archæological value of the stone, made it the subject of a paper read before the Society, but since that time, although displayed at a county exhibition and twice shown at meetings of the Society above mentioned, this remarkable relic has remained unheard of.

This is the simple story of most great archæological discoveries; no "man of science" was at hand to analyze the condition of the surrounding soil, or satisfy himself that a fraud had not been committed, and a hundred questions now arise as to the finder of the stone, and its present owner, its long unrecognized importance, the whereabouts of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, etc., etc. The "modern scientist" will by no means be satisfied with such evidence as would be held sufficient in a court of law, and every fraud that has been perpetrated upon the lover of Indian relics adds to the necessity of carefully examining each detail of the discovery—nothing must be believed except upon the strongest evidence.

For a full discussion of this evidence the reader is referred to the appendix.

Several circumstances seem to concur in adding to the novelty of the discovery. In the first place the carving has been made upon one of the so-called "gorget stones," than which no class of Indian relics have been more puzzling to archæologists. Our museums are well-supplied with these mysterious perforated tablets of slate, generally resembling in size and shape the stone represented in fig. 1, and which are found in all parts of the United States. Ornaments, talismans, breastplates, or buttons, as we may choose to call them, they seem to have been the peculiar property of the North American Indian, without a counterpart, as far as the writer can learn, in the stone implements of other uncivilized races. They seem often to have been buried with the dead warrior and when discovered in Indian graves are generally close to the breast of the skeleton.[B] Gorgets are frequently scratched and scribbled upon, and ornamental zig-zags and cross-lines, like the faint scratches plainly to be seen on the Lenape stone crossing the carvings in all directions, are not uncommon on these stones, pipes, banner stones, and other Indian implements; but picture-writings proper, such as are commonly found painted upon buffalo robes, scratched upon birch bark, or carved upon the face of cliffs or large boulders, are exceedingly rare on small stones, and the tablet in question is the only known instance, the writer believes, of a pictured gorget. The carving, when compared with the larger and more conventional Muzzinabiks or rock-writings and birch-bark records of the Indians, seems to lack much of the symbolic obscurity common to these productions of the prophets and medicine men. It doubtless belongs to the less hieratic class of writings, known among the Algonkins as "Kekeewin," which dealt with things generally understood by the tribe.

It is unquestionably a picture of a combat between savages and the hairy mammoth—an encounter such as our imagination has not yet connected with the ancient forests of America, and drawn as well as an Indian who had seen the great monster could have drawn it. Most of the figures seem represented according to the common conventional method of the modern Indians, yet there is certainly a seeming picturesque relation between them of which we can find no example in the few ancient Indian pictographs which have been preserved to us. We can almost fancy a foreground, a distance, and a faint chiaro-oscuro.

The combat we might imagine takes place on the confines of a forest, and if we may judge from an upward inclination of the foreground on the right, at the base of a hillside. The monster, angry, and with erect tail, approaches the forest, in which, through the pine trunks, are seen the wigwams of an Indian village. In the sky overhead, and as if presiding over the event, are ranged the powers of heaven: forked lightning flashes through the tree-tops, and from between a planet and the crescent moon, beyond which we seem to see a constellation (represented by a series of crossed lines) and two stars, the sun's face looks down upon the scene. Four human forms confront the monster, the first holds in his right hand a bow from which the arrow just discharged is sticking in the side of the enraged beast, and in his left, if it is not planted in the ground, a long lance; a second warrior with head-dress of feathers stands farther to the right; and still farther, and near what may perhaps be called a rock, a third sits upon the ground apparently smoking a pipe. A fourth figure is easily distinguishable trampled under the fore feet of the mammoth.

The strong effect upon the fancy of the rude carving, as we gaze upon it, would be hard indeed to resist. Its stern naïveté and characteristic lack of æsthetic purpose bring upon the mind a haunting sense of the reality of the event it represents, and our sympathies seem genuinely awakened for the four human beings who have dared to confront the monster with their rude weapons of stone, yet whose destiny, like that of their huge antagonist, is overshadowed by the near presence of a supernatural power, seen in the great phenomena of nature which the artist has connected with the scene. Well might the appearance of the hairy mammoth have excited in the superstitious mind of the Indian hunter fancies more wild than those contained in the carving. Hardly more thrilling could have been the coming of the white men in ships, or the sound of their cannon, than the sight of one of these ungainly monsters in the shadows of a primeval forest, or the crash of his irresistible advance through the underbrush.

Beckendorff, a Russian engineer, who, in 1846, saw a carcass entire, "a black, horrible, giant-like mass," floating on one of the rivers of Siberia, declared that its appearance to that of a modern Indian elephant was as "that of a coarse ugly dray-horse to an Arab steed." He also noticed a ridge of stiff hair like a mane about a foot in length and extending above the shoulders and along the back.

Its size, like that of the modern elephant, must have varied considerably. The famous St. Petersburg skeleton measures but nine feet in height, while that in the Royal Museum of Natural History in Brussels reaches eleven feet, and the animal in the carving, judging from the relative size of the figures, would have been still larger than Beckendorff's carcass, which he declares measured thirteen feet in height. Geology tells us much of the aspect, epoch, habits, and range of the mammoth; that it had appeared later than the mastodon, and somewhere in the age known as the Pliocene; that there were several species—three at least—two of which were inhabitants of America; that in North America it ranged from Behring Strait to the Gulf of Mexico, and in Europe from the extremity of Eastern Siberia as far south as Rome and the Pyrenees; that it fed upon the branches of the fir, birch, poplar, willow, etc., and was probably migratory in its habits, wandering