There has been much talk in scientific circles lately about Palæoliths, and much misunderstanding about them. Let me try to explain in a few words what they are, what they tell, and what mistakes people make about them.

Since man first appeared on this planet, his history has been a slow progress from the most rudimentary arts up to those which he now possesses. We know this, because in a given locality those remains of his art which are found undisturbed in strata geologically the oldest are always the rudest. The exceptions to this rule are in appearance only, as for instance when a given locality was not occupied by men until they had already acquired considerable knowledge of arts, or when a cultivated nation was overrun by a barbarous one.

The general line of advance I have indicated shows, wherever we can trace it, many similarities—similarities not necessarily dependent on an ancient intercourse, but simply because primitive man felt everywhere the same wants, and satisfied them in pretty much the same manner. He felt the need of defence and attack, and everywhere a stick and a stone offered themselves as the handiest and most effective weapons; he used both wherever he was, and adapted them to like shapes.

In casting about for some standard wherewith to measure the long progress from this simple beginning to the present day, antiquaries have hit upon a very excellent one—the choice of a material employed at any given epoch for obtaining a cutting edge—for manufacturing l’instrument tranchant. Man conquers nature as he does his enemy—by cutting her down. The world at present uses iron, or its next product steel, for that purpose; before it came into vogue many nations employed bronze; but in the earliest periods of man’s history, and to-day in some savage tribes, stone was the substance almost exclusively wrought for this purpose. These distinctions divide the progress of man into the three great periods; the Age of Iron, the Age of Bronze, and the Age of Stone.

Do not make the mistake of supposing that the remains of human art reveal this sequence in every locality; I have already hinted that this is not the case. And do not make that other mistake of supposing that all three are found in chronologic sequence over the whole world. On the contrary, they are synchronous even to-day, as there are now tribes in Brazil in the Age of Stone and nations in Asia in the Age of Bronze. The word “Age” in this connection does not mean a definite period of time, but a recognized condition of art.

In Western Europe, however, where these terms originated, the three Ages were chronologic. Previous to about two thousand years before the Christian era, all the nations in that region employed stone exclusively to manufacture their cutting implements; later, bronze was preferred for the same purpose; and still later, iron. I say “preferred,” for do not imagine that the implement of stone or of bronze was straightway discarded when the better material was learned. We know that stone battle-axes were used in Ireland and Germany down to the tenth century, and bronze was employed by Romans and Egyptians long after they became acquainted with iron.

Each of these three Ages has various subdivisions. Those of the Age of Stone are particularly important. They are two, based upon the manner in which the stone was brought to an edge. All the specimens in geologically the oldest deposits have been brought to an edge by a process of chipping off small pieces, so as to produce a sharp line or crest on a part or the whole of the border of the stone. This artificial process leaves such peculiar traces that a practiced eye cannot confound it with any accidental chipping which natural means effect.

The later deposits of the Age of Stone show that the early workmen had acquired another manner of dressing their material; they rubbed one stone against another, thus grinding it down to a sharp polished edge.

These two methods give the names to the two periods of the Age of Stone, the Period of Chipped Stone and the Period of Polished Stone. Do not suppose, however, that the workmen in polished stone forgot the art of chipping stone. On the contrary, they continued it side by side with their new learning, and you will find on the sites of their workshops plenty of stone implements in form and technical production like the chipped implements of the older period.

We know that the polished or ground-stone implements came into use later than the earliest chipped implements, for in the oldest beds the latter are found exclusively. Hence the time when they were used exclusively is called the older stone implement period or the Palæolithic period; while, the time when both chipped and polished stones were used, metals were yet unknown, is named the newer stone implement period, or the Neolithic period. A true “Palæolith” is a typical chipped stone implement, the position of which when found leads us to believe that it was manufactured in the older of these periods.

We are not entirely dependent on its position to decide its antiquity. The kind of stone it is, the amount of weather-wearing or patine it shows, certain characteristics of shape and size, the indication that the chipping was done in a peculiar manner, all these aid the skilled observer in pronouncing definitely as to whether it is a true Palæolith.

Nor is position always a guarantee of antiquity. A genuine Palæolith may have been washed into newer strata, or be exposed by natural agencies on the surface of the ground, and in such cases it may not be possible to distinguish it from the products of Neolithic industry. A recent product of art may have sunk or been buried in an ancient stratum, and thus become what is termed an “intrusive deposit.”

The Palæolithic period itself is advantageously subdivided further into two Epochs, an earlier one in which men made “simple” implements only, and a later one in which they manufactured “compound” implements as well. I was the first to point out this distinction, and as I have found it really useful, and as others have also expressed to me the value which it has been to them in this line of research, I will explain it further.^[33] A “compound” implement is one composed of several parts adapted to each other, as the bow and the arrow, the spear with its shaft and blade, or the axe with its head and helve and the means of fastening the one to the other. These were not early acquisitions. During long ages man contented himself with such tools or weapons as he could frame of a single piece of wood or stone, simply holding it in his hand. When he found he could increase its effectiveness by fitting it to a handle, the discovery marked an era in his culture.

He may indeed in his rudest ages have lashed a stone to the end of his club, or have inserted a spall of flint in the split end of a stick; but these are not compound implements in the proper sense of the term. The expression means an art-product which clearly shows that it was but one part of a mechanical apparatus. The arrow-head with its stem, barbs and body, the stone axe with its grooves or drilled perforation for the handle, are incomplete in themselves, they disclose a preconceived plan for the adjustment of parts which man in his earliest and rudest condition does not seem to have possessed. The most ancient strata in which the remains of human art have been found, either in Europe or America, yield “simple” implements only; “compound” implements are a conquest of his inventive faculty at a later date.

So far as America is concerned it is probable that the oldest remains of man yet discovered on the northern continent have been those exhumed in the valley of the Delaware River, in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. According to the most careful geological observers that large deposit of gravel covering about five thousand acres on both banks of the river below Trenton is a post-glacial deposit not less than twelve or fifteen thousand years old. Imbedded in this at various depths a large number of true palæoliths have been discovered by Dr. C. C. Abbott, Professor F. A. Putnam, myself and others. Every one of them so far as I am aware belongs to the class of “simple” implements, not an arrowhead nor grooved axe nor stemmed scraper having been reported.

Another deposit of gravel further down the Delaware River is much older: The best authorities in such matters believe that it was deposited, not after the recession of the great glacier which once covered Canada and the northern portion of the United States, but while that tremendous phenomena was at its height, and when all the streams of the central United States were periodically choked with vast masses of ice and snow. In this, which is called the Columbian gravel, chipped stone implements have been found by Mr. Cresson, all of the “simple” variety, and at such depths as to preclude the theory of an intrusive deposit. These discoveries carry the age of the appearance of man in the Delaware valley back to a date which is possibly over a hundred thousand years ago.

The great glacier left its mass of boulders, pebbles and broken stone, which it pushed before it, or carried with it, in a long line of so-called “moraines,” extending, roughly speaking, from New York to St. Louis. In this mass, at its edges where the great wash from the melting ice poured down, palæoliths have been found in undisturbed position, proving that also there man had struggled with the inclemency of the ice-age, and, poorly provided as he was, had come out victorious. Here too all the implements he left are of the “simple” type, indicating at once the vast antiquity of the period and the presence of a race substantially the same as that to the east at the same date.

No tribe has been known to history which was confined to the knowledge of “simple” implements, or which manufactured stone implements exclusively in the Palæolithic forms. Wherever, therefore, these are found without the admixture of artificially ground or polished stones we may be sure we face the remains of a time whose antiquity cannot be measured by any chronology applied to the historic records of humanity.

This enables us in a measure to define the limits of the region known to the human race at this, its earliest epoch; with our present deficient knowledge we can do so only partially and by exclusion. It is safe to state that in Europe Palæolithic man did not occupy the central alpine area of Switzerland and its surroundings, nor the plains of Russia, nor any part of the Scandinavian peninsula, Scotland, Ireland, nor Iceland. In North America he had no habitations north of the forty-first parallel of latitude except perhaps close to the shores of the two great oceans;^[34] it is not probable that his foot pressed the soil of any of the West Indian Islands; but when the great Austral Glacier was in its recession depositing the fertile loam of the pampas of Buenos Ayres human beings with their rude Palæoliths were following up the retreating line of ice, as in the Northern Hemisphere. Ages uncounted and uncountable have passed since then, but man has left indestructible evidences that even in that early morn of his existence he had explored and conquered that continent which a late generation has chosen to call “the New World.”

Were the question I am about to discuss one of merely theoretical bearings, I should not approach it; but the widespread belief that the American tribes are genealogically connected with the Mongolians is constantly directing and coloring the studies of many Americanists, very much as did at one time the belief that the red men are the present representatives of the ten lost tribes of Israel. It is practically worth while, therefore, to examine the grounds on which the American race is classed by these anthropologists as a branch of the Mongolian, and to inquire whether the ancient culture of America betrayed any positive signs of Mongolian influence.

You will permit me to avoid the discussion as to what constitutes races in anthropology. To me they are zoölogical sub-species, marked by fixed and correlated characteristics, impressed so firmly that they have suffered no appreciable alteration within the historic period either through time or environment. In this sense, Blumenbach, in the last century, recognized five races, corresponding to the five great land-areas of the globe, and to their characteristic faunal and floral centres. This division was an eminently scientific one, and still remains the most in accord with anatomical and linguistic research. About twenty years after the appearance of Blumenbach’s work, however, the eminent naturalist Cuvier published his great work on “The Animal Kingdom,” in which he rejected Blumenbach’s classification, and proposed one dividing the human species into three races,—the white or Caucasian, the black or Ethiopian, and the yellow or Mongolian. In the latter he included the Malays and the American Indians.

This triple division has been very popular in France, and to some extent in other countries. It is not, and it was not in its inception, a scientific deduction from observed facts, but was a sort of a priori hypothesis based on the physiological theories of Bichat, and at a later day derived support from the philosophic dreams of Auguste Comte. Bichat, for instance, had recognized three fundamental physiological systems in man—the vegetative or visceral, the osso-muscular, and the cerebro-spinal. The anthropologists, in turn, considered it a happy thought to divide the human species into three races, each of which should show the predominance of one or other of these systems. Thus the black race was to show the predominance of the vegetative system; the yellow race, the osso-muscular system; the white race, the nervous system.^[36] As Bichat had not discovered any more physiological systems, so there could be no more human races on the earth: and thus the sacred triplets of the Comtian philosophy could be vindicated.

How little value attaches to any such generalizations you will readily perceive, and you will be prepared, with me, to dismiss them all, and to turn to the facts of the case, inquiring whether there are any traits of the red race which justify their being called “Mongolian” or “Mongoloid.”

Such affinities have been asserted to exist in language, in culture, and in physical peculiarities, and I shall take these up seriatim for examination.

First, as to language.

The great Mongolian stock is divided into the southern branch, speaking monosyllabic, isolating languages, and the northern branch, whose dialects are polysyllabic and agglutinating. The latter are sometimes called Turanian or Ural-Altaic; and as they are geographically contiguous to the Eskimo, and almost to the Athabascans, we might reasonably expect the linguistic kinship, if any exists, to be shown in this branch of Mongol speech. Is such the case? Not in the least. To prove it, I think it enough to quote the positive statement of the best European authority on the Ural-Altaic languages, Dr. Heinrich Winkler. He emphatically says, that, in the present state of linguistic science, not only is there no connection apparent between any Ural-Altaic and any American language, but that such connection is shown to be highly improbable. The evidence is all the other way.^[37]

I need not, therefore, delay over this part of my subject, but will proceed to inquire whether there are any American affinities to the monosyllabic, isolating languages of Asia.

There is one prominent example, which has often been put forward, of a supposed monosyllabic American language; and its relationship to the Chinese has frequently been asserted—a relationship, it has been said, extending both to its vocabulary and its grammar. This is the Otomi, spoken in and near the valley of Mexico. It requires, however, but a brief analysis of the Otomi to see that it is not a monosyllabic language in the linguistic sense, and that in its sentence-building it is incorporative and polysynthetic, like the great majority of American tongues, and totally unlike the Chinese. I may refer to my own published study of the Otomi, and to that of the Count de Charencey, as proving what I say.^[38]

Some have thought that the Maya of Yucatan has in its vocabulary a certain number of Chinese elements; but all these can readily be explained on the doctrine of coincidences. The Mexican antiquary Mendoza has marshalled far more coincidences of like character and equal worth to show that the Nahuatl is an Aryan dialect descended from the Sanscrit.^[39] In fine, any, even the remotest, linguistic connection between American and Mongolian languages has yet to be shown; and any linguist who considers the radically diverse genius of the two groups of tongues will not expect to find such relationship.

I shall not detain you long with arguments touching supposed Mongolian elements of culture in ancient America. Any one at all intimately conversant with the progress of American archæology in the last twenty years must see how rapidly has grown the conviction that American culture was homebred, to the manor born: that it was wholly indigenous and had borrowed nothing—nothing, from either Europe, Asia, or Africa. The peculiarities of native American culture are typical, and extend throughout the continent. Mr. Lewis Morgan was perfectly right in the general outline of his theory to this effect, though, like all persons enamored of a theory, he carried it too far.

This typical, racial American culture is as far as possible, in spirit and form, from the Mongolian. Compare the rich theology of Mexico or Peru with the barren myths of China. The theory of governments, the method of house-construction, the position of woman, the art of war,^[40] are all equally diverse, equally un-Mongolian. It is useless to bring up single art-products or devices, such as the calendar, and lay stress on certain similarities. The doctrine of the parallelism of human development explains far more satisfactorily all these coincidences. The sooner that Americanists generally, and especially those in Europe, recognize the absolute autochthony of native American culture, the more valuable will their studies become.

It is no longer in season to quote the opinions of Alexander von Humboldt and his contemporaries on this subject, as I see is done in some recent works. The science of archæology has virtually come into being since they wrote, and we now know that the development of human culture is governed by laws with which they were unacquainted. Civilization sprang up in certain centres in both continents, widely remote from each other; but, as the conditions of its origin were everywhere the same, its early products were much alike.

It is evident from what I have said, that the asserted Mongolian or Mongoloid connection of the American race finds no support either from linguistics or the history of culture. If anywhere, it must be in physical resemblances. In fact, it has been mainly from these that the arguments have been drawn. Let us examine them.

Cuvier, who, as I have said, is responsible for the confusion of the American with the Mongolian race, based his racial scheme on the color of the skin, and included the American within the limits of the yellow race. Cuvier had seen very few pure Mongolians, and perhaps no pure-blooded Americans; otherwise he would not have maintained that the hue of the latter is yellow. Certainly it is not. You may call it reddish, or coppery, or cinnamon, or burnt sugar, but you cannot call it yellow. Some individuals or small tribes may approach the peculiar dusky olive of the Chinaman, but so do some of the European peoples of Aryan descent; and there are not wanting anthropologists who maintain that the Aryans are also Mongoloid. The one position is just as defensible as the other on the ground of color.

Several of the most prominent classifications of mankind are based upon the character of the hair; the three great divisions being, as you know, into the straight, the curly, and the woolly haired varieties. These external features of the hair depend upon the form of the individual hairs as seen in cross-section. The nearer this approaches a circle, the straighter is the hair. It is true that both Mongolians and Americans belong to the straight haired varieties; but of the two, the American has the straighter hair, that whose cross-section comes nearer to a perfect circle. So that by all the rules of terminology and logic, if we are to call either branch a variation from the other, we should say that the Mongol is a variety of the American race, and call it “Americanoid,” instead of vice versa.

The color of the hair of the two races is, moreover, distinctly different. Although superficially both seem black, yet, observed carefully by reflected light, it is seen that the ground-tone of the Mongolian is bluish, while that of the American is reddish.

Of positive cranial characteristics of the red race, I call attention to the interparietal bone (the os Incæ), which is found in its extreme development in the American, in its greatest rarity among the Mongolians; also to the form of the glabella, found most prominent in American crania, least prominent in Altaic or northern Mongoloid crania; and the peculiar American characteristics of the occipital bone, flattened externally, and internally presenting in nearly forty per cent. of cases the “Aymarian depression,” as it has been termed, instead of the internal occipital protuberance.^[41]

The shape of the skull has been made another ground of race-distinction; and, although we have learned of late years that its value was greatly over-estimated by the earlier craniologists, we have also learned that in the average, and throughout large numbers of peoples, it is a very persistent characteristic, and one potently indicative of descent or relationship. Now, of all the peoples of the world, the Mongols, especially the Turanian branch, are the most brachycephalic; they have the roundest heads; and it is in a high degree noteworthy that precisely the American nation dwelling nearest to these, having undoubted contact with them for unnumbered generations, are long-headed, or dolichocephalic, in a marked degree. I mean the Eskimo, and I cannot but be surprised that such an eminent anthropologist as Virchow,^[42] in spite of this anatomical fact, and in defiance of the linguistic evidence, should have repeated the assertion that the Eskimo are of Mongolian descent.

Throughout the American continent generally, the natives were not markedly brachycephalic. This was abundantly illustrated more than twenty years ago by the late Prof. James Aitkins Meigs, in his “Observations on the Cranial Forms of the American Aborigines.” They certainly, in this respect, show no greater Mongoloid affinities than do their white successors on the soil of the United States.

If color, hair, and crania are thus shown to present such feeble similarities, what is it that has given rise to a notion of the Mongoloid origin of the American Indian? Is it the so-called Mongolian eye, the oblique eye, with a seeming droop at its inner canthus? Yes, a good deal has been made of this by certain writers, especially by travellers who are not anatomists. The distinguished ethnologist Topinard says the Chinese are very often found without it, and I can confirm this opinion by those I have seen in this country. It is, indeed, a slight deformity, affecting the skin of the eyebrow only, and is not at all infrequent in the white race. Surgeons know it under the name epicanthus, and, as with us it is considered a disfigurement, it is usually removed in infancy by a slight operation. In a few American tribes it is rather prevalent, but in most of the pure Indians I have seen, no trace of it was visible. It certainly does not rank as a racial characteristic.^[43]

The nasal index has been recommended by some anatomists as one of the most persistent and trustworthy of racial indications. The Mongolian origin of the red race derives faint support from this quarter. From the measurements given in the last edition of Topinard’s work^[44] the Mongolian index is 80, while that of the Eskimo and tribes of the United States and Canada, as far as observed, is 70, that of the average Parisian of to-day being 69 (omitting fractions). According to this test, the American is much closer to the white than to the yellow race.

Most of the writers (for instance, Avé-Lallemant, St. Hilaire, Peschel, and Virchow) who have argued for the Mongoloid character of the Americans, have quoted some one tribe which, it is asserted, shows marked Chinese traits. This has especially been said of the natives of three localities,—the Eskimo, the tribes of the North Pacific coast, and the Botocudos of Brazil. So far as the last-mentioned are concerned, the Botocudos, any such similarity has been categorically denied by the latest and most scientific traveller who has visited them, Dr. Paul Ehrenreich. It is enough if I refer you to his paper in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie for 1887, where he dismisses, I should say once for all, the notion of any such resemblance existing. I have already pointed out that the Eskimo are totally un-Mongolian in cranial shape, in nasal index, and in linguistic character. They do possess in some instances a general physiognomical similarity, and this is all; and this is not worth much, as against the dissimilarities mentioned. The same is true of the differences and similarities of some tribes of the north-west coast. In estimating the value of resemblances observed in this part of our continent, we should remember that we have sufficient evidence to believe that for many generations some slight intercourse has been going on between the adjacent mainlands and islands of the two continents in the regions of their nearest proximity. The same train of events led to a blending of the negro and the white races along the shores of the Red Sea; but any one who recognizes the distinction of races at all—and I am aware that certain eccentric anthropologists do not—will not, on that account, claim that the white race is negroid. With just as little reason, it seems to me, has it been argued that the native Americans as a race are Mongoloid.^[45]

An acute philosophical writer has stated that the superficial observer is apt to be impressed with the similarities of objects; while the profounder student finds his attention more profitably attracted to their differences. By this maxim we may explain this theory of the affinities of the American race as well as many another which has been broached.

[The following Essay is reprinted without alteration. It appeared in the American Antiquarian for October, 1881, and has a certain degree of historic value as illustrating the progress of archæologic study in the United States. It is, I believe, the first reasoned argument that the constructors of the mounds of the Ohio Valley were the ancestors of tribes known and resident not remote from the sites of these ancient works. Though this opinion has not yet been fully accepted, the tendency of later studies is unquestionably in its favor.]

The question, Who were the Mound-builders? is one that still remains open in American archæology. Among the most recent expressions of opinion I may quote Prof. John T. Short, who thinks that one or two thousand years may have elapsed since they deserted the Ohio valley, and probably eight hundred since they finally retired from the Gulf coast.^[46] Mr. J. P. MacLean continues to believe them to have been somehow related to the “Toltecs.”^[47] Dr. J. W. Foster, making a tremendous leap, connects them with a tribe “who, in times far remote, flourished in Brazil,” and adds: “a broad chasm is to be spanned before we can link the Mound-builders to the North American Indians. They were essentially different in their form of government, their habits and their daily pursuits. The latter were never known to erect structures which should survive the lapse of a generation.”^[48]

On the other hand, we have the recent utterance of so able an ethnologist as Major J. W. Powell to the effect that, “With regard to the mounds so widely scattered between the two oceans, it may be said that mound-building tribes were known in the early history of discovery of this continent, and that the vestiges of art discovered do not excel in any respect the arts of the Indian tribes known to history. There is, therefore, no reason for us to search for an extralimital origin through lost tribes for the arts discovered in the mounds of North America.”^[49]

Between opinions so discrepant the student in archæology may well be at a loss, and it will therefore be worth while to inquire just how far the tribes who inhabited the Mississippi valley and the Atlantic slope at the time of the discovery were accustomed to heap up mounds, excavate trenches, or in other ways leave upon the soil permanent marks of their occupancy.

Beginning with the warlike northern invaders, the Iroquois, it clearly appears that they were accustomed to construct burial mounds. Colden states that the corpse was placed in a large round hole and that “they then raise the Earth in a round Hill over it.”^[50] Further particulars are given by Lafitau: the grave was lined with bark, and the body roofed in with bark and branches in the shape of an arch, which was then covered with earth and stones so as to form an agger or tumulus.^[51] In these instances the mound was erected over a single corpse; but it was also the custom among the Hurons and Iroquois, as we are informed by Charlevoix, to collect the bones of their dead every ten years, and inter them in one mass together.^[52] The slain in a battle were also collected into one place and a large mound heaped over them, as is stated by Mr. Paul Kane,^[53] and that such was an ancient custom of the Iroquois tribes, is further shown by a tradition handed down from the last century, according to which the Iroquois believed that the Ohio mounds were the memorials of a war which in ancient times they waged with the Cherokees.^[54] Mr. E. G. Squier, who carefully examined many of the earthworks in the country of the ancient Iroquois, was inclined at first to suppose the remains he found there were parts of “a system of defence extending from the source of the Allegheny and Susquehanna in New York, diagonally across the country through central and northern Ohio to the Wabash,” and hence drew the inference that “the pressure of hostilities [upon the mound-builders] was from the north-east.”^[55] This opinion has been repeated by some recent writers; but Mr. Squier himself substantially retracted it in a later work, and reached the conviction that whatever ancient remains there are in Western New York and Pennsylvania are to be attributed to the later Indian tribes and not to the Mound-builders.^[56]

The neighbors of the Iroquois, the various Algonkin tribes, were occasionally constructors of mounds. In comparatively recent times we have a description of a “victory mound” raised by the Chippeways after a successful encounter with the Sioux. The women and children threw up the adjacent surface soil into a heap about five feet high and eight or ten feet in diameter, upon which a pole was erected, and to it tufts of grass were hung, one for each scalp taken.^[57]

Robert Beverly, in his History of Virginia, first published in 1705, describes some curious constructions by the tribes there located. He tells us that they erected “pyramids and columns” of stone, which they painted and decorated with wampum, and paid them a sort of worship. They also constructed stone altars on which to offer sacrifices.^[58] This adoration of stones and masses of rocks—or rather of the genius which was supposed to reside in them—prevailed also in Massachusetts and other Algonkin localities, and easily led to erecting such piles.^[59]

Another occasion for mound-building among the Virginian Indians was to celebrate or make a memorial of a solemn treaty. On such an occasion they performed the time honored ceremony of “burying the hatchet,” a tomahawk being literally put in the ground, “and they raise a pile of stones over it, as the Jews did over the body of Absalom.”^[60]

I am not aware of any evidence that the Cherokees were mound-builders: but they appreciated the conveniences of such structures, and in one of their villages William Bartram found their council house situated on a large mound. He adds: “But it may be proper to observe that this mount on which the rotunda stands is of a much ancienter date than the building, and perhaps was raised for another purpose.”^[61] Lieutenant Timberlake is about our best early authority on the Cherokees, and I believe he nowhere mentions that they built upon mounds of artificial construction. Adair, however, states that they were accustomed to heap up and add to piles of loose stones in memory of a departed chief, or as monuments of important events.^[62]

The tribes who inhabited what we now call the Gulf States, embracing the region between the eastern border of Texas and the Atlantic Ocean south of the Savannah River, belonged, with few and small exceptions, to the great Chahta-Muskokee family, embracing the tribes known as Choctaws, Chikasaws, Muskokees or Creeks, Seminoles, Allibamons, Natchez and others. The languages of all these have numerous and unmistakable affinities, the Choctaw or Chahta presenting probably the most archaic form. It is among them, if anywhere within our limits, that we must look for the descendants of the mysterious “Mound-builders.” No other tribes can approach them in claims for this distinction. Their own traditions, it is true, do not point to a migration from the north, but from the west; nor do they contain any reference to the construction of the great works in question; but these people seem to have been a building race, and to have reared tumuli not contemptible in comparison even with the mightiest of the Ohio Valley.

The first explorer who has left us an account of his journey in this region was Cabeza de Vaca, who accompanied the exposition of Pamfilo de Narvaez in 1527. He, however, kept close to the coast for fear of losing his way, and saw for the most part only the inferior fishing tribes. These he describes as generally in a miserable condition. Their huts were of mats erected on piles of oyster shells (the shell heaps now so frequent along the southern coast). Yet he mentions that in one part, which I judge to be somewhere in Louisiana, the natives were accustomed to erect their dwellings on steep hills and around their base to dig a ditch, as a means of defence.^[63]

Our next authorities are very important. They are the narrators of Captain Hernando de Soto’s famous and ill starred expedition. Of this we have the brief account of Biedma, the longer story of “the gentleman of Elvas,” a Portuguese soldier of fortune, intelligent and clear-headed, and the poetical and brilliant composition of Garcilasso de la Vega. In all of these we find the southern tribes described as constructing artificial mounds, using earthworks for defence, excavating ditches and canals, etc. I quote the following passage in illustration:

“The town and the house of the Cacique Ossachile are like those of the other caciques in Florida. * * * The Indians try to place their villages on elevated sites; but inasmuch as in Florida there are not many sites of this kind where they can conveniently build, they erect elevations themselves in the following manner: They select the spot and carry there a quantity of earth which they form into a kind of platform two or three pikes in height, the summit of which is large enough to give room for twelve, fifteen or twenty houses, to lodge the cacique and his attendants. At the foot of this elevation they mark out a square place according to the size of the village, around which the leading men have their houses. * * * To ascend the elevation they have a straight passage way from bottom to top, fifteen or twenty feet wide. Here steps are made by massive beams, and others are planted firmly in the ground to serve as walls. On all other sides of the platform, the sides are cut steep.”^[64]

Later on La Vega describes the village of Capaha:

“This village is situated on a small hill, and it has about five hundred good houses, surrounded with a ditch ten or twelve cubits (brazas) deep, and a width of fifty paces in most places, in others forty. The ditch is filled with water from a canal which has been cut from the town to Chicagua. The canal is three leagues in length, at least a pike in depth, and so wide that two large boats could easily ascend or descend it, side by side. The ditch which is filled with water from this canal surrounds the town except in one spot, which is closed by heavy beams planted in the earth.”^[65]

Biedma remarks in one passage, speaking of the provinces of Ycasqui and Pacaha: “The caciques of this region were accustomed to erect near the house where they lived very high mounds (tertres très-elevèes), and there were some who placed their houses on the top of these mounds.”^[66]

I cannot state precisely where these provinces and towns were situated; the successful tracing of De Soto’s journey has never yet been accomplished, but remains as an interesting problem for future antiquaries to solve. One thing I think is certain; that until he crossed the Mississippi he at no time was outside the limits of the wide spread Chahta-Muskokee tribes. The proper names preserved, and the courses and distances given, both confirm this opinion. We find them therefore in his time accustomed to erect lofty mounds, terraces and platforms, and to protect their villages by extensive circumvallations. I shall proceed to inquire whether such statements are supported by later writers.

Our next authorities in point of time are the French Huguenots, who undertook to make a settlement on the St. John River near where St. Augustine now stands in Florida. The short and sad history of this colony is familiar to all. The colonists have, however, left us some interesting descriptions of the aborigines. In the neighborhood of St. Augustine these belonged to the Timuquana tribe, specimens of whose language have been preserved to us, but which, according to the careful analysis recently published by Mr. A. S. Gatschet,^[67] has no relationship with the Chahta-Muskokee, nor, for that matter, with any other known tongue. Throughout the rest of the peninsula a Muskokee dialect probably prevailed.

The “Portuguese gentleman” tells us that at the very spot where De Soto landed, generally supposed to be somewhere about Tampa Bay, at a town called Ucita, the house of the chief “stood near the shore upon a very high mound made by hand for strength.” Such mounds are also spoken of by the Huguenot explorers. They served as the site of the chieftain’s house in the villages, and from them led a broad, smooth road through the village to the water.^[68] These descriptions correspond closely to those of the remains which the botanists, John and William Bartram, discovered and reported about a century ago.

It would also appear that the natives of the peninsula erected mounds over their dead, as memorials. Thus the artist Le Moyne de Morgues, writes: “Defuncto aliquo rege ejus proviciæ, magna solemnitate sepelitur, et ejus tumulo crater, e quo bibere solebat, imponitur, defixis circum ipsum tumulum multis sagittis.”^[69] The picture he gives of the “tumulus” does not represent it as more than three or four feet in height; so that if this was intended as an accurate representation, the structure scarcely rises to the dignity of a mound.

After the destruction of the Huguenot colony in 1565, the Spanish priests at once went to work to plant their missions. The Jesuit fathers established themselves at various points south of the Savannah River, but their narratives, which have been preserved in full in a historic work of great rarity, describe the natives as broken up into small clans, waging constant wars, leading vagrant lives, and without fixed habitations.^[70] Of these same tribes, however, Richard Blomes, an English traveler, who visited them about a century later, says that they erected piles or pyramids of stones, on the occasion of a successful conflict, or when they founded a new village, for the purpose of keeping the fact in long remembrance.^[71] About the same time another English traveler, by name Bristock, claimed to have visited the interior of the country and to have found in “Apalacha” a half-civilized nation, who constructed stone walls and had a developed sun worship; but in a discussion of the authenticity of his alleged narrative I have elsewhere shown that it cannot be relied upon, and is largely a fabrication.^[72] A correct estimate of the constructive powers of the Creeks is given by the botanist, William Bartram, who visited them twice in the latter half of the last century. He found they had “chunk yards” surrounded by low walls of earth, at one end of which, sometimes on a moderate artificial elevation, was the chief’s dwelling and at the other end the public council house.^[73] His descriptions resemble so closely those in La Vega that evidently the latter was describing the same objects on a larger scale—or from magnified reports.

Within the present century the Seminoles of Florida are said to have retained the custom of collecting the slain after a battle and interring them in one large mound. The writer on whose authority I state this, adds that he “observed on the road from St. Augustine to Tomaka, one mound which must have covered two acres of ground,”^[74] but this must surely have been a communal burial mound.

Passing to the tribes nearer the Mississippi, most of them of Choctaw affiliation, we find considerable testimony in the French writers to their use of mounds. Thus M. de la Harpe says: “The cabins of the Yasous, Courous, Offogoula and Ouspie are dispersed over the country on mounds of earth made with their own hands.”^[75] The Natchez were mostly of Choctaw lineage. In one of their villages Dumont notes that the cabin of the chief was elevated on a mound.^[76] Father Le Petit, a missionary who labored among them, gives the particulars that the residence of the great chief or “Brother of the Sun,” as he was called, was erected on a mound (butte) of earth carried for that purpose. When the chief died, the house was destroyed, and the same mound was not used as the site of the mansion of his successor, but was left vacant and a new one was constructed.^[77] This interesting fact goes to explain the great number of mounds in some localities; and it also teaches us the important truth that we cannot form any correct estimate of the date when a mound-building tribe left a locality by counting the rings in trees, etc., because long before they departed, certain tumuli or earthworks may have been deserted and tabooed from superstitious notions, just as many were among the Natchez.

We have the size of the Natchez mounds given approximately by M. Le Page du Pratz. He observes that the one on which was the house of the Great Sun was “about eight feet high and twenty feet over on the surface.”^[78] He adds that their temple, in which the perpetual fire was kept burning, was on a mound about the same height.

The custom of communal burial has been adverted to. At the time of the discovery it appears to have prevailed in most of the tribes from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. The bones of each phratry or gens—the former, probably—were collected every eight or ten years and conveyed to the spot where they were to be finally interred. A mound was raised over them which gradually increased in size with each additional interment. The particulars of this method of burial have often been described, and it is enough that I refer to a few authorities in the note.^[79] Indeed it has not been pretended that such mounds necessarily date back to a race anterior to that which occupied the soil at the advent of the white man.

I have not included in the above survey the important Dakota stock who once occupied an extended territory on the upper Mississippi and its affluents, and scattered clans of whom were resident on the Atlantic Coast in Virginia and Carolina. But, in fact, I have nowhere found that they erected earthworks of any pretentions whatever.

From what I have collected, therefore, it would appear that the only resident Indians at the time of the discovery who showed any evidence of mound-building comparable to that found in the Ohio valley were the Chahta-Muskokees. I believe that the evidence is sufficient to justify us in accepting this race as the constructors of all those extensive mounds, terraces, platforms, artificial lakes and circumvallations which are scattered over the Gulf States, Georgia and Florida. The earliest explorers distinctly state that such were used and constructed by these nations in the sixteenth century, and probably had been for many generations. Such too, is the opinion arrived at by Col. C. C. Jones, than whom no one is more competent to speak with authority on this point. Referring to the earthworks found in Georgia he writes: “We do not concur in the opinion so often expressed that the mound-builders were a race distinct from and superior in art, government, and religion, to the Southern Indians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”

It is a Baconian rule which holds good in every department of science that the simplest explanation of a given fact or series of facts should always be accepted; therefore if we can point out a well known race of Indians who, at the time of the discovery, raised mounds and other earthworks, not wholly dissimilar in character and not much inferior in size to those in the Ohio valley, and who resided not very far away from that region and directly in the line which the Mound-Builders are believed by all to have followed in their emigration, then this rule constrains us to accept for the present this race as the most probable descendants of the Mound Tribes, and seek no further for Toltecs, Asiatics or Brazilians. All these conditions are filled by the Chahta tribes.^[80]

It is true, as I have already said, that the traditions of their own origin do not point to the north but rather to the west or northwest; but in one of these traditions it is noticeable that they claim their origin to have been from a large artificial mound, the celebrated Nanih Waiya, the Sloping Hill, an immense pile in the valley of the Big Black River;^[81] and it may be that this is a vague reminiscence of their remote migration from their majestic works in the north.

The size of the southern mounds is often worthy of the descendants of those who raised the vast piles in the northern valleys. Thus one in the Etowah Valley, Georgia, has a cubical capacity of 1,000,000, cubic feet.^[82] The Messier Mound, near the Chatahoochee River, contains about 700,000 cubic feet.^[83] Wholly artificial mounds 50 to 70 feet in height, with base areas of about 200 by 400 feet, are by no means unusual in the river valleys of the Gulf States.

With these figures we may compare the dimensions of the northern mounds. The massive one near Miamisburg, Ohio, 68 feet high, has been calculated to contain 311,350 cubic feet—about half the size of the Messier Mound. At Clark’s Works, Ohio, the embankments and mounds together contain about 3,000,000 cubic feet;^[84] but as the embankment is three miles long, most of this is not in the mounds themselves. Greater than any of these is the truncated pyramid at Cahokia, Illinois, which has an altitude of 90 feet and a base area of 700 by 500 feet. It is, however, doubtful whether this is wholly an artificial construction. Professor Spencer Smith has shown that the once famous “big mound” of St. Louis was largely a natural formation; and he expresses the opinion that many of the mounds in Missouri and Illinois, popularly supposed to be artificial constructions, are wholly, or in great part, of geologic origin.^[85] There is apparently therefore no such great difference between the earth structures of the Chahta tribes, and those left us by the more northern mound-builders, that we need suppose for the latter any material superiority in culture over the former when first they became known to the whites; nor is there any improbability in assuming that the Mound-builders of the Ohio were in fact the progenitors of the Chahta tribes, and were driven south probably about three or four hundred years before the discovery. Such is the conviction to which the above reasoning leads us.

In the course of it, I have said nothing about the condition of the arts of the Mound-builders compared with that of the early southern Indians; nor have I spoken of their supposed peculiar religious beliefs which a recent writer thinks to point to “Toltec” connections;^[86] nor have I discussed the comparative craniology of the Mound-builders, upon which some very remarkable hypotheses have been erected; nor do I think it worth while to do so, for in the present state of anthropologic science, all the facts of these kinds relating to the Mound-builders which we have as yet learned, can have no appreciable weight to the investigator.

[Investigations conducted since the above Essay was printed require some modifications in its statements. The researches of Professor Cyrus Thomas render it likely that the Cherokees were also Mound-builders, and that they occupied portions of Western Pennsylvania and Western Virginia less than two centuries ago. (See also my work The Lenâpè and their Legends, pp. 16–18. Philadelphia, 1885.) Probably the Ohio Valley Mound-builders were the ancestors of some of the Cherokees as well as of the Chahta-Muskoki tribes. Craniologic data from the Ohio mounds are still too vague to permit inferences from them.]