Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/308

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

contained papers of much value. At present octavo monographs by such writers as Mrs. Zelia Nuttall and Mr. A. S. Gatschet are also published by the museum. One important and original accomplishment of the museum remains to be mentioned. In Adams County, Ohio, on a high bluff at some distance from the nearest railroad town, is the Great Serpent Mound, in some respects the most remarkable monument of antiquity in America. It was in danger of destruction, Dr. C. C. Abbott. when Prof. Putnam made an appeal for funds for its purchase and preservation. Ladies of Boston responded to the appeal, the money needed was raised, and paid over to the museum, which made the purchase. The place has been pleasantly laid out as Serpent Mound Park, and the old monument itself has been carefully surveyed, restored, and put into a condition to withstand the destroying action of time and the elements. Prof. Putnam is Director of the Department of Ethnology of the Columbian Exposition, and in connection with its work has kept parties in the field excavating mounds and gathering material. His plan of display is a vast one, and a most instructive and interesting object lesson in American anthropology (ethnography, physical anthropology, archæology) is sure to be prepared.

New York is not so much a center of anthropological work as it should be. At the American Museum of Natural History there is much good material. Here one may see what is left in America of the Squier and Davis collection from the Ohio mounds, containing many specimens figured in the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley; the Squier collection from Peru, comprising a wonderfully fine lot of greenstone carvings; the collection of Colonel C. C. Jones, made chiefly in Georgia, numbering five thousand specimens, and the basis of his book, The Antiquities of the Southern Indians; a remarkable collection in European archæology, including series from the river gravels and caves of France, from the lake dwellings of Switzerland, and from the famous localities of Denmark; the Emmons collection from