CALAVERAS SKULL. (Front and side view.)

What Whitney says of the history and authenticity of the skull will be found in his paper on “Human remains and works of art of the gravel series,” in Ibid. pp. 258-288. His conclusions are that it shows the existence of man with an extinct fauna and flora, and under geographical and physical conditions differing from the present,—in the Pliocene age certainly. This opinion has obtained the support of Marsh and Le Conte and other eminent geologists. Schmidt (Archiv für Anthropologie) thinks it signifies a pre-glacial man. Winchell (Preadamites, 428) says it is the best authenticated evidence of Pliocene man yet adduced. On the contrary, there are some confident doubters. Dawkins (No. Am. Rev., Oct., 1883) thinks that all but a few American geologists have given up the Pliocene man, and that the chances of later interments, of accidents, of ancient mines, and the presence of skulls of mustang ponies (introduced by the Spaniards) found in the same gravels, throw insuperable doubts. “Neither in the new world nor the old world,” he says, “is there any trace of Pliocene man revealed by modern discovery.” Southall and all the Bible advocates of course deny the bearing of all such evidence. Dawson (Fossil Men, 345) thinks the arguments of Whitney inconclusive. Nadaillac (L’Amérique préhistorique, 40, with a cut, and his Les Premiers Hommes, ii. 435) hesitates to accept the evidence, and enumerates the doubters.[1649]

Footprints have been found in a tufa bed, resting on yellow sand, in the neighborhood of an extinct volcano, Tizcapa, in Nicaragua. One of the prints is shown in the annexed cut, after a representation given by Dr. Brinton in the Amer. Philosoph. Soc. Proc. (xxiv. 1887, p. 437). Above this tufa bed were fourteen distinct strata of deposits before the surface soil was reached. Geologists have placed this yellow sand, bearing shells, from the post-Pliocene to the Eocene. The seventh stratum, going downwards, had remains of the mastodon.[1650]

Some ancient basket work discovered at Petit Anse Island, in Louisiana, has been figured in the Chicago Acad. of Sciences, Transactions (i. part 2). Cf. E. W. Hilgard, in Smithsonian Contributions, no. 248.

Foster rather strikingly likens what we know of the history of the human race to the apex of a pyramid, of which we know neither the height nor extent of base. Our efforts to trace man back to his beginning would be like following down the sides of that pyramid till it reaches a firm base, we know not where. Many geologists believe in a great ice-sheet which at one time had settled upon the northern parts of America, and covered it down to a line that extends across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and westerly in a direction of some variableness. There are some, like Sir William Dawson,[1651] who reject the evidence that persuades others. Prof. Whitney (Climatic Changes, 387) holds that it was a local phenomenon confined in America to the northeastern parts. The advocates look to Dr. James Geikie[1652] as having correlated the proofs of the proposition as well as any, while writers like Howorth[1653] trace the resulting phenomena largely to a flood.

ANCIENT FOOTPRINT FROM NICARAGUA.

How long ago this was, the cautious geologist does not like to say;[1654] nor is he quite ready to aver what it all means.[1655] Perhaps, as some theorize, this prevailing ice showed the long winter brought about by the precession of the equinoxes, as has long been a favorite belief, with the swing of ten thousand years, more or less, from one extreme to the other.[1656]

Others believe that we must look back 200,000 years, as James Croll[1657] and Lubbock do, or 800,000 and more, as Lyell did at first, and find the cause in the variable eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, which shall account for all the climatic changes since the dawn of what is called the glacial epoch, accompanying the deflection of ocean currents, as Croll supposes, or the variations in the disposition of sea and land, as Lyell imagines.[1658] This great ice-sheet, however extensive, began for some reason to retreat, at a period as remote, according as we accept this or the other estimate, as from ten thousand to a hundred thousand years.

That the objects of stone, shaped and polished, which had been observed all over the civilized world, were celestial in origin seems to have been the prevalent opinion,[1659] when Mahudel in 1723 and even when Buffon in 1778 ventured to assign to them a human origin.[1660]

In the gravels which were deposited by the melting of this more or less extended ice-sheet, parts of the human frame and the work of human hands have been found, and mark the anterior limit of man’s residence on the globe, so far as we can confidently trace it.[1661] Few geologists have any doubt about the existence of human relics in these American glacial drifts, however widely they may differ about the age of them.[1662]

FROM DAWSON’S FOSSIL MEN.

The outer outline is that of the skull found in the cave of Cro-magnon, in France, belonging, as Dawson says, p. 189, to one of the oldest human inhabitants of western Europe, as shown in Lartet and Christy’s Reliquiae Aquitanicae. The second outline is that of the Enghis skull; the dotted outline that of the Neanderthal skull. The shaded skull is on a smaller scale, but preserving the true outline, and is one of the Hochelaga Indians (site of Montreal). Cuts of the Enghis and Neanderthal skulls are given in Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times, pp. 328, 329. Dawkins (Cave Hunters, 235) thinks the Enghis skull of doubtful age. On the Neanderthal skull see Quatrefages and Hamy, Crania Ethnica (Paris, 1873-75), and Dawkins (p. 240). Huxley gives it a great antiquity, and says it is the most ape-like one he ever saw. Quatrefages, Hommes fossiles, etc. (1884), says it is not below some later men. Southall (Epoch of the Mammoth, 80) says it has the average capacity of the negro, and double that of the gorilla, and doubts its antiquity.

It was in the American Naturalist (Mar. and Ap., 1872) that Dr. C. C. Abbott made an early communication respecting the discovery of rude human implements in the glacial gravels[1663] of the Delaware valley, and since then the Trenton gravels have been the subject of much interest. The rudeness of the flints has repeatedly raised doubts as to their artificial character; but Wilson (Prehistoric Man, i. 29) says that it is impossible to find in flints broken for the road, or in any other accumulation of rocky débris, a single specimen that looks like the rudest implement of the drift. Experts attest the exact correspondence of these Trenton tools with those of the European river drift. Abbott has explained the artificial cleavages of stone in the American Antiquarian (viii. 43). There are geologists like Shaler who question the artificial character of the Trenton implements. From time to time since this early announcement, Dr. Abbott has made public additional evidence as he has accumulated it, going to show, as he thinks, that we have in these deposits of the glacial action the signs of men contemporary with the glacial flow, and earlier than the red Indian stock of historic times.[1664] He summarizes the matter in his “Palæolithic implements of a people on the Atlantic coast anterior to the Indians,” in his Primitive Industry (1882).[1665]

Some discoveries of human bones in the loess or loam of the Mississippi Valley have not been generally accepted. Lyell (Second Visit, ii. 197; Antiq. of Man, 203) suspends judgment, as does Joseph Leidy in his Extinct Mammalia of North America (p. 365).

The existence of man in western Europe with extinct animals is a belief that, from the incredulity which accompanied the discovery by Kemp in London, in 1714, of a stone hatchet lying in contiguity to some elephant’s teeth,[1666] has long passed into indisputable fact, settled by the exploration of cave and shell heaps.[1667] In North America, this conjunction of man’s remains with those of the mastodon is very widely spread.[1668] The geological evidence is quite sufficient without resorting to what has been called an Elephant’s head in the architecture of Palenqué, the so-called Elephant Mound in Wisconsin, and the dubious if not fraudulent Elephant Pipe of Iowa.[1669] The positions of the skeletons have led many to believe that the interval since the mastodon ceased to roam in the Mississippi Valley is not geologically great. Shaler (Amer. Naturalist, iv. 162) places it at a few thousand years, and there is enough ground for it perhaps to justify Southall (Recent Origin, etc., 551; Ep. of the Mammoth, ch. 8) in claiming that these animals have lived into historic times.

A human skeleton was found sixteen feet below the surface, near New Orleans—(which is only nine feet above the Gulf of Mexico), and under four successive growths of cypress forests. Its antiquity, however, is questioned.[1670] The belief in human traces in the calcareous conglomerate of Florida seems to have been based (Haven, p. 87) on a misconception of Count Pourtalès’ statement (Amer. Naturalist, ii. 434), though it has got credence in many of the leading books on this subject. Col. Whittlesey has reported some not very ancient hearths in the Ohio Valley (Am. Ass. Arts and Sciences, Proc., Chicago, 1868, Meeting, vol. xvii. 268).

The testimony of the caves to the early existence of man has never had the importance in America that it has had in Europe.

It was in 1822 that Dr. Buckland, in his Reliquiae diluvianae (2d ed., 1824), first made something like a systematic gathering of the evidence of animal remains, as shown by cave explorations; but he was not prepared to believe that man’s remains were as old as the beasts. He later came to believe in the prehistoric man. In 1833-34, Dr. Schmerling found in the cave of Enghis, near Liége, a highly developed skull, and published his Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles découverts dans les cavernes de la province de Liége.[1671]

In 1841, Boucher de Perthes began his discoveries in the valley of the Somme,[1672] and finally discovered among the animal remains some flint implements, and formulated his views of the great antiquity of man in his Antiquités Celtiques (1847), rather for the derision than for the delectation of his brother geologists. In 1848, the Société Ethnographique de Paris ceased its sessions; but Boucher de Perthes had aroused a new feeling, and while his efforts were still in doubt his disciples[1673] gathered, and amid much ridicule founded the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, which has had so numerous a following in allied associations in Europe and America.

He tells us of the struggles he endured to secure the recognition of his views in his De l’homme antédiluvien et de ses œuvres (Paris, 1860), and his trials were not over when, in 1863, he found at Moulin Quignon a human jaw-bone,[1674] which, as he felt, added much strength to the belief in the man of the glacial gravels.[1675]

The existence of man in the somewhat later period of the caves[1676] was also claiming constant recognition, and the new society was broad enough to cover all. In 1857, Dr. Fuhlrott had discovered the Neanderthal skull in a cave near Düsseldorf.

In 1858, the discovery of flint tools in the Brixham cave, in Devonshire, was more effective in turning the scientific mind to the proofs than earlier discoveries of much the same character by McEnery had been. In March, 1872, Emile Rivière investigated the Mentone caves, and found a large skeleton, unmistakably human, and the oldest yet found, supposed to be of the palæolithic period. (Cf. Découverte d’un Squelette humain de l’Epoque paléolithique, Paris, 1873.) All this evidence is best set forth in the collection of his periodical studies on the mammals of the Pleistocene, which were collected by William Boyd Dawkins in his Cave Hunting: researches on the evidence of caves, respecting the early inhabitants of Europe (London, 1874),[1677] a book which may be considered a sort of complement to Lyell’s Antiquity of Man and Lubbock’s Prehistoric Man; Dawkins (ch. 9, and Address, Salford, 1877, p. 3) and Lubbock (Scientific Lectures, 150) unite in holding the modern Eskimos to be the representative of this cave folk. No argument is quite sufficient to convince Southall that the archæologists do not place the denizens of the caves too far back (Recent Origin of Man, ch. 13), and he rejects a belief in the steady slowness of the formation of stalagmites (Epoch of the Mammoth, 90), upon which Evans, Geikie, Wallace, Lyell, and others rest much of their belief in the great antiquity of the remains found beneath the cave deposits.[1678]

The largest development of cave testimony in America has been made by Dr. Lund,[1679] a Danish naturalist, who examined several hundred Brazilian caves, finding in them the bones of man in connection with those of extinct animals.[1680] The remains of a race, held to be Indians, found in the caves of Coahuila (Mexico) are described by Cordelia A. Studley in the Peabody Mus. Reports, xv. 233. Edward D. Cope has studied the contents of a bone cave in the island of Anguilla (West Indies), in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, no. 489 (1883). J. D. Whitney describes a cave in Calaveras County, in the Smithsonian Rept. (1887), and Edward Palmer one in Utah (Peab. Mus. Rept., xi. 269). Putnam explored some in Kentucky (Ibid. viii.). Putnam’s first account of his cave work in Kentucky, showing the use of them as habitations and as receptacles for mummies, is in the Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., xvii. 319. J. P. Goodnow made similar explorations in Arizona (Kansas City Rev., viii. 647); E. T. Elliott in Colorado (Pop. Sci. Mo., Oct., 1879), and Leidy in the Hartman cave, in Pennsylvania (Philad. Acad. Nat. Sci. Proc., 1880, p. 348). Cf. also Haldeman in the Am. Philos. Soc. Trans. (1880) xv. 351. Col. Charles Whittlesey has discussed the “Evidences of the antiquity of man in the United States,” in describing some cave remains of doubtful age.[1681] W. H. Dall’s On the remains of later prehistoric man obtained from caves in the Catherine archipelago, Alaska territory, and especially from the caves of the Aleutian islands (Washington, 1878) is included in the Smithsonian contributions to knowledge, xxii.

Throughout the world, naturalists have found on streams and on the seacoast, heaps of the refuse of the daily life of primitive peoples. Beneath the loam which has covered them there are found the shells of edible mollusks and other relics of food, implements, ornaments and vessels, of stone, clay, and bone. Sometimes it happens that natural superposed accumulations will mark them off in layers, and distinguish the usages of successive periods.[1682]

OSCAR PESCHEL.

From the engraving in the 1877 ed. of his Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen. His Abhandlungen zur Erd-und Völker-Kunde, continuing his contributions to Das Ausland and other periodicals, and edited by J. Löwenberg, was published at Leipzig, in 3 vols. in 1877-79, the preface containing an account of Peschel’s services in this field.

In the Old World such heaps upon the Danish coast have attracted the most attention under the name of Kjœkkenmœddinger, or Kitchen-middens, and their teachings have enlivened the recitals of nearly all the European archæologists who have sought to picture the condition of these early races.

It seems to be the general opinion that in the Old World this shell-heap folk succeeded, if they do not in part constitute the contemporaries of, the men of the caves.[1683]

JEFFRIES WYMAN.

From a photograph taken in 1868, furnished by his family. The portrait in the Peabody Museum Report, no. viii., represents him somewhat later in life, with a beard. He died Sept. 4, 1874. There are accounts of Wyman in the same Report, by Asa Gray, who also made an address on Wyman before the Boston Society of Nat. Hist. (cf. Pop. Science Monthly, Jan., 1875), with commemorations by O. W. Holmes (Atlantic Monthly, Nov., 1874, and Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv. 4), by F. W. Putnam in the Proc. Amer. Acad. with a list of his publications; by Packard in the Mem. Nat. Acad., and B. G. Wilder (Old and New, Nov., 1874).

These accumulations are known usually in America as shell heaps, and it is generally characteristic of them that, while they contain pottery and bone implements, the stone instruments are far less numerous, and generally occur in the upper layers in those of Florida, but they are scattered through all the layers in those of New England. Professor Jeffries Wyman, whose name is in this country particularly associated with shell-heap investigations, could not find[1684] that any one had in the scientific spirit called attention to the subject in America earlier than Caleb Atwater in the Archæologia Americana (vol. i., 1820), who had observed such deposits on the Muskingum River in Ohio. They had not passed unnoticed, however, by some of the early explorers. Putnam (Essex Inst. Bulletin, xv. 86) notes that J. T. Ducatel observed those on the Chesapeake in 1834. The earliest more particular mention of the inland mounds seem to have been made in Prinz Maximilian’s Travels in the United States.[1685] Foster, in his Prehistoric Races of the U. S. (ch. 4,—a special survey of the American heaps), says that Professor Vanuxem was the first to describe the sea-side mounds in 1841, in the Proc. Amer. Asso. Geologists (i. 22).[1686]

SHELL HEAPS ON CAPE COD.

There has been as yet little found in America from which to develop the evidence of early man from any lake or river dwellings, while so much has been done in Europe.[1687] In some parts of Florida the Indians are reported to have built houses on piles; and in South America tree-houses and those on platforms are well known. Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson has reported (Peabody Mus. Rept., xxii. for 1888) the discovery of pile ends in the Delaware River, and has shown that two of these river stations are earlier than the third, as is evident from the rude implements of argillite found in the two when compared with those discovered in the third, where implements of jasper and quartz and fragments of pottery were associated with those of argillite.

PUEBLO REGION.

From a map, “Originalkarte der Urwohnsitze der Azteken und Verwandten Pueblos in New Mexico, zusammengestellt von O. Loew,” in Petermann’s Mittheilungen über wichtige neue Erforschungen auf dem Gesammtgebiete der Geographie, xxii. (1876), table xii. The small dotted circles stand for inhabited pueblos; those with a perpendicular line attached are ruins; and when this perpendicular line is crossed it is a Mexicanized pueblo. See the map in Powell’s Second Rept. Bur. Ethnol. (1880-81) p. 318, which marks the several classes: inhabited, abandoned, ruined pueblos, cavate houses, cliff houses, and tower houses.

The earliest discoveries of the cliff houses of the Colorado region were made by Lieut. J. H. Simpson, and his descriptions appeared in his Journal of a Military Reconnoissance, in 1849.[1688] No considerable addition was made to our knowledge of the cliff dwellers till in 1874-75, when special parties of the Hayden Geological Survey were sent to explore them (Hayden’s Report, 1876), whence we got accounts of those of southwestern Colorado by W. H. Holmes, including the cavate-houses and cliff-dwellers of the San Juan, the Mancos, and the ruins in the McElmo cañon.[1689] W. H. Jackson gives a revised account of his 1874 expedition in the Bulletin of the Survey (vol. ii. no. 1), adding thereto an account of his explorations of 1875. Jackson also gives a chapter on the ruins of the Chaco cañon.[1690]

In coming to the class of ruins lying in a few instances just within, but mostly to the north of, the Mexican line, we encounter the Pueblo race, whose position in the ethnological chart is not quite certain, be their connection with the Nahuas and Aztecs,[1691] or with the moundbuilders,—red Indian if they be,—or with the cliff-dwellers, as perhaps is the better opinion. Their connection with savage nations farther north is not wholly determinable, as Morgan allows, on physical and social grounds, and perhaps not as definitely settled by their architecture as Cushing seems to think.[1692]

The Spaniard early encountered these ruins,[1693] and perhaps the best summary of the growth of our knowledge of them by successive explorations is in Bancroft’s Nat. Races, iv. ch. 11.[1694] In the century after the Spanish conquest, we have one of the best accounts in the Memorial of Fray Alonso Benavides, published at Madrid in 1630.[1695] The most famous of the ruins of this region, the Casa Grande of the Gila Valley in Arizona,[1696] is supposed to have been seen (1540) by Coronado, then in a state of ruin; but we get no clear description till that given by Padre Mange, who accompanied Padre Kino to see the ruins in 1697.[1697]

There are few descriptions[1698] of the antiquities of this country previous to the military examination of it which was made during the Mexican War. Such is recorded in W. H. Emory’s Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Fort Leavenworth in Missouri to San Diego in California,[1699] which gives us some of the earliest representations of these antiquities, including the ruins of Pecos.[1700] In 1849, Col. Washington, the governor of New Mexico, organized an expedition against the Navajos, and Lieut. James H. Simpson gives us the first detailed account of the Chaco cañon in his Journal of a Military Reconnoissance (Philad., 1852).[1701] He also covered (p. 90), among the other ruins of this region, the old and present habitations of the Zuñi, but these received in some respects more detailed examination in Capt. L. Sitgreave’s Report of an Expedition down the Zuñi and Colorado rivers (Washington, 1853),[1702] accompanied by a map and other illustrations.[1703] New channels of information were opened when the United States government undertook to make surveys (1853) for a trans-continental line of railways; and a great deal of material is embodied in Whipple’s report on the Indian tribes in the Pacific R. R. Reports, vol. iii. The running of the boundary line between the United States and Mexico also contributed to our knowledge. The commissioner during 1850-53 was John Russell Bartlett, who, on the failure of the government promptly to publish his report, printed his Personal narrative of explorations and incidents (N. Y., 1854), and made in some parts of it an important contribution to our knowledge of the antiquities of this region.[1704]

No considerable advance was now made in this study for about a score of years. Major Powell first published his account of his adventurous exploration (1869) of the Colorado cañon in Scribner’s Monthly (Jan., Feb., Mar.) in 1875, and it was followed by his official Exploration of the Colorado River (Washington, 1875), making known the existence of ruins in the cañon’s gloomy depths. The Reports of the U. S. Geological Survey, including the accounts by W. H. Jackson and W. H. Holmes, give much valuable and original information; and a good deal of what has been included in the Reports of the Chief of Engineers (U. S. Army) for 1875 and 1876 will also be found in the seventh volume, edited by F. W. Putnam, of Wheeler’s Survey,[1705] including the pueblos of Acoma, Taos, San Juan, and the ruin[1706] on the Animas River.

The latest examinations of these Pueblo remains, of which we have published accounts, are those made by A. F. Bandelier for the Archæological Institute of America. He has given his results in his “Historical introduction to studies among the sedentary Indians of New Mexico,” and in his “Report on the ruins of Pecos,” which constitutes the initial volume of Papers, American series, of the Institute (Boston, 1881).[1707] He believes Pecos to be Cicuye, visited by Alvarado in 1541,—a huge pile with 585 compartments, finally abandoned in 1840. In October, 1880, he examined the region west of Santa Fé (Second Rept. Archæol. Inst.). His explorations also determined the eastern limits of the sedentary occupation of New Mexico (Fifth Report). He renewed his studies in 1882 (First Bull. Archæol. Inst., Jan., 1883), and thought the ruins showed successive occupiers, and divides them into cave dwellings, cliff houses, one-story buildings, and those of more than one, with each higher one retreating from the front of the next lower.

PUEBLO REGION.

A reduction of the map accompanying Bandelier’s report on his investigations in New Mexico, in the Fifth Rept. of the Archæological Institute of America (Cambridge, 1884).

The most essential sources of information have thus been enumerated, but there is not a little fugitive and comprehensive treatment of the subject worth the student’s attention who follows a course of investigation.[1708]

The literature of the moundbuilders, and of the controversies arising out of the mysterious relics of their life, is commensurate with the very wide extent of territory covered by their traces.[1709] It was long before any intelligent notice was taken of the mounds by those who traversed the wilderness. De Soto, in 1540, could get no traditions concerning them beyond the assurances that the peoples he encountered had built them, or some of them. We read of them also in Garcilasso de la Vega, Biedma and the Knight of Elvas, on the Spanish side; but on the French at a later day we learn little or nothing from Joutel, Tonti, and Hennepin, though something from Du Pratz, La Harpe and some of the missionaries. Kalm,[1710] the Swede, in 1749, was about the first to make any note of them. Carver found them near Lake Pepin in 1768. In 1772 the missionary David Jones[1711] made observations upon those in Ohio. Adair did not wholly overlook them in his American Indians in 1775. Prof. James Dunbar, of Aberdeen, in his Essays on the history of mankind in rude and uncultivated ages (Lond., 1780), uses what little Kalm and Carver afforded. Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia (1782) speaks of them as barrows “all over the country,” and “obvious repositories of the dead.”[1712] Arthur Lee makes reference to them in 1784. A map of the Northwest Territory, published by John Fitch about 1785, places in the territory which is now Wisconsin the following legend: “This country has once been settled by a people more expert in the art of war than the present inhabitants. Regular fortifications, and some of these incredibly large, are frequently to be found. Also many graves and towers like pyramids of earth.” In 1786 Franklin thought the works at Marietta might have been built by De Soto; and Noah Webster, in a paper in Roberts’ Florida, assented.[1713] B. S. Barton, in his Observations in some parts of Natural History (London, 1787), credited the Toltecs with building them, whom he considered the descendants of the Danes.

As the century draws to a close, we find occasional and rather bewildered expression of interest in the Observations on the Ancient Mounds by Major Jonathan Heart;[1714] in the Missions of Loskiel; in the New Views of Dr. Smith Barton; in the Carolina of William Bartram; and in the travels of Volney. In 1794 Winthrop Sargent reported in the Amer. Philos. Soc. Trans., iv., on the exploration of the mounds at Cincinnati. The present century soon elicited a variety of observations, but there was little of practical exploration. A New England minister, Thaddeus Mason Harris, passed judgment upon those in Ohio, when he journeyed thither in 1803.[1715] The commissioner of the United States to run the Florida boundary, Andrew Ellicott, describes some near Natchez in his Journal (1803). Bishop Madison communicated through Professor Barton some opinions about those in Western Virginia, which appear in the Transaction of the American Philosophical Society, taking different grounds from Dr. Harris, who had thought them works of defence. The explorations of Lewis and Clark (1804-6) up the Missouri, and of Pike (1805-7) up the Mississippi, produced little. Robin, the French naturalist, in 1805,[1716] Major Stoddard[1717] and Breckenridge[1718] later, saw some in Louisiana, Missouri, and Illinois. A leading periodical, The Portfolio, contributed something to the common stock in 1810 and 1814, giving plans of some of the mounds. Those in Ohio were again the subject of inquiry by F. Cuming in his Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country (Pittsburg, 1810), and by Dr. Daniel Drake in his Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Valley (Cinn., 1815). John Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary, accounted for the ancient fortifications through the traditions of the Delawares, who professed once to have inhabited this country, but it has been suspected that the worthy missionary was imposed upon.[1719] DeWitt Clinton, in 1811, before the New York Historical Society, and again in 1817, before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York, had given some theories in which the Scandinavians figured as builders of the mounds in that State.

It was thus at a time when there was much speculation and not much real experimental knowledge respecting these remains that, under the auspices of the then newly founded American Antiquarian Society, Mr. Caleb Atwater, of Ohio, was employed to explore and survey a considerable number of these works. He embodied his results in the initial volume of the publication of that society, the Archæologia Americana.[1720] After pointing out scattered evidences of the traces of European peoples, found in coins and other relics throughout the country, Atwater proceeds to his description of the earthworks, mainly of Ohio; and beside giving many plans,[1721] he enters into the question of their origin, and expresses a belief in the Asiatic origin of their builders, and in their subsequent migration south to lay, as he thinks, the foundations of the Mexican and Peruvian civilizations.

COL. CHARLES WHITTLESEY.

After a photograph kindly furnished by the Hon. C. C. Baldwin, of Cleveland, Ohio, who has printed a memorial of his friend with a list of his writings in Tract 68 of the Western Reserve Hist. Soc.

During the next twenty-five years there cannot be said to have been much added to a real knowledge of the subject. Yates and Moulton in their Hist. New York (1824) borrowed mainly from Kirkland (1788) the missionary. Humboldt had no personal contact with the remains to give his views any value (1825). Warden in his Recherches (1827) gave some new plans and rearranged the old descriptions. There was some sober observation in M’Culloh’s Researches (3d ed., 1829); some far from sober in Rafinesque (1838); some compiled descriptions with worthless comment in Josiah Priest’s American Antiquities (Albany, 1838); something like scientific deductions in S. G. Morton’s study of the few moundbuilders’ skulls then known, in his Cranea Americana (1839); with an attempt at summing up in Delafield (1839) and Bradford (1841). This is about all that had been added to what Atwater did, when E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis eclipsed all labors preceding theirs, and began the series of the Smithsonian Contributions with their Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Washington, 1847 and 1848).[1722] During the preceding two years they had opened over two hundred mounds, and explored about a hundred earthwork enclosures, and had gathered a considerable collection of specimens of moundbuilders’ relics.[1723] They had begun their work under the auspices of the American Ethnological Society, but the cost of the production of the volume exceeded the society’s resources, and the transfer was made to the Smithsonian Institution. The work took a commanding position at once, and still remains of essential value, though some of the grounds of its authors are not acceptable to present observers; and indeed in his work on the mounds of New York, which the Smithsonian Institution included in the second volume of their Contributions, Squier found occasion to alter some of his opinions in his earlier work, or at least to ascribe the mounds of that State to the Iroquois. The third volume of the same Contributions (1852) introduces to us one of the ablest of the local investigators in a paper by Charles Whittlesey, of “Descriptions of Ancient Works in Ohio,”—the forerunner of numerous papers which he has given to the public in elucidation of the mounds.[1724] Three years later (1855), in the seventh volume of the Smithsonian Contributions, a new field in the emblematic and animal mounds of the northwest was for the first time brought to any considerable extent to public attention in the paper by Increase A. Lapham, on the “Antiquities of Wisconsin.” Lapham had made his explorations under the auspices of the American Antiquarian Society,[1725] and his manuscript had been revised by Haven, when it was decided to consign it for publication to the Smithsonian Institution.