Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/427

Rh they contain vast heaps of slain, and are memorials of great battles, is unsupported by facts. Still more remarkable earthworks are those commonest in Wisconsin and Iowa, but of which a few examples are found in Ohio, and which bear the outlines of men and animals, constituting huge bass-reliefs on the surface of the earth. One of these, surveyed by Squier and Davis in 1846, on the banks of Brush creek, Adams county, Ohio, is in the form of a serpent, over 1,000 feet in length, extended in graceful curves, and terminating in a triple coil at the tail. The embankment constituting the effigy is upward of 5 feet high by 30 feet base at the centre of the body, diminishing somewhat toward the head and tail. The neck of the figure is stretched out and slightly curved, and its mouth is opened wide, as if in the act of swallowing or ejecting an oval figure, which rests partly between the distended jaws. This oval is formed by an embankment 4 feet high, and is perfectly regular in outline, its transverse and conjugate diameters being 103 and 39 feet respectively. The combined figure has been regarded by some as a representation of the oriental cosmological idea of the serpent and the egg. With the remains of the dead in the sepulchral mounds, as also within those which are believed to have been connected with the religion of their builders, many relics of art have been discovered, displaying greater skill than was known to exist among the tribes found in occupation of the country at the time of the discovery. Elaborate carvings in stone, pottery often of elegant design, articles of use and ornament in metal, silver, and native copper from Lake Superior, mica from the Alleghanies, shells from the gulf of Mexico, and obsidian, probably also porphyry, from Mexico, are found side by side in the same mound. Articles of comparatively recent date, some of them of undoubted European origin, have also been found among the later and secondary deposits in the mounds. Forged inscriptions, stones bearing mysterious characters, "Erse, ancient Greek, Phœnician, Celtiberic, and Runic," as evidences of every possible and impossible theory of American origin, have each found people credulous enough to accept and defend their authenticity, even after the authors of the various impostures have abandoned them to their fate. The facts connected with the monuments of the Mississippi valley "indicate that the ancient population was numerous and widely spread, as shown from the number and magnitude of their works, and the extensive range of their occurrence; that it was essentially homogeneous in customs, habits, religion, and government, as appears from the great uniformity which the works display, not only in respect to position and form, but in all minor particulars; and that the features common to all the remains identify them as appertaining to a single grand system, owing its origin to a family of men moving in the same general direction, acting under common impulses, and influenced by similar causes." Whatever differences the monuments display are such as might result from the progressive efforts of a people in a state of development, or from the weaker efforts of colonies, or what might be called provincial communities. It is impossible that a population for whose protection such extensive military works were necessary, and which was able to defend them, should not have been eminently agricultural; and such monuments as the mounds at Grave Creek and Cahokia indicate not only a dense agricultural population, but a state of society essentially different from that of the existing race of Indians north of the tropic. There is not, and there was not at the period of the discovery, a single