The steps which led up to these results are by no means clear to us; they have not been built in any one place or by any one people. Nations have risen and fallen, and have given place to others that in turn have left a heap of ruins. We find it impossible to trace back through the historic ages into and beyond the prehistoric shadows, the pathway to culture followed by any one people. The necessity for groping increases with every backward step, and we pick up one by one the scattered links of a chain that has a thousand times been broken. So far our information is meager and fragmentary, and centuries of research will be required to round up our knowledge to such a fullness as to enable us to rehabilitate the ancient races, a result to be reached only by an exhaustive comparative study of the art products of all peoples and of all ages. By collecting the various relics of art in shell I shall be able to add a fragment to this great work. Destructible in their character these relics are seldom preserved from remote periods, and it is only by reason of their inhumation with the dead that they appear among antiquities at all. A majority of such objects, taken from graves and tumuli, known to post-date even the advent of the white race in North America, are so far decayed that unless most carefully handled they crumble to powder. It is impossible to demonstrate the great antiquity of any of these relics. Many of those obtained from the shell heaps of the Atlantic coast are doubtless very ancient, but we cannot say with certainty that they antedate the discovery more than a few hundred years. Specimens obtained from the mounds of the Mississippi Valley have the appearance of great antiquity, but beyond the internal evidence of the specimens themselves we have no reliable data upon which to base an estimate of time. The age of these relics is rendered still less certain by the presence of intrusive interments, which place side by side works of very widely separated periods. The antiquity of the relics themselves is not, however, of first importance; the art ideas embodied in them have a much deeper interest. The tablets upon which the designs are engraved may be never so recent, yet the conceptions themselves have their origin far back in the forgotten ages. Deified ancestors and mythical creatures that were in the earlier stages rudely depicted on bark and skins and rocks were, after a certain mastery over materials had been achieved, engraved on tablets of flinty shell; and it is probable that in these rare objects we have, if not a full representation of the art of the ancient peoples, at least a large number of their most important works, in point of execution as well as of conception.