e, had accumulated after the body
was interred.

The spongy condition of these bones, in spite of the preservative
action of the ashes, is evidence of the fact frequently noted, that
with advancing age some change takes place which renders them less
resistant to destructive influences. Bones of children only a few
weeks old near this skeleton held their structure perfectly and were
easily secured.

Ten feet east from the pile of mussel shells, at a slightly lower
level, was nearly half a gallon of snail shells which had been boiled,
probably in soup. With them were a few pieces of bones.

Scattered irregularly through the ashes were many cavities which
somewhat resembled the "postholes" so common beneath the mounds in
Ohio. Some were barely an inch in diameter and a foot deep; from this
size they varied indefinitely to the largest, which was a little more
than 3 feet deep, reaching from about a foot below the undisturbed
layers just under the loose surface ashes to within about a foot of
the bottom. "About" is used advisedly, because at this point neither
the top nor the bottom of undisturbed material could be determined
with certainty. The lower 2 feet of this cavity was uniformly 7 inches
across; above this it slightly expanded, funnel-like, to a diameter of
8 inches at the top. The sides of this, as of all of them, large or
small, were as smooth and hard as if made with a posthole digger or a
boring tool. Strata of ashes, not changing their level or appearance
in the least, were continuous around the margin. But the holes were
not always straight; some of them changed direction as if due to a
crooked post or stick. Nearly all of them were rounded, even
hemispherical at top or bottom, or both, like the bottom of a pot.
They were not molds, for nothing could have been taken out of them
without changing or destroying its form. If they had contained any
solid substance like a post it must have stood unchanged until the
layers of ashes surrounded and covered it, and then must have so
completely disappeared as to leave no trace of its existence. They
were not formed by driving any object down, because in that case the
bottom would not have been so regularly rounded and the ashes around
the sides would have been more or less displaced. They were not due to
burrowing animals. In fact, if there be imagined a nearly cylindrical
mass of ice, straight or slightly crooked, with rounded ends, placed
upright and retaining its p