Tracing them along the northern route through the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, these shells have been found in the ancient graves of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana, and northward to the regions of the Great Lakes. Dr. Gerard Troost, in a communication to the American Ethnological Society,[54] describes an interesting series of sepulchral remains discovered in Tennessee. The crania were characterised by remarkable artificial compression, as in an example figured by Dr. Morton (plate 55, _Crania Americana_), and the graves abounded with relics, “lares, trinkets, and utensils, all of a very rude construction, and all formed of some natural product, none of metal.” From an examination of those, Dr. Troost was led to the conclusion that the race to whom they pertained came from some tropical country. Among their stone implements obsidian abounded. Numerous beads were formed of tropical marine shells of the genus _marginella_, ground so as to make a perforation on the back, by means of which they could be strung together for purposes of personal ornament. Plain beads were made from the columellæ of the _Strombus gigas_; and such columellæ were found worked to a uniform thickness, perforated through the centre, and in all stages of manufacture, to that of perfected beads and links of the much-prized _wampum_. Similar accumulations of shell beads in the great mounds of the Ohio valley are referred to in a subsequent chapter; but another relic has an additional value from the light it throws not only on early native arts, but on ancient manners and modes of thought. Dr. Troost describes and figures various rudely sculptured idols, from some of which he was led to assume the existence of Phallic rites among the ancient idolaters of Tennessee. The greater number of the idols were of stone, but the one figured here (Fig. 49) has been modelled of clay and pounded shells, and hardened in the fire. It represents a nude human figure, kneeling, with the hands clasped in front; and when found, it still occupied, as its primitive niche or sanctuary, a large tropical shell (_Cassis flammea_), from which the interior whorls and columella had been removed, with the exception of a small portion at the base, cut off flat, so as to form its pedestal. The special application of this example of the tropical cassides adds a peculiar interest to it, as manifestly associated with the religious rites of the ancient race by whom the spoils of southern seas were transported inland, and converted to purposes of ornament and use.