sous leurs sens, ils manquoient de termes pour les exprimer, ou les avoient laissé tomber dans l'oubli."-Charlevoix, tom. v., p. 288.

The variety of dialects proves the little communication held between the different tribes of savages, a necessary consequence of their living by the chase, and requiring extensive hunting-grounds.

"We need only," says Acosta (De Procur. Indorum Salut.), “cross a valley for hearing another jargon."

No. XLVII.

"The following are the results of the most recent researches on the lines of fortifications, and the tumuli found between the Rocky Mountains and the chain of the Alleganies. The fortifications chiefly occupy the space between the great lakes of Canada, the Mississippi and the Ohio, from the fourty-fourth to the thirty-ninth degree of latitude. Those which advance most toward the northeast are on the Black River, one of the tributary streams of Lake Ontario. The most remarkable ancient fortifications in the State of Ohio are, 1st. Newark, a very regular octagon, containing an area of 32 acres, and connected with a circular circumvallation of 16 acres; the eight great doors of the octagon are defended by eight works placed before each opening. 2d. Perryvale County, numerous walls, not in clay, but stone. 3d. Marietta, two great squares with twelve doors; the walls of earth are 21 feet high, and 42 feet at their base. 4th. Circleville, a square with eight doors, and eight small works for their defense connected with a circular fort, surrounded by two walls and a moat. 5th. Point Creek, at the confluence of the Scioto and the Ohio; the fortifications are partly irregular; one of them contains 62 acres. 6th. Portsmouth, opposite. Alexandria; vast ruins, disposed on parallel lines, denote that this spot heretofore contained a numerous population. 7th. Little Miami and Cincinnati, a wall of 7 feet high and 6300 toises long. All these square forts are placed as exactly to the east as the Egyptian and Mexican pyramids; when the forts have only one opening, it is directed toward the rising sun. The walls of these lines of fortification are most frequently of earth, but two miles from Chilicothe, in the State of Ohio, we find a wall constructed in stone, from 12 to 15 feet high, and from 5 to 8 feet thick, forming an inclosure of 80 acres. It is not yet precisely known how far those works extend to the west, along the course of the Missouri and the River La Plata; but they are not found on the north of the Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Michigan, neither do they pass the chain of the Alleganies. Some circumvallations discovered on the banks of the Chenango, near Oxford, in the State of New York, may be considered as a very remarkable exception. We must not confound these military monuments with the mounds or tumuli containing thousands of skeletons of a stunted race of men, scarcely 5 feet high. These mounds increase in number from the north toward the south; Mr. Brackenridge thinks there are nearly 3000 tumuli, from

20 to 100 feet high, between the mouth of the Ohio, the Illinois, the Missouri, and the Rio San Francisco, and that the number of skeletons they contain indicate how considerable must have been the population heretofore of those countries. These monuments, considered as the places of sepulture of great communes, are most frequently situated at the confluence of rivers, and on the most favorable points for trade. The base of the tumuli is round, or of an oval form; they are generally of a conical form, and sometimes flattened at the summit, as if intended to serve for sacrifices, or other ceremonies to be seen by a great mass® of people at once. Some of these monuments are two or three stories high, and resemble in their form the Mexican Teocallis, and the pyramids with steps of Egypt and Western Asia. Some of the tumuli are constructed of earth, and some of stones heaped together. Hatchets have been found on them, together with painted pottery, vases, and ornaments of brass, a little iron, silver in plates (near Marietta), and perhaps gold (near Chilicothe). Some of these mounds are only a few feet high, and are placed at the center or in the neighborhood of the circular circumvallations; they were either tribunes for haranguing the assembled people, or places of sacrifice, and where they are only from 20 to 25 feet high, they may be considered as observatories erected to discover the movements of a neighboring enemy. The great tumuli, from 80 to 100 feet high, are most frequently insulated, and sometimes seem to be of the same age as the fortifications to which they are linked. The latter merit particular attention: I know nowhere any thing that resembles them either in South America or the ancient continent. The regularity of the polygon and circular forms, and the small works intended to cover the doors of the building, are, above all, remarkable. We know not whether they were inclosures of property, walls of defense against enemies, or intrenched camps, as in Central Asia. The custom of separating the different quarters of a town by circumvallations is observed alike in the ancient Tenochleitian and the Peruvian town of Chimu, the ruins of which I examined, between Truxillo and the coast of the South Sea. The tumuli are less characteristic constructions, and may have belonged to nations who had no communication with one another; they cover both Americas, the north of Asia, and the whole east of Europe, and, it is said, are still constructed by the Omawhaws of the River Plata. The skulls contained in the tumuli of the United States furnish means of recognizing, almost with certainty, to what degree the race of men by whom they were raised differ from the Indians who now inhabit the same countries. Mr. Mitchell believes that the skeletons of the caverns of Kentucky and Tennessee 'belong to the Malays, who came by the Pacific Ocean to the western coast of America, and were destroyed by the ancestors of the present Indians, and who were of Tartar race (Mongul).' With respect to the tumuli and the fortifications, the same learned writer supposes, with Mr. De Witt Clinton, that those monuments are the works of Scandinavian nations, who, from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, visited the coast of Greenland, Newfoundland, or Vinland, or Drageo, and a part of the

continent of North America. If this hypothesis be well founded, the skulls found in the tumuli ought to belong, not to the American, Mongul, or Malay race, but to a race vulgarly called Caucasian. Did the nations of the Mexican race, in their migrations to the south, send colonies toward the east, or do the monuments of the United States pertain to the Autochthone nations? Perhaps we must admit in North America, as in the ancient world, the simultaneous existence of several centers of civilization, of which the mutual relations are not known in history. The very civilized nations of New Spain, the Tolteques, the Azteques, and the Chichimeques, pretended to have issued successively, from the sixth to the twelfth century, from three neighboring countries situated toward the north. These nations spoke the same language, they had the same cosmogonic fables, the same propensity for the sacerdotal congregations, the same hieroglyphic paintings, the same divisions of time, the same taste (Chinese and Japanese) for noting and registering every thing. The names given by them to the towns built in the country of Analmac were those of the towns they had abandoned in their ancient country. The civilization on the Mexican table-land was regarded by the inhabitants themselves as the copy of something which had existed elsewhere, as the reflection of the primitive civilization of Aztlan. Where, it may be asked, must be placed that parent land of the colonies of Anahuac, that officinum gentium which, during five centuries, sends nations toward the south who understand each other without difficulty, and recognize each other for relations? Asia, north of Amour, where it is nearest America, is a barbarous country, and in supposing (which is geographically possible) a migration of southern Asiatics by Japan, Tarakay (Tchoka), the Kurile and Aleutian Isles, from southwest toward the northeast (from 40 to 55 degrees of latitude), how can it be believed that in so long a migration, on a way so easily intercepted, the remembrance of the institutions of the parent country could have been preserved with so much force and clearness? The cosmogonic fables, the pyramidal constructions, the system of the calendar, the animals of the tropics found in the catasterim of days, the convents and congregations of priests, the taste for statistic enumerations, the annals of the empire held in the most scrupulous order, lead us toward Oriental Asia, while the lively remembrances of which we have just spoken, and the peculiar physiognomy which Mexican civilization presents in so many other respects, seem to indicate the antique existence of an empire in the north of America, between the thirty-sixth and forty-second degrees of latitude. We can not reflect on the military monuments of the United States without recollecting the first country of the civilized nations of Mexico. It is in rising to more general historical considerations, in examining with more care than has been hitherto done the languages and the osteologic conformation of different tribes, in exploring the immense country bounded by the Alleganies and the coast of the Western Ocean, that means will be obtained of throwing light on a problem so worthy of exercising the sagacity of historians. According to the tra

ditions collected by Mr. Heckewelder, the country east of the Mississippi was heretofore inhabited by a powerful nation, of gigantic stature, called Alleghewi, and which gave its name to the Alleganian mountains. The Alleghewis were more civilized than any of the other tribes found in the northern climates by the Europeans of the sixteenth century. They inhabitated towns founded on the banks of the Mississippi, and the fortifications that now excite the astonishment of travelers were constructed by them, in order to defend themselves against the Delawares, who came from the west, and were allied at that period with the Iroquois. It may be supposed that this invasion of a barbarous people changed the political and moral state of those countries. The Alleghewis were vanquished by the Delawares after a long struggle. In their flight toward the south they gathered together the bones of their relations in separate tumuli; they descended the Mississippi, and what became of them is not known.

The lines of

fortification of a prodigious length observed by Captain Lewis on the banks of the Missouri sufficiently prove that the ancient habitation of the Alleghewis, that powerful people which I am inclined to regard as being of Tolteque or Azteque race, extended far to the west of the Mississippi, toward the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Mr. Nuttall, in going up the Arkansas to Cadron, was informed of the existence of an ancient intrenchment, resembling a triangular fort. The Arkansas assert that it is the work of a white and civilized people, whom, when they arrived in this country, their ancestors fought and vanquished, not by force, but cunning. They attribute, also, to a more ancient and polished people than themselves, the monuments of rough stones heaped up on the summit of the hills. Other monuments, not less curious, are the commodious roads of immense length which the natives have traced from time immemorial, and which lead from the banks of the Arkansas, near Little Rock, to Saint Louis on the right, and by the settlement of Mont Prairie, as far as Natchitoches, on the left. Do the characteristic features of colossal stature and white color, attributed to nations now destroyed, owe their origin to the ideas of power and physical force in general, to the feeling of the intellectual preponderance of the Europeans, or are those features linked with the fables of white men, legislators, and priests, which we find among the Mexicans, the inhabitants of New Granada, and so many other American nations ? The skeletons contained in the tumuli of the trans-Alleganian country belong, for the most part, to a stunted race of men, of lower stature than the Indians of Canada and the Missouri.

"An idol discovered at Natchez has been justly compared by M. Malte-Brun to the images of celestial spirits found by Pallas among the Mongul nations. If the tribes who inhabit the towns on the banks of the Mississippi issued from the same country of Aztlan, it must be admitted that the Tolteques, the Chichimeques, and the Azteques, from the inspection of their idols, and their essays in sculpture, were much less advanced in the arts than the Mexican tribes, who, without deviating toward the east, have followed the great path of the nations of the

New World, directed from north to south, from the banks of the Gila toward the Lake of Nicaragua.”—Humboldt's Personal Narrative, vol. vi., p. 328.

No. XLVIII.

"Dr. Morton, in his luminous and philosophical essay on the aboriginal race of America, seems to have proved that all the different tribes, except the Eskimaux, are of one race, and that this race is peculiar and distinct from all others. The physical characteristics of the Fuegians, the Indians of the tropical plains, those of the Rocky Mountains, and of the great Valley of the Mississippi, are the same, not only in regard to feature and external lineaments, but also in osteological structure. After comparing nearly 400 crania, derived from tribes inhabiting almost every region of both Americas, Dr. Morton has found the same peculiar shape pervading all; 'the square or rounded head, the flattened or vertical occiput, the high cheek bones, the ponderous maxillæ, the large quadrangular orbits, and the low, receding forehead.' The oldest skulls from the cemeteries of Peru, the tombs of Mexico, or the mounds of the Mississippi and Ohio, agree with each other, and are of the same type as the heads of the most savage existing tribes." Lyell, vol. ii., p. 37.

No. XLIX.

"I saw no person among the Chaymas who had any natural deformity. I might say the same of thousands of Caribs, Muyseas, and Mexican and Peruvian Indians, whom we observed during the course of five years. Bodily deformities-deviations from nature--are infinitely rare among certain races of men, especially those nations who have the dermoid system highly colored. I can not believe that they depend solely on the progress of civilization, a luxurious life, or the corruption of morals. We might be tempted to think that savages all appear well made and vigorous, because feeble children die young for want of care, and that the strongest alone survive; but these causes can not act on the Indians of the missions, who have the manners of our peasants, and the Mexicans of Cholula and Tlascala, who enjoy wealth that has been transmitted to them by ancestors more civilized than themselves. If, in every state of cultivation, the copper-colored race manifest the same inflexibility, the same resistance to deviation from a primitive type, are we not forced to admit that this property belongs in great measure to hereditary organization—to that which constitutes the race? I use intentionally the phrase in great measure, not entirely to exclude the influence of civilization. Besides, with copper-colored men, as with the whites, luxury and effeminacy, by weakening the physical constitution, had heretofore rendered deformities more common at Corezco and Tenochtitlan."-Humboldt's Personal Narrative, vol. iii., p. 235.