Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/656

638 flora being derived chiefly from the former, and the fauna mostly from the latter. The marine fauna of the coral region of South Florida he pronounces a West Indian colony engrafted on the more or less North American fauna of the east and west coasts of the peninsula. Of the land animals the mammals are entirely North American. The batrachia and reptiles, too, belong, with a very few exceptions, to North American species. The insects are probably of mixed origin, coming from North America, Cuba, and the Bahamas. The land-shells of the Keys are the same as those of the mainland.

As regards the flora of Florida and its Keys, the author says of the pine that it is confined to the mainland, there being only one small group of Keys which bears a growth of pines. Pine-forests, indeed, are characteristic of the shores of Florida, and of all the Southern States, while the characteristic trees of the Keys are fig-trees, quassia, torch-wood, mahogany, and a few others, interspersed with a dense shrubbery, in which several species of Eugenia are perhaps most common.

How the American Aborigines disposed of their Dead.—The modes of disposing of the bodies of the dead in use among the aborigines of America are classed by Mr. Edwin A. Barber, in the Naturalist, under four heads, viz.: inhumation, cremation, embalmment, and aërial sepulture. Of these, the first was most usually employed, the bodies being interred either in ordinary graves, in mounds, or in caves. Several tribes, among them the Lenni-Lenape, or Delawares, were accustomed to incase their dead in stone boxes or tombs. In tumulus burial, the dead were generally laid near the original level of the surface, and the mound heaped over them. Only isolated instances of cave-burial have been signalized in the United States, as in Breckenridge County, Kentucky, and in the Canons of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Cremation was of two kinds—in graves and in urns. Among the Pueblos of Arizona and Utah the body was sometimes burned, and the ashes deposited in shallow tombs. Several tribes on the Gila River, in Southern Arizona, burned the bones of the dead in urns. But few cases of embalming are known to have occurred in the limits of the United States. As examples of this mode of preparing the corpse may be mentioned the Mammoth Cave and Salt Cave mummies of Kentucky. These bodies have been preserved by a rude species of embalmment and by exsiccation. Aërial sepulture was of two kinds—the first by suspension on scaffolds or in trees, the second by sepulture in canoes. Several tribes still employ the former mode of burial. The Sioux elevate the bodies of their dead into trees, or stretch them out on raised platforms, wrapping them in blankets and leaving them to the mercies of the elements and carnivorous birds.

Accurate Geological Estimates.—A good illustration of the exactness of modern geological science is found on comparing the results actually obtained in the sinking of artesian wells in London with the conclusions reached by Prof. Prestwich as long ago as 1851. In a work published in that year, "A Geological Inquiry respecting the Water-bearing Strata of the Country around London," Prestwich made the prediction that the chalk beneath London would be found to have a thickness of 650 feet, the upper green-sand of 40 feet, and the gault of 150 feet. At the time of this announcement, as we learn from Nature, no well in London had been sunk to a greater depth than 300 feet in the chalk, but now there are four deep borings which marvelously confirm Prof. Prestwich's reasonings. We take from our London contemporary the following table, showing the results as calculated by Prestwich, and as actually ascertained by borings:

"When it is remembered," adds Nature, "that the chalk graduates downward insensibly into the upper green-sand, and that it is almost impossible to decide on their line of separation, it will be admitted on all hands that the agreement between the estimated and proved results is marvelously close."