The description of the kitchen middens of Denmark, when compared with those which have already been given of the shell heaps on the Northwest coast, will show to us how longcontinued was this peculiar mode of life, even for several thousand years. It shows, also, that different classes of people-hunters and agriculturalists-were in prehistoric times, as in modern times, in the habit of going to the sea coast and for a time dwelling there, leaving the débris of the camps as signs of their presence. The fire-beds, fragments of pottery, and other relics, show that the people were accustomed to domestic life and were, perhaps, skillful in erecting habitations for themselves. The difference between the relics in the kitchen middens in Denmark and those on the Northwest coast, shows that a higher grade of progress had been reached. This is shown especially by the superior boats which were constructed out of logs, by using rude stone axes. No boats have been discovered in these kitchen middens, but so many have been found in the mounds on the coast of Denmark and Norway and Sweden, and in the bogs of Ireland, as to convey the idea that they were a sea-going people, and were skillful navigators. Deep inlets of the sea, and not a few river courses, opened a comparatively easy approach from the coasts and neighboring islands, leading through the woods to fresh water lakes in the Interior, teeming with fish, and at the same time to new and by no means unimportant resources. On the other hand, the necessity of gaining a livelihood does not appear to have driven the new settlers far from the coasts to the islands lying out in the more open sea. These facts show that the inhabitants of the world were accustomed to resort to the sea for subsistence and became navigators at a very early date; taking this for granted we may learn how the population of the globe became distributed.

As to the race which constructed the kitchen middens on the coasts of Europe, Asia, and America, it is impossible to determine, but it is supposed that the ancient Turanian people who were the first inhabitants of Mesopotamia, antedating the Semitics, were of the same race as the Finns, and it is not impossible that they made their way across Behring Strait, or the Aleutian Islands to the Northwest coast; while another branch were perhaps the ancestors of the Basques, or the Britons, who made their way across the Atlantic to the north coasts of America, and so southward.

As to the distribution of the kitchen middens, the following quotation from Nadaillac will give us some information:

The kitchen middens, or heaps of kitchen refuse-such was the name given to these shell mounds-could not have been the natural deposits left by the waves after storms, for in that case they would have been mixed with quantities of sand and pebbles. The conclusion is inevitable, that man alone could have piled up these accumulations, which were the refuse flung away day by day after his meals, The kitchen middens confirmed

in a remarkable manner the opinion of Steenstrup, and everywhere a number of important objects were discovered. In several places the old hearths were brought to light. They consisted of flat stones, on which were piles of cinders, with fragments of wood and charcoal. It was now finally proved that these mounds occupied the site of ancient settlements, the inhabitants of which rarely lett the coast, and fed chiefly on the motlusca which abounded in the waters of the North Sea.

The earliest inhabitants of Russia placed their dwellings near rivers above the highest flood-levels known to or foreseen by them. Virchow has recognized on the shores of Lake Burtneck in Germany, a kitchen midden belonging to the earliest Neolithic times, perhaps even to the close of the Paleolithic period. He there picked up some stone and bone implements, and notices on the one hand the absence of the reindeer, aud on the other, as in Scandinavia, that of domestic animals. But in this case, the home of the living became the tomb of the dead, as numerous skeletons lay beside the abandoned hearths. Similar discoveries have been made in Portugal: shell heaps having been found thirty-five to eighty feet above the sea-level. Here, also, excavations have brought to light several different hearths, and in many of the most ancient kitchen middens in the valley of the Tigris were found crouching skeletons, proving that here, too, the home had become the tomb. **

It is, however, chiefly in America that these attract attention, for there huge shell mounds stretch along the coast of New Foundland, Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, Louisiana, California, and Nicaragua. We meet with them again near the Orinoco and the Mississippi, in the Aleutian Islands, and in the Guianeas in Brazil, and in Patagonia; on the coasts of the Pacific, as on those of the Atlantic. * ** The kitchen middens of Florida and Alabama are even more remarkable. There is one on Amelia Island which is a quarter of a mile long, with a medium depth of three feet and a breadth of nearly five. That of Bear's Point covers sixty acres of ground, that of Anecerty Point, one hundred, and that of Santa Rosa, five hundred. Others taper to a great height. Turtle Mound near Smyrna is formed of a mass of oyster shells, attaining a height of nearly thirty feet, and the height of several others is more than forty feet. In all of them bushels of shells have already been found, although a great part of the sites they Occupy are still unexplored; huge trees, roots, and tropical creepers having in the course of many centuries, covered them with an almost impenetrabie thicket. At Long Neck Branch is a shell mound that extends for half a mile, and in California there is a yet larger kitchen midden; it measures a mile in length and half a mile in width, and, as in similar accumulations, excavations have yielded thousands of stone hammers and bone implements The shell mounds of which we have so far been speaking are all near the sea, but there is yet another, consisting entirely of marine shells. fifty miles beyond Mobile.*

We conclude, then, that the coasts of America are as good a place for the study of the beginnings of architecture as Denmark, or even the regions of Mesopotamia. The people may have belonged to a different race, but it may help us to get a very different idea of the aborigines of our country, if we associate them with the fishermen of Europe, for those in America were even more advanced in the art of boat building and house building, than were the ancient people of Europe. We have elsewhere described the houses which were erected amid the shell heaps on the Northwest coast, and shall now turn to those on the coast of Florida. The explorations of Mr. W. H. Moore and Mr. A. E. Douglas have brought out many new facts.

•See "Prehistoric Peoples "

Mr. A. E. Douglas also discovered several canals in the shell mounds-one of them five miles long; another canal connected a lagoon, through which the interior waters were expected to find an outlet to the sea. He speaks of the imposing appearance of the shell mounds and thinks that some of them were designed as lookouts or sites of houses. He refers, also, to elevated roadways leading from the mounds to a lake or water course or village, thus proving that the mounds may have been sites for houses.

Mr. William Bartram speaks of Mt. Royal as a magnificent mound, twenty feet high and 300 feet in diameter, as attended with a roadway. He says:

A noble Indian highway leads from the great mound in a straight line three-quarters of a mile, through an awful forest of live oaks. It was terminated by palms and laurel magnolias in the maze of an oblong artificial lake, which was on the edge of a greater savannah. This general highway was about fifty yards wide, sunk a little below the common level and the earth thrown up on each side, making a bank about two feet high.

There are sand mounds on the coast of Florida, which to all appearances were erected at the same time as the kitchen middens. There are on the Northwest coast kitchen middens in which are canals, harbors for canoes, and the remains of houses which resemble those which are still occupied by the Klamath Indians, These are evidently modern, but they show that the same mode of life and the same customs continued for thousands of years, even when there was no connection between the people. The same stage of society may have been reached by the people on the coast of America much later than those on the coast of Europe; the fact, however, that so much time elapsed between the kitchen middens of Norway and Denmark and those on the coasts of America, shows how prolonged this stage of semi-civilization has been upon the earth.

II. Another class of coast structures has been recently brought to light off the coast of Florida. We shall, therefore, take up the description of these as excellent specimens of the skill of the prehistoric people. They have been associated with the sand mounds and shell heaps of Florida, but they show a more advanced stage, and should probably be classed with the mounds and earthworks of the Gulf States, for it is the opinion of Dr. D. G. Brinton, Prof. F. W. Putnam and others that they were erected by the same people.

The object of these remarkable "shell keys" is unknown, but they appear to have been walls, which surrounded the seagirt habitation of an ancient and unknown people. The "reef raised sea walls of shell" surrounded central, half natural lagoons, or lake courts, with the "many-channeled enclosures," which, when surrounded by the dwellings of the people who erected them, must have made the island resemble a modern Venice. The houses were probably constructed altogether of