The contents of the Scioto Valley Mound, as well as of others described above, prove that the human remains were deposited in them long after the body had gone to decay; and while numerous indications serve to show that cremation was extensively practised by the Mound-Builders, it is not improbable that a custom may have prevailed analogous to the modern Indians’ scaffolding and subsequent sepulture of the bones of their dead. The remains thus periodically gathered were sometimes deposited in a common ossuary, as in that of the Taylor Mound; and in other cases were burnt, with fitting rites, and their ashes heaped together, forming mounds, such as one opened on the bank of Walnut Creek, in the Scioto Valley. The principal portion of this consisted seemingly of long-exposed and highly-compacted ashes, intermingled with specks of charcoal, and small bits of burned bones. Beneath this was a small mound of very pure white clay, resting on the original soil, without any traces of the action of fire, over which the incinerated remains had been piled into a mound, nine feet in height by forty in base. The customs of the North American Indians, however, were very diverse; and among the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians inhumation, cremation, urn-burial, and mummification, accompanied with deposition in artificial vaults and in caves, were all practised. It need not therefore surprise us to find exceptions among the ancient Mound-Builders to any practice recognised as most prevalent among them. Considering the decayed state of most of the bones recovered from the great sepulchral mounds, where they were equally protected from external air and moisture: if the common dead were inhumed under the ordinary little grave-mound, their bones must, for the most part, have long since returned to dust. Nor must it be overlooked that the extremely comminuted state to which most of the skeletons in the larger mounds have been reduced, when brought to light by modern explorers, is due, in part at least, to the falling in of a superincumbent mass of earth and stones upon them, when the timber ceiling of their sarcophagus had sustained the weight long enough only to render them the less able to resist its crushing force. The perfect preservation of the “Scioto Mound cranium” was due to its being imbedded in charcoal, over which a superstructure of large stones enveloped with tough yellow clay had been piled, without any treacherous timber vaults. It lay in the centre of the carbonaceous deposit, resting on its face. The lower jaw was wanting, and only the clavicle, a few cervical vertebræ, and some of the bones of the feet were huddled around it. Unaccompanied though it was by any relics of art, it is, in itself, one of the most valuable objects hitherto recovered from the American mounds.