“According to Gilman,[6] the bird-shape stones were worn on the head by the Indian women, but only after marriage. Abbott quotes Colonel Whittlesey to the effect that they were worn by Indian women to denote pregnancy, and from William Penn that when the squaws were ready to marry they wore something on their heads to indicate the fact. [Illustration: FIG. 413. (S. 1–4.) Peabody Museum, Cambridge. ] “Jones[7] quotes from De Bry that the conjurors among the Virginia Indians wore a small black bird above one of their ears as a badge of office.” Professor Boyle[8] says: “Although for convenience known as bird-amulets—most of them being apparently highly conventionalized bird-forms—now and again one sees specimens that are not suggestive of birds, whatever else they may have been intended to symbolize. In some instances there has not been any attempt to imitate eyes even by means of a depression, but in the majority of cases the eyes are enormously exaggerated, and stand out like buttons on a short stalk, fully half an inch beyond the side of the head. In every finished specimen the hole is bored diagonally through the middle of each end of the base, upwards and downwards. If merely for suspension when being carried, one hole would be sufficient, but the probability is that these were intended for fastening the ‘amulets’ to some other object, but what, or for what purpose, is not known. “It has been suggested that these articles ... were employed in playing a game; that they are totems of tribes or clans; and that they were talismans in some way connected with the hunt for waterfowl. They are, at all events, among the most curious and highly finished specimens of Indian handicraft in stone found in this part of America, and the collection of them in the Provincial Archæological Museum is said to be the best that has been made.” [Illustration: FIG. 414. (S. 3–8.) Effigy of a whale. Andover collection. This stone was found near Fall River, Massachusetts. It appears to be an effigy of a whale. Numbers of rude effigies, more or less whale-like in character, are found along the Atlantic seaboard in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Doubtless the whale would excite wonder in the minds of aborigines—hence the effigies. ] [Illustration: FIG. 415. (S. 1–2.) Bear effigy. Found near the corner of Essex and Boston Streets, Salem, Massachusetts, in 1830. ] [Illustration: FIG. 416. (S. 1–3.) Group of various objects from ruins near Phœnix, Arizona. Phillips Academy collection. ] Professor Boyle speaks of the bar-amulet after treating of bird-stones, but he does not class them as the same kind of ceremonials.