Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/185

Rh of the province of New York, by its author, who signs himself "B. Ratzer, Siuv'r in His Majestie's 60th American Reg't." It is a map of the city of New York, and it gives the waters of the entire harbor, with their soundings. Its date is 1767. A large tract of water is marked "" In that area of what was then fine native oysters is now the vast patch of "made-land," laid down by the filling in of the city's refuse, by the New Jersey Central Railroad, and which matter is now in litigation. The time was when the entire waters west of the channel, beginning south of Jersey City, and surrounding Ellis and Bedloe's Islands and Robbins's Reef, and a little way beyond Constable's Point, up the Kill Von Kull, altogether some six miles in a straight line, was a rich bank of native oysters, and supposed to be inexhaustible. It can hardly be questioned that, when the European settled here, that which is now the eastern coastline of the United States contained, by several times, more of these edible bivalves than did all the rest of the world. The very shells left inland in many places, by the aboriginal oyster-eaters, make mounds of vast extent, in some instances thirty feet high. At Fernandina, and other places in Florida, they were used as forts in the late war. As to their antiquity, there can be no doubt that oysters were eaten there thousands of years ago.

Recent ethnological investigations indicate, at least, the strange fact that the people who began those shell-heaps antedated the supposed autocthonesautochtones [sic] of the American Indian. Their bones have been discovered, and they show an osteology not known among any of the red-men of to-day, namely, a flattening of the tibia, or shin-bones. The relics of the great mounds have shown the same fact; and so marked is this, that the name platycnemic, or flat-shinned, is proposed for this ante-historic race. Again, the unpleasant fact is also indicated that these same ancient oyster-eaters were cannibals. And those heaps of oyster-shells on the land, in which are mixed relics of the ancient races, extend from Florida to Maine. They are found on islands in Casco Bay. But the oyster is not an inhabitant of these parts to-day. In fact, it is a sort of fossil; so that some great geological change has taken place on our coast since those times in the long ago. This surely points to a great antiquity of these autocthonicautochtonic [sic] oyster-eating men. And the several facts just enumerated would indicate the extraordinary prevalence of this bivalve on our Eastern coast. The most ancient name of Britain is Albion, with evident allusion to its white cliffs. If this truthfully characterized the Druid-Land, it surely would not have been less appropriate, nor less poetical, had the first adventurer named this Occident shore the Oyster-Land.

So, then, how potent has been the influence of the oyster in the industries, and morals, and convivialities of the ancient and the modern man!