Fresh-water shell heaps also abound; and Professor Jeffries Wyman made those of East Florida the subject of an interesting paper in _The American Naturalist_. Such memorials of the encampments of the aborigines are historical records of the habits and customs of ancient native tribes. The fresh-water mussels, which constituted an important article of food, and also supplied the pearls which they prized for decoration, enter largely into the contents of the heaps. Intermingled with them are “numerous fragments of pottery, stone axes, chisels, crushing-stones, awls, mortars, net-sinkers, arrow and spear points, flint-knives, shell beads, soapstone ornaments, pipes, and the bones of deer, buffalo, alligators, turtles, racoons, and other animals.”[56] Many of the bones have been split, like those found in the ancient mounds and caves of Europe, for the purpose of extracting the marrow; and along with such evidences of culinary arts are piles of chipped flint and stone, with broken or unfinished axes, spear and arrow-heads, and other traces of the Indian tool-maker’s workshop. In all ways we thus recognise, amid diversities of race, climate, and other external circumstances, many minute analogies between the men of palæolithic and neolithic ages of Europe, and those of the new world’s more recent centuries, in regions apart from its singular centres of a native civilisation. But also the convenient form and beauty of various marine shells have led to their use, not only as a substitute for the flint and stone of other localities, or the unknown bronze and iron of later ages, but even for the precious metals as the medium of a recognised currency, and this from times of unknown antiquity, alike in the old world and in the new. Of such substitutes for a metallic currency the _Cypræa moneta_ is the most familiar. The cowrie shells used as currency are procured on the coast of Congo, and in the Philippine and Maldive Islands. Of the latter, indeed, they still constitute the chief article of export. At what remote date, or at what early stage of rudimentary civilisation, this singular representative shell-currency was introduced, it is perhaps vain to inquire; but the extensive area over which it has long been recognised proves its great antiquity. The Philippine Islands form, in part, the eastern boundary of the Southern Pacific, and the Maldives lie off the Malabar coast in the Indian Ocean; but their shells circulate as currency not only through Southern Asia, but far into the African continent.