Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/783

Rh abound. The sun shines clear overhead, and the huge mountains look down upon the cities and villages at their feet, like a mother upon her babes: all is a picture of peacefulness. Suddenly, in a second, all is changed. The protecting angels become destroying fiends, vomiting fire and liquid hell upon the devoted cities at their feet, burning, scorching, strangling their wretched inhabitants. The earth rocks horribly, palaces, temples, all crashing down, crushing their human victims, flocked together like so many ants. Vast rents open at their very feet, licking with huge, flaming tongues the terrified people into their yawning mouths. And then the inundations. Mighty waves sweep over the land. The fierce enemies, Fire and Water, join hands to effect the destruction of a mighty nation.

How they hiss and surge, rattle and seethe! How the steam rises, mingled with the black smoke, looking like a mourning-veil, that it is, and, when that veil is lifted, all is still, the quiet of annihilation! Of all that populous land, naught remains save fuming, seething mud. It is not to be supposed that all perished in that calamity. Long before this they had spread over the portion of the Americas contiguous to the peninsula, building cities, palaces, roads, and aqueducts, like those of their native homes; and adventurous pioneers continually spreading north, east, and westward, their constant increase of numbers from their former homes enabling them to overcome the resistance offered to their progress by both natives and nature, till at last they reached and discovered the copper country of Lake Superior. That they appreciated this discovery is evinced by the innumerable evidences of their works and of their skill in discovering the richest and most promising veins. Wherever our miners of the present day go, they find their ancient fellow craftsmen have been before them, worked the richest veins and gathered the best copper; and it is supposed that they continued thus till the terrible blotting out of their native country cut short all this, and left this advancing civilization to wither and die like a vine severed from the parent stem.

Having no further accession to their numbers, and being continually decimated by savages and disease, they slowly retreated before the ever-advancing hordes. Gradually, and contesting every step, as is shown by their numerous defensive works along their path, they were forced back to their cities on this continent, that had been spared them from the universal destruction of their country, where the dense and almost impassable forests afforded them their last refuge from their enemies, and where, reduced by war, pestilence, and other causes, to a feeble band, their total extinction was only a matter of time. Such is probably the history of this lost civilization, and such would have been the history of our civilization had we in our infant growth been cut off from receiving the nourishment of the mother countries.

Within the last twenty-five years, all sciences relating to the past