Treasures of the Past
March 2004

From Paris on March 29 Arthur Wilson wrote his mother in Yonkers, New York:
“I arrived here all right Wednesday in time for supper. Howard had bought the March St. Nicholas which had the piece he wrote in it with the illustrations of the shells with crabs in them which I made. It seemed strange to run across it here in Paris.”

At the entrance to the harbor of San Pedro, in California, lies a little island known as Isla de les Muertos or Dead Men’s Island. It is composed of layers of sand and clay full of fossil shells.

Ages ago these mollusks were living on the old sea-bottom and when they died their shells became buried in the sand and ooze, and covered by the accumulating sediment. As the ages rolled by, the slow but great movements of the earth’s old crust gradually raised the sea-bottom above water so it became dry land. At the present time, the sea in storms is undermining the island, and the fossil shells are washed out and mingled with the shells of living mollusks in the rock-pools which surround its base.

It is here that a curious and interesting incident takes place and the oldest houses of which I have any knowledge are to be found. The little hermit-crabs, hunting for empty univalve shells in which to make their homes, seize the fossil ones as readily as the living, and scurry off, bearing upon their backs houses so old that, compared with them, the most ancient ruins of human habitations were built but yesterday.

And these little houses of the hermit-crabs, although so old, are not in ruins or decay, but as strong and perfect to their minutest detail as when occupied by their original owners, perhaps two hundred thousand years ago!

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