ing the Delaware Indians with far more skill in carving, even steatite, than they ever possessed. As tobacco-pipes have ever been the rarest and most costly of Indian relics, special attention was given to their manufacture, and very remarkable have been some of the specimens which have found their way into private cabinets and public museums. The history of some of these pipes is as intricate and fascinating as a novel, but want of space forbids its publication in this connection. Suffice it to say that the archæologist is only safe when he exhumes, in person, steatite pipes from graves, and finds other objects, either under like circumstances, or sees them plowed up on ancient village sites.
So determined, indeed, are some of these fabricators of frauds, that the following incident is worthy of being published, to show the ingenuity they exercise in their peculiar calling. To discover an Indian grave is, of course, a red-letter day for the archæologist. Now, Indian graves are manufactured to order, it would appear. At least the following recently occurred in New Jersey: A Philadelphia Flint Jack secured a half-decayed skeleton from a Potter's field in the vicinity, and placed it in a shallow excavation on the wasting bank of a creek in New Jersey, where Indian relics were frequently found. With it he placed a steatite tobacco-pipe of his own make, a steatite carving of an eagle's head, and beads; with these were thrown numbers of genuine arrow-heads and fragments of pottery. The earth was blackened with powdered charcoal. This "plant" was made in November, and, in the following March, during the prevalence of high waters and local freshets, he announced to an enthusiastic collector that he knew the location of an Indian grave, and offered to take him thither for fifty dollars, the money to be paid if the search proved successful, which of course it did. The cranium of that Philadelphia pauper passed through several craniologists' hands, and was gravely remarked upon as of unusual interest, as it was a marked dolichocephalic skull, whereas the Delaware Indians were brachycephalic!
A word, in conclusion, with reference to that much-vexed question, the contemporaneity of man and the mastodon in North America. Constantly objects are being brought to the attention of archæologists as having some bearing upon this question. As to whether the "elephant-pipes," of Iowa, or the "Lenapé-stone," of Pennsylvania, be genuine or not, no opinion is here expressed; but it is unquestionable that many of the remains of the mastodon found in New Jersey and New York are far more recent than some of the relics of man, and it is simply impossible that even so late a comer as the Indian should not have seen living mastodons on the Atlantic seaboard of this continent. Elephant-pipes and carvings should not be condemned, merely because of an impression still prevalent that the mastodon was a creature of an earlier geological epoch than the recent. This is but half the truth: he also shared the forests of the present with the fauna of historic times.
