of _inhumation_ in pits, graves, or holes in the ground, in stone graves or cysts, in mounds, beneath or in houses, or in caves. _Embalmment_, to a limited extent, was also practised, the corpse being wrapped in garments and made up into a bundle before being placed in the earth, a cave, charnel-house, or in a box mounted on a scaffold. _Surface-burial_ was in use in some districts, the corpse being placed in a pen, a hollow tree or log, or simply covered with loose earth, or bark, or rocks forming cairns. In several regions, at various times, _cremation_ was the rule, or at least a partial burning, the resulting bones and ashes being preserved by some tribes and scattered by others. _Aerial sepulture_ is the name given to another method, where the body was left in the cabin or wigwam, deposited on scaffolds or trees, in boxes or canoes, sometimes supported by posts, sometimes resting on the ground, placed in baskets perched on pinnacles of rock or hung to the branches of trees,--the last being the mode often adopted in the case of children. Lastly, some nations were accustomed to sink their dead beneath the water, or turn them adrift in canoes.

It is manifest that many of these practices could not be shown, from the nature of the case or the limits of space, except by pictures or models; but certain forms are represented in the great stocking-foot-shaped jars of coarse earthenware which served as coffins in the Nicaraguan region, in cinerary urns, in bones and skulls prepared to be kept as a sacred heirloom in the family, and in various descriptions of mummies, swathed and unswathed, chiefly from Peru and from caves in Mexico.

It has always been the habit of savage and semi-barbarous people, the world over, to bury with their dead or destroy at the grave more or less property which may or may not have belonged to the deceased persons. Among some of the American Indians this was carried to such an extent as utterly to impoverish all the relatives, who, in fact, seem to have accumulated wealth solely for the purpose of funereal display. By a few tribes, like the Natchez, human sacrifice--forcibly of slaves, voluntarily on the part of relatives--was enjoined whenever a prominent man died. In most nations, however, the sacrifices were limited to horses, dogs, and food-animals, ornaments and implements. It was believed that in the spirit-land to which the soul was going this property would be of service and these slaves and wives and various objects would be necessary in order that the dead man might be well fitted to pursue his immortal journey. Therefore, when a grave is opened or any form of burial-place is found by the archaeologist, he is almost sure to obtain a quantity of imperishable property,--weapons and ornaments of stone, bone, or metal, clay food-dishes, and the like,--the history of which is identified with that of the deceased and tells his story.

Two classes of burial-places have been the subject of special exploration and study by this museum, generally under the personal supervision of Professor Putnam, or of Mr. Lucien Carr, his assistant. One of these are the strange stone cysts of Tennessee, which occur in thousands in the Cumberland valley. They were from two to four feet below the surface, and were made of large slabs of stone, placed edgewise to form the sides and ends, on which other flat stones rested, forming the top of the grave. The bottoms of these cysts were sometimes lined with small stones, oftener with large potsherds, while in some instances the lining was probably of bark. While most of the cysts contained only a single body, two, three, and even five skeletons were found together in a few instances. Each grave held a greater or less quantity and variety of articles of native manufacture. Stone implements were rarer than is customary elsewhere, but those present were unusually fine. One of the skeletons had a stone arrow-head embedded in the spine. The pottery was more abundant, and consisted for the most part of well-made water-bottles and food-dishes, ornamented by incised lines or designs in color. Implements and ornaments of bone, stone, and shell, beads of terra-cotta and shell, small mollusks perforated for stringing, a few carved pipes of pottery, stone, etc., were also gathered and brought to Cambridge.

While cemeteries of this character are known to have extended over wide areas of lowland, stone graves were also built into low pyramids by placing one tier on top of another until from four to six had been laid. Each tier as completed--probably each grave as added--would be covered with earth, so that the whole formed a burial-mound fifty feet or more in diameter and eight or ten feet high (the bottom tier of graves being sunken), containing perhaps two hundred bodies. Not only within the cysts, but on and around the stones throughout the mound, were exhumed many relics, especially of pottery, showing that food and offerings had been laid upon the graves after they were closed. Nowhere was there the least indication of any contact with Europeans; and these cemeteries undoubtedly antedate the coming of the whites.

Among the most strikingly interesting discoveries made during the past few years is the burial-place in the Miami valley of Ohio, with its hundreds of singular pits dug in the hard clay below the leaf-mould in which the skeletons are found. This place was discovered by the members of the Madisonville Literary and Scientific Society, which, during three or four years, carried on an exploration under the personal direction of Dr. C. L. Metz. In 1880 the Peabody Museum was invited to join in the exploration, and Professor Putnam visited the locality soon afterward. The result of this co-operation is apparent in the large collections brought to the museum, where the contents of several of these strange pits are shown, as well as thousands of objects obtained from others or occurring with the skeletons in the leaf-mould. More than fifteen hundred pits and a thousand skeletons have now been uncovered and examined, several acres having been dug over, foot by foot, with painstaking completeness.

The pits, hollowed out of the underlying clay, are from two to seven feet in depth, and about four feet in diameter, hidden under a stratum of slowly-accumulated leaf-mould two feet thick. The majority of them, evidently, had been made previous to the burial of the bodies, though some were more recent than a few of the graves. The labor expended in digging them, and the peculiar character of their contents, render it not improbable that they were made in pursuance of some superstition or as part of a religious rite. This is an unsatisfactory generality, but more cannot yet be said with safety.

The average pit may be said to be filled with ashes in more or less well-defined layers. Near the top there may be a mixture of gravel, but underneath are found only fine gray ashes to the depth of one or two feet, in which often occur thin strata of charcoal or sand, while at the bottom burnt stones have often been found. Throughout the whole mass of ashes and sand, from top to bottom, are bones of fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals. The larger bones, such as those of the elk, deer, and bear, are broken; and all, apparently, are those of animals used for food. With the bones are always many shells of fresh-water mussels (_Unionidae_), the more massive of which have a large circular piece cut out near the centre. Fragments of pottery (rarely a whole vessel) also abound in each pit, quantities of implements made of bones and antlers, some forms of which are unlike anything known elsewhere, implements of chipped and polished stone, pipes carved in various shapes from stone, and objects of copper. In some pits several bushels of charred corn, which had been covered with bark matting, lay underneath the ashes; and in three instances human skeletons, or parts of skeletons, have been found in the pits,--a fact which seems to have no special significance.

On the hill-side near this great cemetery is to be seen what doubtless is the site of the permanent village of the people who made the ash-pits. This site is indicated by several earth-circles, the explorations of which, prosecuted by means of trenches, revealed in the centre, upon the hard clay, beneath about two feet of accumulated leaf-mould, fireplaces made of large stones, enclosing beds of ashes mingled with potsherds, flint-flakes, burnt bones, and perforated shells like those in the pits. The few things disclosed within the circles, and the abundance of household-utensils and refuse found in the ashes in the pits, suggest the possibility that on special occasions all the articles in the house, with ornaments, weapons, and other personal property, were partly destroyed by fire, gathered up with the ashes, and deposited in a pit dug for the purpose, while the great number of broken bones of various animals indicates that at such times feasts were held. A custom like this, which is quite consistent with the Indian character as manifested within the historic period, would account for the character of the contents of the pits, while their great number would indicate a long-continued occupation of the village.

Another phase of American archaeology remains to be considered. It is represented in the museum by a unique and most interesting series of specimens illustrating every detail with the greatest particularity and exactness, so that future students need lose no essential feature of the picture that lay before the original explorers and describers. In the northeastern part of Anderson township, near the Little Miami River, a group of earth-works exist which are among the most remarkable of all the thousands scattered throughout the Ohio valley. The owner gave to the museum the exclusive right of exploration, and the locality was mapped and investigated with that scientific care which alone can give the results entire credibility and value. Several of the thirteen mounds within one of the encircling walls contained basins or "altars" of burned clay, on two of which were literally thousands of objects of interest, embracing forms unlike anything known before, and exhibiting an unsuspected degree of cultivation in their makers,--cultivation which, it is fair to suppose, could have been arrived at only after a long period of peaceful and prosperous life in the community. I have space to mention only a few of these articles.

One altar contained about two bushels of ornaments made of stone, mica, shells, pearls, and the teeth of bears and other animals. Pearls were so plentiful, indeed, that as many as sixty thousand are in the possession of the museum. They seem to have been derived mainly, if not wholly, from the fresh-water mussels, and are of all shapes and sizes, out of which might be selected hundreds of perfect spheres, from the size of bird-shot to that of a cherry. What splendid necklaces must the latter have made! But, alas for the mercenary collector, all are ruined by fire,--a fact advantageous to science. Like nearly all the other objects, every pearl is perforated for suspension.

Articles of copper are none too common anywhere, and the collection of relics hammered from that native metal (which must have been obtained, through barter, from the tribes that mined it on Lake Superior, showing how extensive were the tradings of those days) has not only thrown much light on this branch of ancient art and craftsmanship in America generally, but added some peculiar forms to the museum's stock, chiefly in the line of pendent ornaments. One of the forms procured, represented by many specimens, was a spool-shaped ear-ring: something like it had been seen heretofore, but its purpose had been a mystery. Several of the ornaments of copper were covered with native silver, which had been hammered out into thin sheets and folded over the copper. A few were similarly covered with gold; and this is the first time this metal has been found in the mounds.

This would show that beauty was highly appreciated by the natives of the Little Miami valley, say, a thousand years ago. That they had a real regard for art, in advance of what has usually been accorded to the red men of the Northern States, is evident from other contents of these two altar-mounds. One altar contained several sheets of mica and thin plates of copper out of which had been cut some designs in scroll-work which for symmetry and elegance of curve merit a high place; also heads of animals and a grotesque human profile, which are of less worth, but notable in the dearth heretofore of things of that sort among _relicta_ from the mounds.

Far in advance of these, however, are the figurines of terra-cotta found on another altar. They had all been badly burnt, and many of them seemed to have been broken purposely before being placed upon the altar; but it has been found possible to unite many pieces, and enough remains to show at a glance the great importance these small and graceful human images will have in the study of early American art. They are from four to six inches in height, partly nude, and carefully moulded in regard to anatomy. The method of wearing the hair, the use of the button-like or spool-shaped ear-rings, the expression of the features, etc., are all in the highest degree instructive, while the whole effect is pleasing and artistic. Associated with them were two remarkable dishes carved from stone, in the shape of animals, showing an unusual degree of skill and taste.

A discovery in the same mounds which interests scientific men even more than this, or than anything else has done for a long time, is the finding in these mounds of quantities of meteoric iron. It was said by Hildreth ("Archaeologia Americana," i., 1820, page 163) that traces of iron-work had been found in a mound at Marietta, Ohio; but a re-examination of the specimens preserved at Worcester showed that they were of oxidized copper. The present discovery was therefore the first of its kind, and excited so much interest that chemists and mineralogists have been called into council with the archaeologists on the subject. This is the only kind of crude iron that is malleable; and that the people who built the mounds, or any other of the native races of the United States, had any knowledge of working iron-ore, yet remains to be shown. Some of the iron was in its original shape,--unworked nodules; a part in solid bars, etc.; but much of it had been treated like silver,--that is, hammered into sheets and used in thin plates as an ornamental covering for ear-rings and pendants. The mixture of nickel in this meteoric iron has not only preserved it, but caused a polished surface to gleam white, as though plated with silver, while tarnishing less easily than that metal. No doubt it was among the most highly prized of all the treasures of those old days, and nothing more precious than this could have been offered as a sacrifice, when, with lavish hand, pearls and silver and gold, weapons and tools, household furniture and products of the chase and the farm, were heaped upon the funeral pyre or contributed to the sacrificial flame.

In materials illustrating the life and crafts of the Indians during the last century and at present, this museum is not yet so well supplied as some others,--that at Washington, for example, which has been constituted the depository for the collections of scores of government expeditions into the West and North. Nevertheless, some things of great value and completeness in this way are already owned. Thus, in the South American room may be seen a series of specimens illustrating the whole operation of pottery-making among the Caribs of British Guiana. This was obtained several years ago by Professor H. A. Ward, who bought the entire stock of materials of a woman of that tribe whom he found at work. These consisted of a mass of clay ready for the potter, a number of vessels ready for the fire, others which had been burned, and several ornamented in colors. The gourd scrapers of several shapes, with which she smoothed the vessels, small, smooth stones used in polishing the raw colors, and other appurtenances, are included, together with toy vessels which the woman hastily pinched into shape and gave to her children as playthings to amuse them while she worked, the forms of which help to explain many similar articles found in ancient graves.

With like completeness, when Dr. E. Palmer was exploring for the museum the nitre-caves in Northern Mexico, anciently occupied as places of human sepulture, he sent with the "mummies" extracted from them a full series of such natural products of the vicinity as would enable the museum to exhibit the leaves, fibres, and other vegetable productions from which the cloth, baskets, and so forth were constructed by the people who placed their dead in the caves. Dr. Palmer also sent a full set of the rude apparatus by which the present Indians of Mexico make their cactus-cakes and syrup, from the thorn-tipped pole with which the prickly fruit is gathered to the great earthen colanders through which it is strained; also all the implements and utensils, the native still, etc., used in making _pulque_ and in preparing and weaving the fibre of the agave.

To go with greater detail into the treasures of this remarkable collection, whose value is so great, not only historically, but in an educational aspect (since it is readily accessible throughout and instructively presented), is forbidden by the limits of space; but the temptation to transgress is strong. I have said nothing, for example, of the great series of crania, now many times larger than when Wyman printed his papers in the early reports. A portion of this collection has more recently been described by Mr. Lucien Carr, whose voluntary services as an assistant at the museum have been of inestimable advantage to it. I have alluded only incidentally to the department of ceramics, which contains what is unquestionably the most important lot of material ever brought together for the investigation of the history and progress of the potter's art on the Western continent, from the "cord-marked" potsherds of the shell-heaps to the fanciful creations of Mexico and Peru.

It will be seen, then, to summarize briefly what this essay has said, that the trustees of the Peabody Museum have secured to the public a fire-proof building containing nearly four hundred thousand specimens illustrating human progress in the "childhood of the world;" and these have been placed under proper care and arranged in accordance with the demands of modern anthropological science. An instructive and attractive museum has been formed in this way, where, from time to time, free descriptive lectures are given by the curator, and whither students may go for special investigations with the assurance that, so far as America is concerned, they have access to the most important collections that have been brought together, while material for comparison with the antiquities of other parts of the globe is not wanting.

ERNEST INGERSOLL.

A NORTH-RIVER FERRY.

Did the reader ever realize how important a part the ferry and the ford have played in human affairs? How differently would history read without its Caesar crossing the Rubicon, its Xerxes crossing the Hellespont, and its Washington crossing the Delaware, its Paul Revere wherried across the Charles, and its Burr and Hamilton ferried over to Weehawken,--not to speak of the Hebrews going over Jordan, Jacob at the brook Jabbok, and John the Baptist at the fords of Bethabara! The ancients conceived of death under the figure of a ferry, and transmitted it to us with such vividness that we are still half pagan in our imagination. And I can easily believe that the battle of life may be essentially influenced by having a river to cross each day. The change from land to water, from narrow and stony streets to the wide, free outlook and uplook of a great river, the varied life of a crowded ferry-boat and of a busy harbor, the magnetic sympathies of a multitude let loose from toil and perforce at a stand-still for the time,--all this insures a transition of mind as well as transfer of body. I could appreciate the exclamation of an impulsive English girl while waiting one sultry day on a North-River pier, as she spread open her arms and rushed to the edge of the dock: "I feel as if I'd like to take a barth!" It was not the dirty scum under the piles that set her longing, but the general sense of refreshment which the broad and breezy river suggested to her imagination. Why should not those tides wash out some of the lines which a day in the city has left to deepen on a man's mind and brow?--especially if he pushes on to "sweet fields beyond the swelling flood" and enters "that dear hut," his home, under a vine-wreathed porch and along a gravel walk through a grassy lawn, and not down "area steps," or even through the ponderous and marble jaws of some city "palace." Therefore it is that the suburban hath the promise, above his mewed-up fellow-citizen, that his days shall be long in the land which the Lord God giveth him. And hence even the narrow-neckedness of land which distinguishes New York and pushes most of its population over the sides may have its compensations.