repose is often rudely disturbed by the plow, and their human remains scattered over the fields with broker pottery and occasionally flint implements, stone axes, bone awls, and other relics. In many mounds of this class the first step taken in the inhumation of the corpse or corpses apparently was to scoop out from the soil a shallow, dish-like excavation in which the body or bodies—generally several together—were deposited, sitting up with limbs flexed upon the breast; they were then probably covered with bark or other perishable material, as no large stones are ever encountered in these graves, and then covered with earth. In some of them the bones of the dead, in extreme stages of decay, are in great confusion and were buried without definite arrangement or system, somewhat as was observed by Mr. Jefferson in a mound which be describes in his "Notes on Virginia," indicating that in those the skeletons of all members of the tribe who had died within a definite period of time had been collected from the tree-scaffolds, or brought from the tribal bone-house, as was witnessed by Bartram, and laid together in bundles and "covered with a great mount." The chalk-like softness of the bones in this class of mounds tends to confirm the first thought impression of high antiquity; but this fact alone cannot be relied on as satisfactory proof of their age when we consider that the covering of earth, perhaps not of great thickness at first, has been washed down and thinned by rains, leaving the animal remains but slightly protected from the decomposing agencies of water and frost. In one instance unquestionable evidence of comparatively recent origin was presented. In cutting down a roadway through one of the Prairie Creek ridges, since known as "Indian Hill," in the southwestern part of the county, a broad, low mound was removed and the skeletons of several individuals exposed. With the mingled mass of bones thrown out were found broken pottery, a few stone and bone implements, together with a quantity of glass beads and brass rings of European manufacture. Besting in what remained of the hand of one of the female skeletons was a beautiful pipe of polished serpentine in the perfect form of a squatting frog, of life size, but instead of the usual flat, carved base of the so-called 44 mound pipes," it had an aperture drilled to connect with the bowl for the insertion of a cane or wooden stem. Some time afterward, at the foot of this ridge, the plow turned up a single skeleton from a mound so small as to have escaped previous notice; and so far advanced in decay were the bones that it was with difficulty I succeeded in partially restoring, by the aid of glue and plaster, the skull and facial bones. The only relics found with this individual, which I judged to have been a female, were a stone frog, probably unfinished, larger than the natural maximum size, without perforations of any kind, and a pipe, representing the head of a fox, both rudely cut out of soft, coarse, yellow sandstone.
In all the interments I have heretofore mentioned the bodies of the dead, so far as I could ascertain, had been primarily placed upon the
