Tour the East Hall of the National Museum After the First Fifty Years

"Petit Anse Island" is the locality of the remarkable mine of rock salt, discovered during the late war, and from which, for a considerable period of time, the Southern States derived a great part of their supply of this article. The salt is almost chemically pure, and apparently inexhaustible in quantity, occurring in every part of the island (which is about 5,000 acres in extent) at a depth below the surface of the soil of 15 or 20 feet.

The fragment of matting presented to the Institution by J. F. Cley, Esq. May, 1866, was found near the surface of the salt, and about two feet above it were remains of tusks and bones of a fossil elephant. The peculiar interest in regard to the specimen is in its occurrence in sites two feet below the elephant remains, and about fourteen feet below the surface of the soil, thus showing the existence of man on the island prior to the deposit in the soil of the fossil elephant. The material consists of the outer bark of the common southern cane, (Arundinaria macrospermum,) and has been preserved for so long a period both by its silicious character and the strongly saline condition of the soil.

Return to start of the East Hall of the National Museum in 1886