monic purposes until a comparatively recent date. My late distinguished friend Sir Daniel Wilson had indeed inferred this use of them in former times. In his Prehistoric Man (page 77 of the third edition) he tells us that "in the Grave Creek Mound, shell beads, such as constitute the wampum of forest tribes, amounted to between three and four thousand; and it seems singularly consistent with the partial civilization of the ancient mound builders to assume that in such deposits we have the relics of sepulchral records which constituted the scroll of fame of the illustrious dead, or copies of the national archives deposited with the great sachem to whose wisdom or prowess the safety of his people had been due." This inference seemed to me natural and reasonable; but more recent studies have induced me to question it. Many fragments of ancient cloth have been found in the mounds. The wampum belt was a woven structure of peculiar firmness, having a strong warp, with a duplicate woof, on which the beads were strongly attached. That no fragment of such a record has been found in our ancient mounds is surprising, if such numbers of them were buried as this presumption would lead us to suppose. Moreover, it is doubtful if the true wampum bead of the modern belt was in general use in prehistoric times. The shell beads of those times, if small, are of oval or ovoid shape, and, if large, are thick circular disks, resembling modern button molds, or still larger. The beads in modern belts are, as is well known, oblong tubes, about the fourth of an inch in length, shaped like pieces of a tobacco pipe cut off square at the ends. They are well suited to be woven together in a belt, but are otherwise not adapted either for ornament or for use as money. Mr. Holmes, in his valuable paper on Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans, published in the Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, remarks that "it is not known positively that beads of this particular shape were employed in pre-Columbian times; but it is certainly one of the earliest historical forms, and one which has been manufactured extensively by the Indians as well as by the whites. They may be found both in very old and in very recent graves, and have always formed an important part of the stock of the Indian trader."
The conclusion to which. I have been led by these and other evidences is that the use of wampum for conveying messages and preserving records was one of the improvements which accompanied the formation of the Iroquois confederation, and was most probably due to the genius of Hiawatha. Like all his other reforms, it merely brought into clear and useful shape a tendency toward which his people had been advancing. We can not doubt that in dealings between different native tribes there would have been frequent interchange of presents; and no presents would be
