Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/601

Rh races using their hands to less advantage, as well as other bodily organs, the seats of the senses.

Savages exercise their minds less, and personify more than we do. Like children, they say more readily no than yes to all questions affecting their bodily advantage. They are afraid of change. All children and all savages are conservative. The savage has not passed the mental state of our own children. It is impossible for a child to conceive of any change in the world outside until it has had some experience of such changes and has reflected upon them. Even then it is hard for the child to understand the appearance of this city of Buffalo, for instance, ten years before the time when its mind first received permanent impressions. It is from this fact that youth appears so long when we look back upon it, as well as from the fact that our early impressions made upon the "clean slate" of the brain are more enduring, underlying and peering through our subsequent experiences. Even to ourselves, sensible to the hope of change, and therefore of a bettered condition of things, it is difficult and even distasteful to turn to the record of the past and make it give up its dead. It is hard for us to make a mental picture of the site of this city when Red Jacket lived hereabouts; scarcely possible, when, farther back still, in 1687, La Hontan traversed this place. But in the history of North America we can go back by the light of creditable documents to the year 986, when Biarne, the son of Bard son, set sail from Iceland, and, losing his way, came in sight of Newfoundland. Back of the earliest discovery by our race of this continent of North America must lie the history of the Indian. In Mexico traditional historic accounts take us back as far as the sixth century. And, for a still earlier time and its events, we have to penetrate the surface of this continent itself. The earth holds the further answers to these questions. In a story of ancient Greece, we read that there was a dispute as to whether Salamis had formerly belonged to the Athenians or the Megarians. When it was referred to Solon, he caused the graves to be opened. It was found then that their occupants were buried according to the custom of the Athenians, and not of the Megarians. The dead men settled that question. The testimony of the dead Athenians dispensed with the formula of an oath, and was yet accepted. No appeal was necessary after such evidence, just as no statute of limitation could bar a trial of such importance. It was a case of supplementary proceedings that commanded respect.

The earth of this continent shows us that before the Indians there has been a people whom we call Mound-builders—that is, mounds were thrown up here by men whose bones we find in them, lying among rough tools and utensils, and after the mounds we name the race, who, perhaps, were not a different people from the Indians.

But for these mounds we would not know of the men who built them. They are mentioned in no history, human or divine. What