Their villages were composed of houses closely huddled together about a central .sj)ace, which was used for the transaction of public business, for ceremonies and amusements. Besides the manufactures already named there were others that attested the Indian's skill. He made boats of two kinds. One consisted of a light, wooden frame, covered with birch-bark, skillfully and tastefully fastened at the seams; this boat was peculiarly valuable on long journeys, as its lightness allowed it to be easily carried from the waters of one stream to those of another. The other boat was a much heavier affair, fashioned from the trunk of a tree. The wood was charred by heated stones and then scraped away with stone gouges. These boats were sometimes thirty or more feet in length, and were capable of carrying a considerable number of passengers. In some of the sales of land to the white settlers along the Sound the Indians reserved " the white-wood trees, suitable for making canoes of."

PAETLY DRILLED PIECE OF STE.\TITE.'

In nothing was the Indian's skill more strikingly shown than in his manufacture of implements of stone. These were mortars and pestles, axes, hatchets, adzes, gouges, chisels, cutting tools, skinning tools, perforators, arrow and spear-heads, scrapers, mauls, hammer-stones, sinkers, pendants, pierced tablets, jiolishers, pipes and ceremonial stones. Specimens of all these have been found in Westchester County. The mortars were usually bowl-like depressions worn into some rock beside the village site, where the women could conveniently resort to grind the corn. Sometimes they were made in portable stones. The pestles were from two to three inches in diameter and from six to twenty inches in length, and generally of fine sandstone, greenstone or hornblende. Axes were made of varieties of greenstone, syenite,