stages of finish, from the rough angular sections two or more inches square, to the round polished complete disc two or three lines in thickness and from half an inch to an inch in diameter—which a short time ago was turned out of a low mound by the plow, with the skull and cervical vertebrae of a female skeleton. In another low mound on the bluffs the plow threw out, with a mass of chalky bones, a pint of small sea-shells (Marginella opicina), each pierced at the shoulder for the reception of a string to suspend them about the neck or hair. These beautiful little shells are often found in our mounds, and must have been in general use for personal adornment, oras a medium of exchange in the primitive system of commerce and trade. The valves of several species of fresh-water mollusks, especially of the Unios and Anodontas, were utilized as spoons and knives, and used for digging in sandy soil. Rarely we meet with ornaments cut from them. The hypothesis that our river mollusks constituted a part of the food-supply of the Illinois Indiana is not sustained by the presence on our streams of shell heaps of any extent. Fish and game were abundant enough for subsistence at all times, and muscles were in this latitude evidently not considered a luxury.
The long bones of the deer, turkey, &c., were here as elsewhere fashioned into awls, needles, fish hooks, and punches, and made to do service as handles for stone-tools and domestic utensils. The only ornament of bone (if it was an ornament) the county has yet produced is a broad, flat rib from the carapace of a very large snapping turtle, perforated at each end and ground smooth and polished all over.
Of objects carved in stone but few, besides the specimens I have specifically mentioned, have come to light in this county. Of pipes, a small "mound" pipe from Beardstown and the frog (of serpertine) are the only fine specimens known. In our collection are the fox-head pipe and several coarse, heavy affairs, without beauty or symmetry, which were undoubtedly used for smoking tobacco; and pipes made of clay and burnt are not uncommon. These latter objects were perhaps manufactured after the arts of the whites had been learned, as they are fashioned in the exact shape of common English clay pipes; at any rate, their resemblance to the imported article is so striking as to place their claim to high antiquity in serious doubt. As a rule, the objects carved in stone by the stone-age denizens of this region, exhibit such flagrant deficiency of taste or talent in design, and such low order of skill in execution, that we must conclude the few elaborate and finely-finished specimens now and then discovered here are importations from a distance, secured either by barter or reprisals in war, and were made by a people of higher intelligence and advancements in the arts. Of these exotic relics the porphyry "pestles," the "mound," and serpentine pipes, the perforated weapon of ribbon slate, a discoidal stone of milky quartz, and one of those beautiful perforated "ceremonial" stones of rosy, variegated, translucent quartz now in our collection, constitute all of that class known within the limits of the county. Agricultural flint implements, com-
