From this beginning the work went steadily on. Contributions from private and public sources came without stint. The fund of the museum available for explorations and the purchase of collections was judiciously expended year by year, and each annual report contained news of great interest to savants. The amount of material gathered speedily outgrew its original quarters, and a new story was added to Boylston Hall for the reception of the museum. At the end of seven years the catalogue showed over eight thousand entries, one entry in many cases covering a series of objects. Then a great calamity happened: Jeffries Wyman died.

Wyman had been the soul of the whole enterprise. At the founding of the museum he gave up those studies in anatomy and natural history which had made him famous and furnished him so sure a foundation as an anthropologist, in order to devote himself entirely to the new enterprise. His death occurred in September, 1874, closely following that of his great associate in Cambridge, Louis Agassiz.

Dr. Wyman had found an eager companion in his studies and excursions, during several years preceding his death, in Frederick W. Putnam, who was almost the only man in the neighborhood of Boston having either interest or capability (not to speak of opportunity) for such pursuits. A Salem lad, he was one of that group of students whom the elder Agassiz gathered round him when he began teaching at Harvard,—a group comprising Alpheus Hyatt, A. E. Verrill, J. A. Allen, Edward S. Morse, N. S. Shaler, A. S. Packard, Jr., and others now of worldwide reputation. Putnam was an all-round zoologist, but his specialty was fishes. Accident, nearly thirty years ago, turned his attention to the shell-heaps and the primitive implements of his home-neighborhood. The only man to whom he could go for guidance in studying these was Dr. Jeffries Wyman, at that time his instructor in comparative anatomy. Thus the two men were drawn more and more together, and when Wyman organized the new museum Putnam found much time for helping him, although at that time he was in charge of the Salem Museum, an editor of "The American Naturalist," a publisher, and the permanent secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a position which he still retains. It happened, consequently, that upon Dr. Wyman's decease Mr. Putnam was the only man suitable and available to become his successor, and he was quickly appointed to fill the vacancy.

Sixty thousand dollars of the original fund had been set aside by Peabody as a building-fund, but he decreed that this sum should be allowed to grow until it amounted to at least a hundred thousand dollars. This limit was attained in ten years, and in 1876 a building was begun for the accommodation of the museum. The college gave the ground,—a lot on Divinity Avenue, nearly opposite the old Divinity School, and close to the great structure occupied by the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Surrounded by green lawns and avenues of old trees, it is the pleasantest spot in all that charming city. The building was completed and entered in 1878. It is of brick, four stories in height, thoroughly fire-proof, simple in design, and tasteful in ornamentation. The present structure is only a fifth of what the whole building is designed ultimately to be. Two rooms yet remain to be opened to the public, but their fitting will not long be delayed. Its spacious doors open on Divinity Avenue, and there let us enter and glance at its treasures.

The entrance-hall is a square well in the centre of the building, accommodating the broad stairways and galleries, and affording room for many large objects, such as carved figures of stone and the models of the ruined houses and present pueblos of the village Indians of the Southwest. The walls are of finished brick.

On the left a large room is devoted to the office, to the reception of new specimens, and to the library, which is intended to include only works pertaining to this special study. On the right opens the room where naturally and properly begins our survey of the museum. Like the other apartments, it occupies the whole of one side of the building, and is about thirty-five by forty feet in dimensions. Its ceiling is twenty-two feet in height, but a broad gallery runs around all four sides, which adds almost as much exhibition-space as would a second story, without spoiling the open and well-lighted effect of a lofty room. Glass cases cover the walls above and below; upon the floor stand combined upright and table cases, resting upon long cabinets of interchangeable drawers, and the gallery-rail supports a line of narrow, flat cases. In each room is a fireplace, while all are well heated in winter and comfortably ventilated in summer, so that they are attractive to visitors.

This first room holds what is regarded by the curator as the most important series of objects ever brought together illustrative of that ancient people who built the mounds and the singular stone graves of the southern and central portions of the United States. The contents of each mound and grave are arranged by themselves, so that as one passes from case to case a picture of the human life of the past is presented as nearly perfect as can be constructed out of that part of the handiwork of the people which has escaped decay. Here can be seen and studied the many singular results of the potter's art, simple and complex in form and varied in style of ornament; carvings in stone, shell, and bone; implements and ornaments of stone, shell, bone, mica, clay, copper, and other substances; fragments of cloth and twine twisted from vegetable fibres, which have been preserved through charring. One case in this room is devoted to a collection of objects from caves in Kentucky and Tennessee, and contains many interesting fabrics, including a large piece of cloth woven from bark-fibre, shoes formed by braiding leaves of the cat-tail rush, and many other things kept for us in the dry air of the caves through uncounted centuries. In the gallery are grouped several collections from Mexico and Central America, which are especially rich in pottery.

In the room, on the second floor, over this one are stored the most ancient—most primitive—evidences of man's presence yet discovered in the Atlantic States,—evidences in the shape not only of chipped stones of his fashioning, but relics of his very frame, which incontestably extend the period of human occupation along our Atlantic coast back at least to the glacial era. I refer to the palaeolithic remains exhumed by Dr. C. C. Abbott from the terraces of river-drift in the valley of the Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. These deposits of pebbles and sand owe their origin to the continental glacier, whose front reached in solid mass almost to that locality; through them was worn the bed of the present river, and whatever is contained in their undisturbed mass can belong to no more recent date than the later days of the glacial period.

In these gravels near his home, when cut through by railway-building and the wearing of the river-bank, Dr. Abbott found his palaeoliths under such circumstances as left no doubt that they were quite as old as the formation of the bed itself. If you are inexperienced, and take in your hand one of these specimens by itself, it may seem to you simply a small, broken boulder or a fragment from some ledge; but the trained eye sees (what observation and experiment confirm) that fractures like those on these specimens are not such as are made by accident; and when a hundred specimens are displayed before you, all doubt as to their origin vanishes at a glance.

Some of these relics are deeply eroded by the weather, others much less so; some are pebbles that have required only a slight chipping to adapt them to their owner's need, others sharp-edged, elaborately flaked, "turtle-backed" weapons, similar in shape to much of the more modern and finished work in flint. With few exceptions, however, these are made of argillite, and in many cases they have lost the fineness of edge and angle by weathering and by attrition against the gravel in which they were rolled under glacial floods. They bear about the same relation in their roughness and shapelessness to the carefully-worked relics of the red Indian found on the surface, or in the accumulation of soil resulting from the decay of countless generations of forest and herbage which everywhere covers the old gravels, as the matchlock of the Pilgrim Fathers bears to our target-rifle. But they are of human origin, and assert the presence of humanity on the Atlantic coast of America at the close of the glacial period just as logically as the teeth in the green-sand argue sharks in the Cretaceous sea.

In these gravels are entombed scattered bones of the mastodon and other extinct mammals, but it was long before there appeared any relic of a human frame concerning which there could be no misapprehension. At last, quite recently, Dr. Abbott exhumed a tooth, worn and washed and sunken deep in the undisturbed drift,—a tooth of a contemporary of the mastodon and of one of the makers of the argillite implements that presupposed him; a man who never got beyond the palaeolithic stage,—the earliest rudiments of a culture far beneath any savagery of historic times in the Atlantic States. This silent witness of man's antiquity in America is among the treasures of this museum which are unique and priceless.

Who were these earliest men? and what has the museum to show similar to this from other parts of the world? are questions that naturally present themselves.

The only attempt at an answer to the first, with which I am acquainted, is suggested by Dr. Abbott in chapter xxxii. of his "Primitive Industry." After showing that during the last glacial epoch there were no climatic conditions southward of the actual ice-cap which would preclude the existence of men, since they would gradually become used to the slow change (as did so many surviving forms of animal and vegetable life), Dr. Abbott further clears the way by demonstrating that a strong line of demarcation exists between the remains of these people and the earliest traces of the "red Indian" race which Europeans found in possession of the body of the continent; this gap is not one of stratification, or, perhaps, of time, but is shown by a strong distinctness in the character of the worked stones forming the weapons and implements of each people in respect to both material and degree of perfection. Considering further the probability (from known evidence) that the Innuit (Eskimos) once occupied all the interior of the continent, together with the ascertained fact that on the Atlantic coast this people quite recently extended as far south as Cape Cod, and comparing the drift-implements with the exceeding rudeness of the stone implements possessed by the Eskimos when first seen by the whites, Dr. Abbott concludes that in the palaeolithic men we have the ancestors of the Innuit, who were driven to Arctic fastnesses by a new and more powerful race of invaders, who retained possession of the great mass of the continent, and whose descendants remain among us yet.

Now, to examine what the Old World has to show, if anything, similar to these rudiments of civilization, we must go to the opposite gallery, where we shall find, in the collections from the river-drift of England and Southern France, implements equally rude and old-looking, but made of flint instead of the inferior argillite with which the American autochthones contented themselves. Next, a little better on the whole than these, we shall see the relics of stone and bone—the latter not only whittled and broken, but often ornamentally carved—which came from caves in England and Southern Europe: some have been dug from beneath thick layers of stalagmite.

In Europe, then, palaeolithic man is separately considered as the River-drift man and the Cave man, the former believed to be much the older people, and known by the series of simplest patterns of stone implements found in the late Pleistocene river-beds. This River-drift man wandered over the greater part of Europe and Asia, leading a nomadic, feral life,—a hunter of very low order, like the modern Australian. The Cave man, on the contrary, seems to have been restricted in his range, which of itself is considered indicative of different age and race, and he was far in advance of the River-drift man in the variety and workmanship of his weapons and implements. Between both, or rather between the era of the latter and that of the men who made implements of polished stone and chipped flint, there is just such a broad distinction as obtains in the United States between the traces of palaeolithic and those of neolithic man.

The exact parallelism of the palaeolithic ages in the Eastern and Western hemispheres is still more or less disputed by anthropologists, but the general opinion seems to be this: If not two peoples, the River-drift men and the Cave men were certainly distinct sections of the same race which found their way into Europe at widely-separated times, the former having far the higher antiquity. It is believed by Dr. Boyd Dawkins (from whose celebrated cave-explorations in Great Britain has been derived a representative series of specimens for the museum) "that the River-drift man is as completely extinct at the present time as the woolly rhinoceros or the cave bear" which he fed upon; but all authors identify the men of the caves with the Eskimos, who there, as well as here, were forced to retreat by the pressure of a race of new-comers, superior in prowess and cultivation, whose traces we call neolithic.

In America, however (where the Atlantic coast, at least, does not afford caverns like those of Western Europe), the evidence all goes to show that palaeolithic men were in continuous possession of the region from the time when they first appeared until driven northward by the Indians, perhaps close upon the retreat of the great glacier. Returning to the Abbott collection, we shall find that it contains a large quantity of rude arrow-points, scrapers, and other forms of stone implements, some of which are much better than any of the "turtle-backs" or other palaeoliths from the lower gravels. These are found in the upper part of the drift, resting upon them and buried in the humus above: in the latter position they are, of course, more or less intermixed with the jasper and quartz relics of the modern Indian; but these are always made of argillite, are ruder, are much weather-worn, and never occur in the "open-air workshops" of the Indians, where quantities of flint-flakes and unfinished implements of jasper and quartz and of superior pattern are found lying together within a limited space. These argillite points and scrapers seem to belong to the palaeolithic man toward the end of his "age," manifesting a higher stage of culture reached by gradual improvement. It thus appears that while in Europe the rude-stone age was divided into two eras,—the River-drift and the Cave,—in Eastern America the aboriginal Eskimos held sway without interruption, and slowly bettered themselves through unnumbered centuries, until at last they were driven into icy exile by merciless conquerors, where, no doubt, they lost much of the advancement they had gained under more gracious conditions.

It will be observed that we were obliged to go to another part of the building in order to see what remains came from palaeolithic Europe and make our comparisons. This is in accordance with the plan of the museum, which arranges its treasures according to locality, and not according to shape, utility, relative age, degree of finish, or any other style of classification. All the objects found in a particular spot—taken from one grave or a single shell-heap, or, in wider range, belonging to the same geographical region—are kept together, no matter how dissimilar the associated articles may be. Arrangement on any other plan must necessarily become to a greater or less extent the exponent of the views of the one man or clique that controls the matter,—must involve a theory, and hence prove an obstacle to the student who seeks an unbiassed interpretation of the truth. If it does nothing more, it destroys the proper perspective. For example, one of the cases in this museum contains the contents of graves opened in an Indian cemetery on Santa Catalina Island, California, comprising native work, mortars and pots of stone,—for no native pottery occurs in the Californian graves,—beads, flint arrow-heads, etc., together with Spanish swords, stirrups, glass, and other articles of European manufacture. Separate these associated articles,—put the arrow-heads and stone pots with a vast number of other arrow-heads and stone pots,—and there would have been nothing to show, except at the expense of long study, that their date of use was no older than the Spanish invasion of California, or, in the case of the iron-ware, that it had belonged to Indians who yet clung to many of their native customs and manufactures. Shown together as they were collected, one perceives at a glance, and the brain appreciates in true perspective, the picture of life on Santa Catalina Island when those graves were dug, perhaps three centuries ago. The importance and value of this plan become more and more apparent as the student advances. In the publications of the museum, and elsewhere, the curator draws such conclusions as seem to him just from the materials he possesses; but he regards it as due to the public that the specimens themselves shall be exhibited as found, for the verification of his explanations and the investigation of those who come afterward. The first and foremost object of this museum—as it should be of every such institution—is the preservation of historical evidence; the second, the making it accessible in its original aspect for study. Ornamental display, when in the least degree inconsistent with scientific uses, has no place in any of the rooms. Nothing is put up because it is pretty; and if the history of any specimen is at all doubtful, it is kept out of sight, or else its label contains the proper cautions and queries.

Having scanned the relics of that far-away time which seems to have preceded the coming even of the red men into the United States, let us now see what the museum has to show of the arts and industries and amusements of those "Indians" who were found in possession when Europeans came to the New World.

The whole continent was inhabited by what was substantially the same race of men, divided into many language-stocks, subdivided into a still greater number of more or less cohesive tribes, and segregated into innumerable bands or villages. As they varied in dialect, organization, and environment, so were they greatly diversified in mental accomplishments and in outward customs and belongings. In subordinate points the characteristics of some divisions contrasted most pointedly with those of others; yet in certain cardinal aspects the whole population known in historic times from Tierra del Fuego to Eskimo-land was a unit. All were red-skinned Americans, "tarred with the same stick."[1] Moreover, it has been supposed that no race other than these red men has ever permanently occupied any portion of the United States between the departure of the palaeolithic Eskimos and the advent of Europeans,—the "Mound-Builders" not excepted.

To the prehistoric relics and the modern manufactures of these natives of America the Peabody Museum is chiefly devoted. The material preserved was obtained by its original collectors in a variety of ways. Much of it was gathered in farm-fields, where it had been turned up under the plough one piece at a time. All parts of the United States are represented, but some regions more plentifully than others, not only because one district may contain more persons interested in the matter, but because of the comparative scarcity of relics in some parts. One of the most densely populated districts in the whole Union in Indian life was the Atlantic slope of the Alleghanies; and the valleys of the fishing-rivers draining this slope have yielded an enormous quantity of examples of primitive wares, in the shape of architecture, pottery, weapons, tools, and ornaments of stone, shell, horn, and metal.

No one point, probably, has yielded more than the farm and immediate neighborhood of Dr. C. C. Abbott (heretofore referred to), at Trenton, New Jersey. This farm occupies a bluff and wide meadows facing the Delaware River. It was a location unexcelled in advantages for the mild-mannered, sunshine-loving Leni-Lenape. On the dry high ground they could build their lodges underneath great trees and find themselves upon the highway of travel, while the rich bottom-lands gave them never-exhausted planting-ground for their fields of maize. Better than all, they could overlook not only these fields, but far away down the river, and scan the approach of strangers, or watch the approach of the returning parties of hunters and fishermen, whose canoes came up the creeks to moorings at the very foot of the bluff. That this spot was long tenanted by an Indian village there seems ample proof. Almost every species of Indian handiwork, in stone, bone, and clay, known to the Atlantic coast has been found in and about this farm during the past ten years, and the total yield of a square mile in that locality has been nearly twenty-five thousand specimens. The great majority of these are now in the Peabody Museum, and they have furnished Dr. Abbott with the material for our most valuable book on the stone age in North America, entitled "Primitive Industry" (George A. Bates, Salem, 1881). They consist of varied series of axes, celts, hammers, bolas, knives, drills, scrapers, mortars and pestles, food-vessels and agricultural tools, fishing- and hunting-implements, spear- and arrow-points, club-heads, daggers, and other weapons, pipes and gaming-stones, ceremonial and ornamental objects,—all of stone,—besides a deal of pottery (chiefly in fragments), bone-work, and implements of copper, probably procured from other tribes.

Then there is another source of supply,—the shell-heaps. It was the custom of all the aborigines who lived anywhere near the sea to go to the shore in summer—the whole band or a group of families together—and camp there for weeks or months. Certain spots were resorted to annually, just as we go year after year to our favorite sea-side hotel. The time there was spent chiefly in catching and eating salt-water food, and, most of all, oysters and clams. Our "clam-bake" is a survival of their feasts on the beach. Of course under such circumstances extended heaps of castaway shells and fish-bones would accumulate, and become of dimensions which seem extraordinary only when we forget the lapse of time since they were begun. Many objects, some castaway, some lost, would become intermixed with the loose surface shells and be rapidly buried beyond further disturbance. Thus an exploration of these heaps of refuse might be expected to disclose, and really does show, a great variety of indestructible indications of the people around whose summer-lodges they were formed,—how they lived, what they fed upon, and the degree of skill and culture to which they had attained. Scores of these shell-heaps from Maine to Texas have been excavated by private persons or by the agency of the museum, and the yield of each, however miscellaneous, is accessible to us. We may make out from the bones a list of the animals upon which the makers fed, we may tell from the stone implements how the men hunted and fished, from the awls, needles, skin-dressers, etc., of bone and horn with what skill the women worked, and largely what materials they used, while the bits of baked clay mark their position in the ceramic scale,—a well-accepted standard of progress. Nor are these things mixed and confused when deposited in the museum. All from each shell-heap are kept together, and specimens may thus be compared with one another all along the coast-line; or the visitor may go to another room, where the great Rose collection from Denmark is displayed, and compare them with the relics from the shell-heaps (Kjoekken-moedings) and village-sites of Jutland, where a parallel life was lived and the monuments of savage homesteads line the Baltic beaches.

Similarly the sites of villages, towns, and cities have contributed largely to this collection of native antiquities. This is especially true of the Southwest, of Central America, and the Andean region, where the Aztec, the Maya, the Quichuas, the Aymaras, and other highly-organized nations held sway over wide regions. The greatest remains of these people lie in their architecture, the ruins of which astonish the traveller in Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru. Beyond fragments of carving, this, of course, is unavailable to a museum; but beside the images and fragments of representative ornament engraved in stone that have been brought from these ruins hang pictures of the entire building or city, so that the visitor's memory is refreshed, and he is enabled to place the relics in their proper relation to the whole.

In regard to the remarkable remains of the ancient "cliff-dwellers," who inhabited the canons along the south-western boundary of Colorado, and are considered the ancestors of the pueblo-building Indians whose terraced community-houses crown isolated buttes in the midst of the Arizona deserts and along the Rio Grande, a more effective mode of representation has been adopted. Upon several of the large hall-tables will be seen, under glass, models in plaster, colored with exactness, of those great houses and all their externals. These models were made by Messrs. Jackson and Holmes, of the United States Geological Survey, and are wonderfully truthful and instructive. A similar plan has been adopted in a few other cases to show savage architecture, and it has proved so effective and interesting that its use should be extended. The little model of a lacustrine village restored from the vestiges discovered in the Swiss lakes gives one a better notion of how the lake-dwellers really conducted their peaceful life and guarded themselves against their savage enemies of the forest and mountains than any amount of verbal description could do.

Beyond any one of these in importance as a source of mementos illustrating the life and art of the aborigines is the burial-place. Not only do well-recognized graves and cemeteries yield valuable material whenever explored, but a large part of that gathered in ploughed fields and on ancient town-sites was undoubtedly put there with the dead, or as a subsequent offering. Nothing is more fortunate for the science of archaeology than that the primitive Americans held the notions they did respecting death and the hereafter; for through these theories and the practices to which they gave rise an enormous amount of material has been preserved to us which otherwise would have been lost. It is not too much to say, I feel sure, that were all other traces of prehistoric America obliterated from our knowledge and possession save that which has been and may be derived from burial-places, we might still reconstruct nearly as complete a picture as can now be outlined.

The modes of disposal of the dead were various among the native races of America, and most of them may be matched by customs obtaining in the Eastern hemisphere or the Polynesian islands. The commonest method was some form of inhumation in pits, graves, or holes in the ground, in stone graves or cysts, in mounds, beneath or in houses, or in caves. Embalmment, to a limited extent, was also practised, the corpse being wrapped in garments and made up into a bundle before being placed in the earth, a cave, charnel-house, or in a box mounted on a scaffold. Surface-burial was in use in some districts, the corpse being placed in a pen, a hollow tree or log, or simply covered with loose earth, or bark, or rocks forming cairns. In several regions, at various times, cremation was the rule, or at least a partial burning, the resulting bones and ashes being preserved by some tribes and scattered by others. Aerial sepulture is the name given to another method, where the body was left in the cabin or wigwam, deposited on scaffolds or trees, in boxes or canoes, sometimes supported by posts, sometimes resting on the ground, placed in baskets perched on pinnacles of rock or hung to the branches of trees,—the last being the mode often adopted in the case of children. Lastly, some nations were accustomed to sink their dead beneath the water, or turn them adrift in canoes.

It is manifest that many of these practices could not be shown, from the nature of the case or the limits of space, except by pictures or models; but certain forms are represented in the great stocking-foot-shaped jars of coarse earthenware which served as coffins in the Nicaraguan region, in cinerary urns, in bones and skulls prepared to be kept as a sacred heirloom in the family, and in various descriptions of mummies, swathed and unswathed, chiefly from Peru and from caves in Mexico.

It has always been the habit of savage and semi-barbarous people, the world over, to bury with their dead or destroy at the grave more or less property which may or may not have belonged to the deceased persons. Among some of the American Indians this was carried to such an extent as utterly to impoverish all the relatives, who, in fact, seem to have accumulated wealth solely for the purpose of funereal display. By a few tribes, like the Natchez, human sacrifice—forcibly of slaves, voluntarily on the part of relatives—was enjoined whenever a prominent man died. In most nations, however, the sacrifices were limited to horses, dogs, and food-animals, ornaments and implements. It was believed that in the spirit-land to which the soul was going this property would be of service and these slaves and wives and various objects would be necessary in order that the dead man might be well fitted to pursue his immortal journey. Therefore, when a grave is opened or any form of burial-place is found by the archaeologist, he is almost sure to obtain a quantity of imperishable property,—weapons and ornaments of stone, bone, or metal, clay food-dishes, and the like,—the history of which is identified with that of the deceased and tells his story.

Two classes of burial-places have been the subject of special exploration and study by this museum, generally under the personal supervision of Professor Putnam, or of Mr. Lucien Carr, his assistant. One of these are the strange stone cysts of Tennessee, which occur in thousands in the Cumberland valley. They were from two to four feet below the surface, and were made of large slabs of stone, placed edgewise to form the sides and ends, on which other flat stones rested, forming the top of the grave. The bottoms of these cysts were sometimes lined with small stones, oftener with large potsherds, while in some instances the lining was probably of bark. While most of the cysts contained only a single body, two, three, and even five skeletons were found together in a few instances. Each grave held a greater or less quantity and variety of articles of native manufacture. Stone implements were rarer than is customary elsewhere, but those present were unusually fine. One of the skeletons had a stone arrow-head embedded in the spine. The pottery was more abundant, and consisted for the most part of well-made water-bottles and food-dishes, ornamented by incised lines or designs in color. Implements and ornaments of bone, stone, and shell, beads of terra-cotta and shell, small mollusks perforated for stringing, a few carved pipes of pottery, stone, etc., were also gathered and brought to Cambridge.

While cemeteries of this character are known to have extended over wide areas of lowland, stone graves were also built into low pyramids by placing one tier on top of another until from four to six had been laid. Each tier as completed—probably each grave as added—would be covered with earth, so that the whole formed a burial-mound fifty feet or more in diameter and eight or ten feet high (the bottom tier of graves being sunken), containing perhaps two hundred bodies. Not only within the cysts, but on and around the stones throughout the mound, were exhumed many relics, especially of pottery, showing that food and offerings had been laid upon the graves after they were closed. Nowhere was there the least indication of any contact with Europeans; and these cemeteries undoubtedly antedate the coming of the whites.

Among the most strikingly interesting discoveries made during the past few years is the burial-place in the Miami valley of Ohio, with its hundreds of singular pits dug in the hard clay below the leaf-mould in which the skeletons are found. This place was discovered by the members of the Madisonville Literary and Scientific Society, which, during three or four years, carried on an exploration under the personal direction of Dr. C. L. Metz. In 1880 the Peabody Museum was invited to join in the exploration, and Professor Putnam visited the locality soon afterward. The result of this co-operation is apparent in the large collections brought to the museum, where the contents of several of these strange pits are shown, as well as thousands of objects obtained from others or occurring with the skeletons in the leaf-mould. More than fifteen hundred pits and a thousand skeletons have now been uncovered and examined, several acres having been dug over, foot by foot, with painstaking completeness.

The pits, hollowed out of the underlying clay, are from two to seven feet in depth, and about four feet in diameter, hidden under a stratum of slowly-accumulated leaf-mould two feet thick. The majority of them, evidently, had been made previous to the burial of the bodies, though some were more recent than a few of the graves. The labor expended in digging them, and the peculiar character of their contents, render it not improbable that they were made in pursuance of some superstition or as part of a religious rite. This is an unsatisfactory generality, but more cannot yet be said with safety.

The average pit may be said to be filled with ashes in more or less well-defined layers. Near the top there may be a mixture of gravel, but underneath are found only fine gray ashes to the depth of one or two feet, in which often occur thin strata of charcoal or sand, while at the bottom burnt stones have often been found. Throughout the whole mass of ashes and sand, from top to bottom, are bones of fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals. The larger bones, such as those of the elk, deer, and bear, are broken; and all, apparently, are those of animals used for food. With the bones are always many shells of fresh-water mussels (Unionidae), the more massive of which have a large circular piece cut out near the centre. Fragments of pottery (rarely a whole vessel) also abound in each pit, quantities of implements made of bones and antlers, some forms of which are unlike anything known elsewhere, implements of chipped and polished stone, pipes carved in various shapes from stone, and objects of copper. In some pits several bushels of charred corn, which had been covered with bark matting, lay underneath the ashes; and in three instances human skeletons, or parts of skeletons, have been found in the pits,—a fact which seems to have no special significance.

On the hill-side near this great cemetery is to be seen what doubtless is the site of the permanent village of the people who made the ash-pits. This site is indicated by several earth-circles, the explorations of which, prosecuted by means of trenches, revealed in the centre, upon the hard clay, beneath about two feet of accumulated leaf-mould, fireplaces made of large stones, enclosing beds of ashes mingled with potsherds, flint-flakes, burnt bones, and perforated shells like those in the pits. The few things disclosed within the circles, and the abundance of household-utensils and refuse found in the ashes in the pits, suggest the possibility that on special occasions all the articles in the house, with ornaments, weapons, and other personal property, were partly destroyed by fire, gathered up with the ashes, and deposited in a pit dug for the purpose, while the great number of broken bones of various animals indicates that at such times feasts were held. A custom like this, which is quite consistent with the Indian character as manifested within the historic period, would account for the character of the contents of the pits, while their great number would indicate a long-continued occupation of the village.

Another phase of American archaeology remains to be considered. It is represented in the museum by a unique and most interesting series of specimens illustrating every detail with the greatest particularity and exactness, so that future students need lose no essential feature of the picture that lay before the original explorers and describers. In the northeastern part of Anderson township, near the Little Miami River, a group of earth-works exist which are among the most remarkable of all the thousands scattered throughout the Ohio valley. The owner gave to the museum the exclusive right of exploration, and the locality was mapped and investigated with that scientific care which alone can give the results entire credibility and value. Several of the thirteen mounds within one of the encircling walls contained basins or "altars" of burned clay, on two of which were literally thousands of objects of interest, embracing forms unlike anything known before, and exhibiting an unsuspected degree of cultivation in their makers,—cultivation which, it is fair to suppose, could have been arrived at only after a long period of peaceful and prosperous life in the community. I have space to mention only a few of these articles.

One altar contained about two bushels of ornaments made of stone, mica, shells, pearls, and the teeth of bears and other animals. Pearls were so plentiful, indeed, that as many as sixty thousand are in the possession of the museum. They seem to have been derived mainly, if not wholly, from the fresh-water mussels, and are of all shapes and sizes, out of which might be selected hundreds of perfect spheres, from the size of bird-shot to that of a cherry. What splendid necklaces must the latter have made! But, alas for the mercenary collector, all are ruined by fire,—a fact advantageous to science. Like nearly all the other objects, every pearl is perforated for suspension.

Articles of copper are none too common anywhere, and the collection of relics hammered from that native metal (which must have been obtained, through barter, from the tribes that mined it on Lake Superior, showing how extensive were the tradings of those days) has not only thrown much light on this branch of ancient art and craftsmanship in America generally, but added some peculiar forms to the museum's stock, chiefly in the line of pendent ornaments. One of the forms procured, represented by many specimens, was a spool-shaped ear-ring: something like it had been seen heretofore, but its purpose had been a mystery. Several of the ornaments of copper were covered with native silver, which had been hammered out into thin sheets and folded over the copper. A few were similarly covered with gold; and this is the first time this metal has been found in the mounds.

This would show that beauty was highly appreciated by the natives of the Little Miami valley, say, a thousand years ago. That they had a real regard for art, in advance of what has usually been accorded to the red men of the Northern States, is evident from other contents of these two altar-mounds. One altar contained several sheets of mica and thin plates of copper out of which had been cut some designs in scroll-work which for symmetry and elegance of curve merit a high place; also heads of animals and a grotesque human profile, which are of less worth, but notable in the dearth heretofore of things of that sort among relicta from the mounds.

Far in advance of these, however, are the figurines of terra-cotta found on another altar. They had all been badly burnt, and many of them seemed to have been broken purposely before being placed upon the altar; but it has been found possible to unite many pieces, and enough remains to show at a glance the great importance these small and graceful human images will have in the study of early American art. They are from four to six inches in height, partly nude, and carefully moulded in regard to anatomy. The method of wearing the hair, the use of the button-like or spool-shaped ear-rings, the expression of the features, etc., are all in the highest degree instructive, while the whole effect is pleasing and artistic. Associated with them were two remarkable dishes carved from stone, in the shape of animals, showing an unusual degree of skill and taste.

A discovery in the same mounds which interests scientific men even more than this, or than anything else has done for a long time, is the finding in these mounds of quantities of meteoric iron. It was said by Hildreth ("Archaeologia Americana," i., 1820, page 163) that traces of iron-work had been found in a mound at Marietta, Ohio; but a re-examination of the specimens preserved at Worcester showed that they were of oxidized copper. The present discovery was therefore the first of its kind, and excited so much interest that chemists and mineralogists have been called into council with the archaeologists on the subject. This is the only kind of crude iron that is malleable; and that the people who built the mounds, or any other of the native races of the United States, had any knowledge of working iron-ore, yet remains to be shown. Some of the iron was in its original shape,—unworked nodules; a part in solid bars, etc.; but much of it had been treated like silver,—that is, hammered into sheets and used in thin plates as an ornamental covering for ear-rings and pendants. The mixture of nickel in this meteoric iron has not only preserved it, but caused a polished surface to gleam white, as though plated with silver, while tarnishing less easily than that metal. No doubt it was among the most highly prized of all the treasures of those old days, and nothing more precious than this could have been offered as a sacrifice, when, with lavish hand, pearls and silver and gold, weapons and tools, household furniture and products of the chase and the farm, were heaped upon the funeral pyre or contributed to the sacrificial flame.

In materials illustrating the life and crafts of the Indians during the last century and at present, this museum is not yet so well supplied as some others,—that at Washington, for example, which has been constituted the depository for the collections of scores of government expeditions into the West and North. Nevertheless, some things of great value and completeness in this way are already owned. Thus, in the South American room may be seen a series of specimens illustrating the whole operation of pottery-making among the Caribs of British Guiana. This was obtained several years ago by Professor H. A. Ward, who bought the entire stock of materials of a woman of that tribe whom he found at work. These consisted of a mass of clay ready for the potter, a number of vessels ready for the fire, others which had been burned, and several ornamented in colors. The gourd scrapers of several shapes, with which she smoothed the vessels, small, smooth stones used in polishing the raw colors, and other appurtenances, are included, together with toy vessels which the woman hastily pinched into shape and gave to her children as playthings to amuse them while she worked, the forms of which help to explain many similar articles found in ancient graves.

With like completeness, when Dr. E. Palmer was exploring for the museum the nitre-caves in Northern Mexico, anciently occupied as places of human sepulture, he sent with the "mummies" extracted from them a full series of such natural products of the vicinity as would enable the museum to exhibit the leaves, fibres, and other vegetable productions from which the cloth, baskets, and so forth were constructed by the people who placed their dead in the caves. Dr. Palmer also sent a full set of the rude apparatus by which the present Indians of Mexico make their cactus-cakes and syrup, from the thorn-tipped pole with which the prickly fruit is gathered to the great earthen colanders through which it is strained; also all the implements and utensils, the native still, etc., used in making pulque and in preparing and weaving the fibre of the agave.

To go with greater detail into the treasures of this remarkable collection, whose value is so great, not only historically, but in an educational aspect (since it is readily accessible throughout and instructively presented), is forbidden by the limits of space; but the temptation to transgress is strong. I have said nothing, for example, of the great series of crania, now many times larger than when Wyman printed his papers in the early reports. A portion of this collection has more recently been described by Mr. Lucien Carr, whose voluntary services as an assistant at the museum have been of inestimable advantage to it. I have alluded only incidentally to the department of ceramics, which contains what is unquestionably the most important lot of material ever brought together for the investigation of the history and progress of the potter's art on the Western continent, from the "cord-marked" potsherds of the shell-heaps to the fanciful creations of Mexico and Peru.

It will be seen, then, to summarize briefly what this essay has said, that the trustees of the Peabody Museum have secured to the public a fire-proof building containing nearly four hundred thousand specimens illustrating human progress in the "childhood of the world;" and these have been placed under proper care and arranged in accordance with the demands of modern anthropological science. An instructive and attractive museum has been formed in this way, where, from time to time, free descriptive lectures are given by the curator, and whither students may go for special investigations with the assurance that, so far as America is concerned, they have access to the most important collections that have been brought together, while material for comparison with the antiquities of other parts of the globe is not wanting.

ERNEST INGERSOLL.



A NORTH-RIVER FERRY.

Did the reader ever realize how important a part the ferry and the ford have played in human affairs? How differently would history read without its Caesar crossing the Rubicon, its Xerxes crossing the Hellespont, and its Washington crossing the Delaware, its Paul Revere wherried across the Charles, and its Burr and Hamilton ferried over to Weehawken,—not to speak of the Hebrews going over Jordan, Jacob at the brook Jabbok, and John the Baptist at the fords of Bethabara! The ancients conceived of death under the figure of a ferry, and transmitted it to us with such vividness that we are still half pagan in our imagination. And I can easily believe that the battle of life may be essentially influenced by having a river to cross each day. The change from land to water, from narrow and stony streets to the wide, free outlook and uplook of a great river, the varied life of a crowded ferry-boat and of a busy harbor, the magnetic sympathies of a multitude let loose from toil and perforce at a stand-still for the time,—all this insures a transition of mind as well as transfer of body. I could appreciate the exclamation of an impulsive English girl while waiting one sultry day on a North-River pier, as she spread open her arms and rushed to the edge of the dock: "I feel as if I'd like to take a barth!" It was not the dirty scum under the piles that set her longing, but the general sense of refreshment which the broad and breezy river suggested to her imagination. Why should not those tides wash out some of the lines which a day in the city has left to deepen on a man's mind and brow?—especially if he pushes on to "sweet fields beyond the swelling flood" and enters "that dear hut," his home, under a vine-wreathed porch and along a gravel walk through a grassy lawn, and not down "area steps," or even through the ponderous and marble jaws of some city "palace." Therefore it is that the suburban hath the promise, above his mewed-up fellow-citizen, that his days shall be long in the land which the Lord God giveth him. And hence even the narrow-neckedness of land which distinguishes New York and pushes most of its population over the sides may have its compensations.

The ferry makes itself felt long before one gets there. There is a sort of undertow in the city tides far up from the river-front. There is a greater tangle of travel as you approach the streets leading to the ferry. There is a perceptible assimilation of trade to the supposed demands of householders living out of town. The retail Mammon dethrones his proud wholesale rival. The sidewalk- or gutter-stand thrusts itself out in advance of the store. The peripatetic dealer in small wares, the newsboy, the apple-woman, the bootblack, and the mendicant marshal you the way. The whole vicinity acquires the look and stir of a bazaar. Baskets and paper parcels and travelling-bags are conspicuous and general. Perhaps you find yourself on the greasy edge of some huge market. The hacks accumulate like croton-bugs about a kitchen sink. You feel as if you were being sucked into some valve or vortex.

There is a test of character in the mode of going to the ferry. It is almost impossible not to be in a hurry, such is the swirl of the tide in which you find yourself. In my three years of almost daily transit I never ceased to revere the moral superiority of the admirable few who day after day could proceed with leisurely step and serene brow amid the heated, breathless, tugging, anxious multitude. It seemed to indicate a steadiness of nerve, a systematic habit, a wise and deliberate forecast, a self-control and self-confidence, and a belief in their watches, to which I never hope to attain this side of Old Charon's ferry itself. And yet somebody is nearly always late. Quite as likely, however, it is somebody who is too early,—because he really belongs to the next boat, and not to the one which is just leaving the dock as he tears into the ferry-house.

There is a good deal of condensed life and human nature to be found at a ferry by one who himself is in no hurry to cross. Take your stand just where you can see up the street and at the same time can command the whole interior. The waiting-room is deserted, except by some such lounger as yourself, or a passenger left by the last boat or "too previous" for the next. Well for you if you are sufficiently respectable to pass muster with the official whose duty it is to see that no one secures a day's lodging for two cents. There is a slow dribble of wayfarers, who seldom spend their time in the dismal and dingy waiting-room unless in very cold weather or to stand guard over their parcels which they have piled upon the seats. But all at once (especially if the next boat is to connect with some train on the other side) you observe a thickening of the living current far up the sidewalk, as when the gutters are swollen by the turning on of a hydrant. Down comes the hurrying mass, fretting at the manifold obstructions, its component parts struggling together and almost seeming to go over each other's heads. No time now for the small courtesies, or even charities, of life. The sturdy and malodorous beggar knows too well to run alongside with his "Help a poor boy; I'm a stranger in the city." And the man whose abridged and distorted legs are his stock in trade waits for the return-tide to enact his shrewd and pantomimic morality-play by a hurried shuffle up and down the pavement. The news-dealers—even the enterprising female who summons mercy to the aid of commerce by her absurdly lugubrious visage—have the paper and the change all ready to thrust into their customer's hand. The scene at the crossing of the street baffles description. Talk of the day of miracles being past! One who can watch this scene of scare and scamper and hair-breadth escape and not believe in a particular Providence must be incorrigibly heterodox.

The tide reaches the outer gate in a state of lively congestion. The person in front of you as you pass the toll-taker's booth is quite sure to have forgotten his ticket, and has to set down his parcels while he fumbles through all his pockets for it. You are sure you hear the inner gate closing. You dash through the ferry-house in the most undignified manner and unphilosophic mood—to find that you have five minutes to spare! And you take your stand beside your double, who has been all this time enjoying the little woes and absurdities of others,—including yourself.

The current has hardly slackened when the long gate begins to roll to. The last passenger has to edge himself through sideways, at some peril of his packages if not of himself, and at the tender mercy of the gate-keeper. Not the last would-be passenger, however; for a frantic form is seen to dart through the narrow and tortuous pass from the street and fling itself upon the closed barrier, appealing in eloquent indignation to the inexorable Cerberus, and then gazing, with face against the lattice, in imbecile despair at the receding boat. Simultaneous with the thud of the shutting gate is the clank of chains and the rattle of clamps and clogs, as of the striking off of fetters and handcuffs, an asthmatic jingle of a bell somewhere in the body of the boat, a slight slush of revolving paddle-wheels, and the great brute, as steady as a spirit-level and as powerful as a battering-ram, separates itself from the dock like the opening blade of a penknife. You recall the good old days when there were no cruelly-humane gates, and when this stage of the proceeding was marked by a wild leap of belated forms across the widening chasm, with now and then the souse of a miscalculating passenger into the yeasty brine. The scene is less picturesque and exciting now, but it is decidedly more satisfactory.

If you have a wise regard for your sanitary well-being, you will remain on deck, alike to saturate your lungs with torrents of oxygen and to let your weary eye and mind disport themselves like sea-gulls on the broad waters of the bay. What so fresh and cool and clean and still and sparkling and in perfect contrast to the stern and stony and resounding streets! As you lean over the taffrail, looking down into the clear, gliding wave, you can readily conceive why the poor unfortunates to whom life has become a stern and stony street are so often tempted to bury their sorrows in that great calm grave.

I never grow tired of watching the wake of the vessel. It revives some of my earliest impressions,—all the more if it be upon the venerable Wiehawken, or James Rumsey, or some other veteran of the Hoboken line, that used to convey me across the Hudson in my childish days. A ferry-boat then meant to me a country boy's visit to the great city, or, a little later, a city boy's holiday-excursion to the Elysian Fields. The long vibrations of the laboring boat bring back the old thrill of excited expectation. Even the discordant clank of the dock-gear is musical in memory's ear. And at any time of life there is a real fascination in watching the smooth and soapy track unrolling behind us, with its sharp division-line in the centre and its upturned depths of glossy green.

Every harbor has its characteristic features. The harbor of New York gives, first of all, the impression of amplitude. This means not only plenty of "elbow-room" upon the water, but of shore-room. The depots of a continent could be conveniently clustered here, and its fleets perform their tactics. There was nothing mean in Nature's mood when she planned the harbor of New York. And, after all that mellow time and consecrating tradition, the traveller's enthusiasm, the poet's fancy, and the painter's sleight have done for the beauties of the Bosphorus, the Bay of Naples, the harbor of Rhodes, and other "fine old ports" and "gems of the first water," I know of few more picturesque effects, whether of color or of grouping, than that which the North-River ferry-boat affords its passengers as midway in the stream they look up the broad palisaded river, or down the islanded bay, or across on either side at populous and steepled shores, on a golden October afternoon or in the breezy light of a winter morning. Here is, at least, none of the monotony of charm, like the stereotyped features of a placid and passionless beauty, which characterizes your standard harbor-scenes. New York may not be as classic or correct as her languishing rivals on the Hellespont or the blue waters of the Mediterranean, but she has the fascination arising from mobility of feature, endless variety of expression, and vivacity of mood. One who daily crosses the North River for a year will have seemed to belt the globe and voyaged through all zones. He will have danced upon the sparkling waves of the AEgean, groped through the fogs of Liverpool, sweltered in the sultry glare of Tunis, skirted the ice-clad shores of Scandinavia, sickened in the surges of the Channel, lain glassed in the watery mirror of the China Sea. And he will have observed striking features peculiar to this latitude of the Atlantic coast. I recall an atmospheric effect in springtime resembling a light pearl-colored mist, which had none of the qualities of a fog, but rather lent a weird transparency to the air. It gave the impression of sunlight faded or washed of its golden particles, or of a picture drawn on pearl. There was a statuesque stillness about the water, a near and yet a far look about the entire scene, which imparted a sense of unreality, almost of the supernatural.

I have spoken of fogs on the river. Their prevalence differs greatly in different years, also their density and darkness. The East River, from its narrowness, its crowded condition, and its rapid current, is far more obstructed by them; but the Bridge has changed all that. The fogs are to be charged to the serious discount of suburban life; still more the snow-storms, which are more deadening to sound and less capable of illumination. But the use of electric light and the vast capacities of the steam-whistle and fog-horn, not to speak of the more than Indian expertness to which a pilot's eye and ear can be trained, have reduced the inconvenience to a minimum. There is, however, to the imaginative traveller a compensating, albeit an awful, charm. It is like exploring some dim and echoing cave resounding with an organ-concert played by Titans on the very instruments of AEolus himself. The whole river makes one think of a vast shell, full of the boomings and sighings of an infinite sea.

But such experiences on the North River are rare, even in times of fog or snow. For the most part the climate of New York harbor is singularly clear, and its autumns are beginning to be recognized as a meteorological masterpiece. And its vast and varied commerce offers exhaustless entertainment for one who has an eye for the picturesque or a sympathetic imagination for the living freight.

As we look up and down the bay we realize how thoroughly steam has cleared the water of sails, sadly to the sacrifice of beauty. Here and there, however, there is a lingering sloop or schooner, engaged in river- or coasting-trade. Decidedly old-fashioned they look, like the white turban and neckerchief of our grandmothers. As they lie off there, nestling so confidingly in the arms of the great river-god, we seem to get a glimpse of a simpler and serener age, when life glided rather than pushed, waited on the heavenly influences and trusted not its own impulse. I know that the life of a deck-hand will not bear a very close examination for aesthetic purposes. But, as I watch these vessels drifting down through the golden afternoon, or cheerily beating up against the tide on a breezy morning, the man at the wheel is a very model of unconscious grace and almost effortless ascendency; and his shipmates, grouped about him like floating lotos-eaters, have ever a touch of the fine old Ulyssean vagrancy. Now and then there stands out before the breeze and the sunlight a great canvassed ship, like some living thing fluttering and glowing and careering under their thrilling touch. And sometimes a fleet of sailing-yachts, more beautiful and swift than sea-gulls, will hover on the horizon.

It is with something of sadness, if not of regret, that we turn our eyes from these lovely and now almost phantom forms to the monstrosities of steam navigation. I think we are passing through a sort of saurian epoch in this age of steam. When we have outgrown this clumsy, noisy, perilous agent, and have adjusted ourselves to electricity or some still more subtile and commodious force, we may be able to restore somewhat of the graces of form and motion. And we shall then look back upon the hideous and awkward craft of this day very much as we now gaze upon a reproduction of the misshapen and unwieldy monsters of the palaeozoic ages. The river swarms with ferry-boats. Was ever utility attained at so great a sacrifice of taste? Their model must have been a toad with a stick thrust through it (three of which, so impaled and hung up in the sun to dry, Luther recommended as the best cure for all manner of "pestilent humors"). At any rate, the difference between their aspect and that of the sail-boat is that of a beetle and a butterfly. The acme of ugliness is reached in the freight ferry-boats, floating fragments of railroad, whose cars look like the joints of a monstrous creeping worm.

No one, however, can complain of any want of variety in these steam-craft, whether in size or in shape, from the rather stately steamships to the little tug-boats that shoot to and fro like gnats upon the surface of a pool. I say rather stately, for the high and graceful hull of the steamer comes to a lame and impotent conclusion in its squat chimney, like a large-faced man with a mayhemed nose, and in its toy masts and rigging, like a stout woman with curl-papers or a thin wisp of ringlet. When two or three of these steamships are together down the harbor, their white volleys of smoke often present quite a lively picture of a naval engagement. The little puffing pilot-boats have a trick of getting in the way of us ferry-voyagers, like fussy custom-house officers among the newly-landed passengers from the ocean-ferries. There is generally a tug, perhaps with a slow convoy, to be waited for or circumnavigated ere the "slip" can be entered. And they run so close in-shore that the pilot has to be wary, and in some cases to emerge with a series of unearthly steam screeches, lest he step upon one of them with his great "horseshoe" of a ferry-boat. The steam-yacht is the most graceful as well as agile of the species, as certainly it ought to be when as much money is sometimes put into one as would buy a Raphael or build a Grecian temple. The steam-yacht has doubtless a thousand comforts for the owner above the sailing-yacht, but we, whose interest in them is an outside and aesthetic one, cannot help saying, "O Utility, what crimes are committed in thy name!"

There is no beauty, but a deal of attraction, in the great flotillas of linked barges and canal-boats which slowly pass like floating and vulgar Venices. If, as is often the case, they lie across the track, we shall have plenty of opportunity to observe at our leisure their still life. I have always thought that canal-life—by reason of its amphibiousness, its phenomenal slowness, its monotony amid endless change, its solitude amid busy and peopled scenes which it is always touching but never entering—must be a unique existence, a modus vivendi quite apart from other human experiences by land or sea. A distinct type of character and of habit cannot fail to be evolved, which it might be well for ingenious novelists at their wits' ends to study, even though it required a trial of patience and a tribulation of stomach and cuticle for a voyage or two. Dickens saw its possibilities, and made it an episode in Little Nell's wanderings, and I am rather surprised that he did not work the vein farther.

The river-barge is freighted for me with pleasant memories. Like Cleopatra's,

From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense.

There are not many of them now that carry passengers, but in my boyhood they were a common vehicle of travel on the Hudson, several of these shapeless and unwieldy tubs being lashed to the sides or dragged at the stern of a tow-boat. They are identified with summer vacations in the country, than which a boy's memory holds no more honeyed recollections. The hours before "turning in" (the very fact of an abnormal night and bed was a joy to the juvenile mind, despite the incessant and unearthly noises of the live-stock on board) were spent in wandering among the mountains of "produce," inhaling the savor of Orange County butter and baled hay and meal-bags, and listening to the plaintive bleat of comfortless calves and desolate sheep. As night drew on, I would select some snug little nook, where I could lie and dream as we glided along the still and starlit river, through the Highlands, perhaps, or the Palisades. The charm was mainly, of course, in the spell of youthful fancy and expectancy, which touched and transfigured the homely scene, as the moonlight touched and transfigured the silent river. But I associate it all with the barges, and shall ever see in those uncouth craft

Argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.

In summer the excursion-boats add picturesqueness and a festive air to the river, with their gay bunting and bands of music and salutes with bell or steam-whistle, and, above all, their eager throngs of Sunday-school children or the liberated denizens of foul and narrow streets. At times the shipping along the docks and over the bay will blossom with the flags and streamers of all nations, hung fore and aft and extending in fluttering lines down the rigging, imparting a gala aspect to the scene and perhaps thrilling one with patriotic or historic memories. Perhaps we are crossing at the moment when the great Sound-steamers are pushing out from their piers. We feel quite humiliated on our lonely ferry-boat as these leviathans of nautical architecture sweep past us with an imperious curve far out into the stream, and then move steadily and statelily down the middle of the river, like an "ugly duckling" of mammoth proportions. One never gets over the sensation of that sight, nor its impressions as a type of our century,—a vast floating hotel, carrying the population of a village and the luxurious appointments of a palace, gliding as smoothly and noiselessly as an Indian's canoe, and propelled by an internal force apparently as vital and secret as that which moves the Indian's arm.

Yonder comes an ocean-steamer, long, low, and black, with a tri-color flag at the stern, slowly and puffily tugged by a little pilot-boat. The decks literally swarm with figures in all sorts of outlandish garb,—gray and blue stuffs, long shaggy ulsters, Scotch caps and plaids, gay kerchiefs on the women's heads and necks. Some lounge, smoking or gibbering, over the taffrail, other groups sit picturesquely on their large rude boxes, but most of them are suggestively silent and statuesque. And well they may be, for it is the moment of fate to the poor emigrant as much as for Columbus when he approached the shore of a new world. A new world, indeed, in far more than the geographical sense; a new life, or at least a new attempt to live; old things passed away, and all things to be new—except himself. A great wave of homelessness in the wide world, and perhaps of sickness for the old home, sweeps over the poor exile's heart. All is so strange, and so sternly independent of their forlorn and insignificant selves. Perhaps they are being unladen from the ship, shunted down the gang-plank along with their chests, packed on a transfer-boat like so many imported cattle, only not with the care or tenderness with which a drove of Holsteins or Jerseys would be handled. A squad of emigrants, just landed on the wharf and waiting to be transferred to the emigrant-train for another week's voyage by land to the ends of the continent, is one of the most pathetic sights in this world, especially if they are foreign to our speech and dress and modes of life. How wistful and helpless and strayed they look!—a bit of still and stranded life in the sweep and roar of a world that must seem to them as wild and as soulless as the ocean they have just left. How unconsciously they group themselves in picturesque attitudes, which no artistic eye could improve upon! Their staves, their dangling bundles of coarse canvas or of tied-up handkerchiefs of various colors, their quaint and often grotesque attire, their silent posture and vigilant eyes, their sheep-like dependence on their guides, combined with a watch-dog solicitude for their miserable traps, their household groupings and varied ages, from the baby born on shipboard to the old grandfather come to lay his rheumatic bones in the soil of a strange land,—I have stood and watched it all many and many a time, ere I hurried on to my day's business or to my happy home; and the work has seemed more significant, and the home more sweet, for that sight. Surely one need cut only a little way into life here in order to touch its profoundest mysteries and its most far-reaching suggestions.

One who has known New York for a generation or two cannot fail to be struck with its changed appearance as seen from the ferry-boat. It used to lie as low and flat as a whale's back, with perhaps a harpoon sticking out here and there,—to wit, a steeple. The steam elevator has proved quite an Aladdin's Lamp in its magical feats of architecture, by developing a vertical in place of a lateral growth of buildings. The best building-lots are now in the air, and to be had without ground-rent. Troy had to raise its successive Iliums, Ilioses, and Trojas, at intervals of ages, and tear or burn each one down before erecting the next. But we propose to save the Schliemanns of the future a world of trouble by building our various New Yorks simultaneously, one on top of the other. Accordingly, the city is becoming crowded with towering and clumsy structures, especially on the elevated ridge which runs along Broadway from the City Hall to the Battery, giving it the appearance of an uncouth acropolis. All over the town manufactories and public buildings of colossal size stand, like megatheria, knee-deep in a jungle of houses. The campaniles of modern industry rise slim and tall into the air. The great buttresses and towers of the Brooklyn Bridge loom above the house-tops. Grain-elevators, which "take the wind out of the sails" of Noah's Ark, lie stranded on the docks. The poetic and picturesque "forest of masts" has fallen before the march of progress and the axe of steam almost as thoroughly as the primeval woods. The low and open piers have been enclosed, some of them with considerable architectural effect, giving a trim and bandbox look to the river-side.

The transformation is even more marked on the adjacent shores. As I remember Jersey City and Hoboken in my boyhood, they were only small clusters of buildings, with a ferry-house at the water's edge. Now they have crept along from the Palisades to the Kill van Kull, overflowed the Bergen Hills, reared giant structures which rival New York's in monstrosity, and extended their railroad-wharves and steamship-piers over the Arcadian haunts of the Elysian Fields and the primitive meadows of Communipaw and Paulus Hook. And on the East River Brooklyn, joined to New York by its Siamese ligament of the Bridge, seems the bigger twin of the two. The contrast at night is still more striking. The river and the town are brilliant with electric lights, where formerly twinkling lamps or gas-lights made darkness visible. These have the effect of stars of the first magnitude; and the great Bridge, seen on a dark night from the South Ferry, with its lights at regular intervals, suggests that Orion must have slipped his belt.

Crossing the ferry by night was always a favorite experience with me. In sultry weather one can nearly always get a whiff of freshened air, perhaps from the sea; and the quiet is not less reviving to the heated brain. Nowhere does the night seem more "stilly," or the sense of seclusion more profound, than in the middle of the broad bay on a midsummer night before or after the theatre-goers have crossed. The cities, veiled in moonlight or dim in the star-light, seem to be breathing peacefully in giant slumber. The prosaic features of the scene are hidden, the ragged outlines softened, and the smoke and din indistinguishable. It seems hardly possible that these dream-like masses, with their sparkling lights, like reversed heavens, are the rude, restless, discordant gehennas which they sometimes seem to us by day. And yet I realize the awfulness and vastness of these great living creatures far more than in the belittling and disillusionizing daylight. The anchored or passing vessels only add to the sense of seclusion,—the former with a solitary lantern at the stern, the latter perhaps a galaxy of many-colored lights. On a dark night it has the effect of a discharge of Roman candles arrested in mid-career. The other ferry-boats have a comical appearance as they whirl and whiz past us. If in the daytime they are deplorably like pumpkins with a stick thrust through them, at night they remind us of grotesque lanterns made out of those same pumpkins with illuminated slits and slashes.

I find no small entertainment and suggestion in watching the manoeuvres of the skilful pilots. A novice might hastily conclude that it was a simple matter to steer a boat from one side of the river to another. But let him try, and see where he will bring up. The process is as nice a one and as scientific as a game of billiards. The exact stage of the tide and volume of the current, the velocity and direction of the wind, the ice on the river, the approaching or anchored vessels, and all of them in their mutual relations, have to be calculated with mathematical precision, especially in entering the narrow slip: so that the directest way is often the longest way around. Is there not here an object-lesson for those who would live wisely in this narrow transit which we call life? Keep your eye upon the one point to which you know the higher powers call you; but do not think that you are going to march straight there by force of will, or straight there at all. You are in a world full of cross-purposes and counter-currents and side-winds, of accumulated conservatisms and masses of mere inertia and oppositions which straddle or shoulder themselves across your path. You will probably wreck your undertakings, and will certainly waste your strength in needless collisions and shovings aside, unless you take all these things into account. The capacity to do this is wisdom, as distinct from knowledge or right intentions, in any sphere of life. Herein is practical statesmanship, effective reform, everything which has to do with human wills and the course of this world.

But it is not always practicable, even to the most stalwart and seasoned passenger, to spend his time on the open deck. To stand out on the front (one can hardly call it a prow, where the periphery is that of an average wash-tub) or at the stern is to be drowned by rain or sawn asunder by icy winds or broiled like an oyster, and to cower under the upper deck is to get a lively sense of the Cave of the Winds. One with a healthy sense of smell and an instinct for oxygen may well shrink from entering the cabin, and prefer the perils and discomforts of too much atmosphere to those of a depleted and poisoned one. David may have been wise in choosing to be punished for his sins by pestilence rather than by famine or the sword, but he put it on very doubtful ground when he thought he was thereby falling into "the hand of the Lord" in some special manner. For I am confident that bad air is the devil, and that it is this "power of the air" of which he is "prince." And he has no more impregnable stronghold than the cabin of a ferry-boat in winter. In the cars one can brave public opinion and elude the brakeman's eye so as to open something in his "Black Hole." But the cabin windows are hermetically sealed and the doors jealously guarded by an unsleeping dragon. On some of these boats they have an ingenious method of intensifying the sickening odor by anointing the floors with a rancid oil, which affords the tender stomach all the advantages of the famous crossing of the English Channel.

The entire code of the cabin is still to be rescued from the civilization of the cave-dwellers. The essence of politeness has been shown to be self-sacrifice in small things. The average American is naturally as unselfish a being as dwells upon the planet, but he often appears to disadvantage beside far meaner races by reason of an insane haste which tramples politeness under its feet. "After you, sir,"—a phrase which contains in a nutshell the very kernel of all courtesy,—puts the thing in a shape which is almost a physical impossibility to the American temperament. Our fellow-citizen will go ahead of you with the utmost gallantry, though it be to storm a Malakoff or grapple with a mad dog; but to stand aside and let you get on or off a ferry-boat before him is a strain upon his manners enough to dislocate their every limb. Well, remembering that the passive mood comes after the active in grammatical sequence, we will not despair of a development of the passive virtues even in the "go-ahead" American. And then the law of the cabin will no longer be mob-law, nor its motto, "Every man for himself, and —— take the ladies."

It is really ridiculous to see the uneasiness and prematureness of most persons as the boat begins to approach the shore. Though conscious that it will not bring the boat and the dock any nearer together, there is a hunger of the eye to seize the latter from afar. Sometimes the movement of an asphyxiated passenger for the door, or the momentary stoppage of the boat in mid-stream, will bring half the cabin to its feet. It is the same impulse which leads passengers, when waiting in the ferry-house, to glue their faces to the gate for five minutes before the boat arrives, which throngs the platforms and aisles of a car long before the depot is entered, which in church varies the closing hymn with an overcoat drill and causes the benediction to be pronounced amid a rattling discharge of hymn-books into the book-racks.

Having entered the cabin, it is always an interesting question on which side we shall sit,—not to say at which end of the boat. I think that temperament has much to do with the decision of these questions. And it might be well for some psychologist and sociologist to investigate why it is that certain persons will instinctively select the rear of the cabin and others advance to the front; also why some will invariably take their seats on the outer and others on the inner side of the cabin. This being with myself not a matter of instinct but of reason, perhaps my experience is of little value, but I freely and confidentially offer it in the interests of science. I choose the inner row of seats for the following reasons: first, they are warmer in winter by reason of the steam-pipes which run underneath them, and cooler in summer by being more directly in the draught from the open doors; secondly, because the boat is steadier there, and one can read one's paper, if so inclined, with less painful adjustment of the eyes to the shaking type; but chiefly because in that position one has before one the panorama of the river, which is the next best thing to being out on deck. One of the mysteries of human nature is that so large a proportion of ferry-passengers appear to take no more notice of the glorious scenes through which they pass twice a day than if it were a tunnel. They will hurry into the cabin in all weathers, seat themselves with their backs to the river, and spend the voyage buried in the newspaper or gazing into vacancy. They do not seem even to appreciate the study of life afforded by their fellow-passengers. I am sure Dickens would have revelled in the opportunity and found no end of Quilps and Chadbands, Swivellers and Turveydrops, Little Nells and Mrs. Nicklebys, Pickwicks and Artful Dodgers. I have found splendid models for almost every type of civilization and not a few types of barbarism. And the eccentricities of dress are hardly less noteworthy.

One learns to enter heartily into the joys and sorrows of the groups, and even of the individuals, whom he thus watches perhaps from day to day. He comes to be a mind-reader, and works out many a little life-story, as did the ingenious Silas Wegg concerning the people who passed his corner or lived in the houses of the neighborhood. Among the more familiar types are college-students cramming for the day's recitation, giggling school-girls, dapper clerks, pert messenger-boys improving the time by reading a blood-and-thunder story-paper in the very smallest of type, business-men, all nerve in the morning, and in the afternoon chatting affably or half asleep, ladies keen for a shopping-"meet" on Fourteenth Street, housewives with market-baskets, and workingmen with tin pails. Each hour of the day develops its own tide and type of travel, beginning with the lowest class of laborer and ending with the belated reveller. There is a still hour in the morning, awhile before noon, when the idlers and the dissipated begin to dribble into or out of the city, and studies of the odd and the sad alike abound for the Hogarthian pencil and imagination.

The "basket brigade" constitutes a large and regular detachment of the trans-Hudson army. Pleasant it is (I can hear the parody-fiend murmur), when things are green and price of meat is low, to move amid the market-scene, where gourmands stout and housewives lean with baskets come and go. Tempting too, alike to the dainty and the thrifty. Like Robinet in the "Evenings at Home," it adds much to the relish of one's little supper to have selected it one's self out of a whole marketful and to inhale its imaginary savors all the way home. Then, it is so nice to surprise the wife with the earliest of the season, or to pour out upon the table a dozen golden oranges, or to bring a little light into the invalid's eye by a basket of grapes or a fragrant bunch of flowers, or to delight Tiny Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob "know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket, as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk of travel; and yet out of the cover will still protrude the legs of unadjustable "broilers" and the green fringes of garden-stuff, and all this not counting in the oyster-pail, or the great watermelon which has to be carried separately by its wooden handle. The epicurean prospect of the Sunday dinner reflected in the restful face as well as materialized in the basket can hardly fail to elicit a gentle thought from the sternest Sabbatarian's heart.

With the excursion-season comes another phase of our little idyllic studies, as we watch the groups and couples intent upon a picnic at the sea-side or among the Jersey villages. Here is a representative family party which I followed with my eyes, and still farther with my imagination, on their way to Coney Island on a fine, fresh summer morning. There was the grandma, a bright-eyed, beaming old lady, beginning to bend somewhat with years, but as pleased with the day's outing as any of them. There was the mother, sharing her responsibility with the neat and pretty young-lady daughter. There was a youth, somewhat of the Abel Garland type, who might have been the young lady's brother, but who was a happy man even if he was not. There was a small boy; and who need be told what a day that was for him? Lastly, there were two charming little ringleted girls, who walked hand in hand in the prettiest way, with eyes that fairly danced and feet that could hardly help doing so. There was no baby to utter a discordant note or to hang as a Damocles' sword of apprehension over the heads of the group. But in so affectionate and well-regulated a family I am not sure that its presence would not have constituted a new source of happiness. And by and by, as the afternoon waned, I could imagine the father meeting them at the beach, with perhaps the real brother (or would it be the real not-brother?), and coming home with them in the cool evening and the sweet moonlight.

On Saturdays there is an earlier current of home-going working-people; and it is easy to detect a quite different air about them from what they wear on other days. There is no shadow of next morning impending over them. One realizes anew the Sabbath as made for man,—the man who works,—and blesses the Son of Man who is "Lord also of the Sabbath." This is the evening when they carry home their reading for the week, as well as their Sunday dinner. I wish more could be said for the general quality, intellectual or moral, of this literature. But most of it is better than mental vacancy, and a great advance on the illiteracy in which these classes were sunk not so very long ago. And it must be borne in mind that the transient and sensational reading which so many of us carry in cars and cabins, or buy at news-stands, or take out of libraries, would misrepresent us if supposed to be all we had or loved to read. There is in more of these homes than perhaps we suspect a shelf with its well-thumbed "Pilgrim's Progress," its "Robinson Crusoe" with one cover gone, its odd volume of Waverley or Dickens, its copy of Burns or Longfellow, its row of school histories and science, and its pile of magazines.

At certain hours, when the trains are due, the basket brigade is reinforced by the carpet-bag battalion; and a crowd of home-coming or out-going travellers is a never-ending source of sympathetic and imaginative study to the leisurely looker-on. What an anachronism that word "carpet-bag" has become, by the way! I saw not long ago on the ferry-boat a genuine and literal specimen, which carried back my thoughts for a generation to the day when bags were really made of carpet and the most fastidious social Bourbon did not disdain to carry them. They flourished in the age of shawls, and came in not long after the epoch of "gum" shoes. They were of every conceivable pattern, from the sober symphony in brown to a gorgeous wealth of color that might vie with the most audacious wall-paper of an aesthetic age. This "belated traveller" of a carpet-bag had all the appearance of a faded and bedraggled gentility,—was, in fact, a veritable tramp among luggage. It sagged down as it stood on the floor. It ran here and there into strings, as of shoes untied and coat fastened together by twine in lieu of buttons. And it was trampy with mouldy discoloration and travel-stains. It was of vast dimensions, and, as was always the way with carpet-bags, bulging in all directions with its contents. I was not surprised to discover, through its orifice, that it had long ceased to be a receptacle for clothing and was filled with honest workman's tools. Burglars, the police-reports tell us, affect the carpet-bag for their jimmies and the like, but in such case it may be depended on to be as reputable in appearance and as close-mouthed as the last defaulting treasurer or trustee. The modern luggage is a type of advanced thought, if not civilization, whether we consider the Saratoga trunk, the Russia-leather satchel, the school-boy's knapsack, or the commercial traveller's double-locked valise. There is "nothing like leather:" men live now in their trunks, and America's proudest contribution to the world is the railway-check.

But my boat bumps on the shore, and I must pass out, to the marching music of the rattling chains and the swashing tide, to my business,—perhaps a "better" one to be "about" than writing these idle observations on a North-River Ferry.

F. N. ZABRISKIE.



THE ART OF READING.

Statistics as to the number of men and women of good standing in the world who cannot read might have a certain interest. There are probably more persons laboring under that disability than is usually supposed, and this with no reference to unfortunates who in early life have missed the opportunity of learning their A B C, but thinking only of those who have never found the way to utilize a knowledge of letters,—of persons, in short, who do not know what to do with a book. Trustworthy statistics, however, would not be easily obtained: there is too strong a prejudice in favor of books for any one to be very forward in confessing a distaste for them. Now and then such an admission is made, but, for the most part, people like to think that under auspicious conditions—if they had time, or quiet, or health, or what not—they should be great readers. It is a point on which it is quite possible to deceive one's self and almost impossible to deceive others.

You are acquainted, perhaps, with some lady on whose table lies the book that every one is talking about: it is not a novel, we will suppose. "Ah, you have that!" you say to her. Yes, and she expects to enjoy it immensely. She lifts the cover and casts a caressing glance upon its pages, for all the world as if she could not wait to be at it. You know the feeling, and sympathize with her. The next time you are there, seeing the book again reminds you to ask how she liked it. "Why, positively," she says, "I haven't had a single minute in which I could take it up!" But she still cherishes the same agreeable anticipations as before with regard to it. After a considerable lapse of time, on the occasion of another call you may notice a mark protruding in the region of the first chapter, and if mischief or malice or any other inborn propensity to evil prompts you to allude to the subject once more and inquire if the book pleases her, on the whole, she will probably say that it does as far as she has read, only there is an unconscious plaintiveness about this statement which betrays that enthusiasm has waned: the fact is, everybody is talking of another book now, and she has the uncomfortable feeling of being behind-hand. But all the same she may be just as intimately persuaded that it is only a concatenation of adverse circumstances which has prevented her finishing the book long ago, as you are that she will never finish it.

However, as already said, there may sometimes be found among non-readers a clear apprehension of the state of their case. Thus, a lady once avowed, when a conversation had turned upon the profit and pleasure of reading, that she had not the least liking for books and never had had. She regretted it extremely; she felt when she saw any one absorbed in reading that she had missed something; there were times when if she could forget herself in a book she should be very glad, but she could not; she had never been taught to care for reading when she was a child, and it was too late to learn now. Still, on being persuaded to think that she might at least try, she expressed an ambition to enjoy Thackeray, and asked to have his best novel recommended. "Vanity Fair" was accordingly suggested as most likely to please her, and, it being procured, she announced on the following evening that she had read thirty pages that day, and meant to continue at the same rate. Her admiration, alas! was plainly more for her own achievement than for that of her author; nevertheless, the literary adviser talked encouragingly, as the medical adviser often must, in spite of bad signs, and for a few nights the number of pages kept pretty well up to the mark, then steadily declined, and, after an hiatus or two, "Vanity Fair" was mentioned no more. It was, as the lady herself had thought, too late. But on another point also she may have been right,—namely, in the implied belief that childhood was the time when she might have learned to like reading.

There is certainly a wide-spread impression that children ought to display some taste for literature, so that to say a child does not care for his book is rather a damaging statement: it is made with reluctance: one is "afraid Charlie does not like to read;" one always adds, if possible, that "he likes to be read to, however," and in any case the obliging by-stander hastens to say, "Oh, well, perhaps he will take to reading as he grows older," which remark, on the principle that one never knows what may happen, is incontrovertible as far as it goes. No one would wish to assert dogmatically that Charlie will not ripen into a reader, but at the same time no one very seriously supposes that he will. "As the twig is bent the tree's inclined" is felt to be peculiarly applicable in his case.

And still one ought not to be fatalistic about the twig: for the tree, indeed, it is too late, but that means nothing, if not that for the twig it is yet time. In certain ways this idea is recognized and acted upon, as, for instance, when a taste for music is to be cultivated children are held to practise daily on the piano, even though they hate it; if dancing is necessary to secure a graceful carriage, they must learn to dance, notwithstanding that they might prefer to swarm up and down the sidewalk on roller-skates. And so, when a relish for books is to be awakened, why should it not follow that children must read? Why content one's self with anything short of that? To read to a child, otherwise than occasionally and with the occult purpose of giving a lesson in ease of utterance, is evidently pernicious. It may sound well to say that Charlie likes to be read to, but the real sense of the statement is that he considers reading laborious, and that we are doing our best to strengthen him in that opinion. To be sure he is right,—reading is more or less laborious at the outset; but then the obvious deduction from this would seem to be that the more seriously he applies himself to it the better.

To some persons such an axiom will have a brain-feverish sound: children are heard of who are devoted to books to the injury of their health, and so it is assumed that to incite any child to read may be a tempting of Providence. This is a groundless supposition. Even in the few authentic cases of precocious development efficient parents may easily take measures to check the ravages of intellect, while in the far greater number of instances where the mental and physical qualities are pretty evenly balanced, parental efficiency would be well displayed in cherishing rather than in repressing a love for literature. If one thinks what a companion a book may be in hours of loneliness, what a comforter in weary illness or in sorrow, and, above all, what a blessing in the temporary escape it offers from the every-day trials of existence, which tend to take on huge proportions if one settles down among them, but will look of a very reasonable size to one who comes back to them with sight refreshed after a judicious absence,—if one thinks of all this, the art of playing on the piano or of dancing sinks greatly in importance as compared with the art of reading. Even considering only the respective duration of advantage, one would have to decide for reading if a choice must be made, for girls generally give up music when they marry, and at some not quite so definitely fixed period dancing is renounced by both sexes, while books remain appropriate to every age and condition of life.

Happily, however, there is no need to choose: reading may be cultivated side by side with more florid accomplishments. To provide an interesting book and appoint an hour for its perusal may just as easily be done as to set apart an hour for the piano,—indeed, in some cases more easily, since there would be no bills coming in for the reading-lessons. And who will say that a child might not learn to like reading, might not insensibly get into the spirit of the art, by this simple method when duly insisted on? Perhaps it would fail sometimes; there may be persons absolutely incapable of the prolonged attention required for reading; but one cannot help thinking that in most minds this power of attention could be aroused and fostered, and that, therefore, if a child does not like books at the start, that need not be accounted a fatal sign. People who have detested their music-lessons at first have been known to come finally to the enjoyment of music through those very means.