A large conical mound thirty feet high, in the present burying ground at Marietta, is one of the best specimens of tumuli in the Northern States and is unique in being surrounded by an enbankment and fosse. This mound was one of the first excavated anywhere in the country and had for its explorer, in 1788, no less a personage than the famous Doctor Manasseh Cutler of Massachusetts (agent of the Ohio company, which formed the settlement here), and author of the "Ordinance of Freedom." The "find" which was unimportant—a single skeleton merely, was discovered about midway between the apex and base of the tumulus, and it is probable that had the excavation been pushed to the base a more interesting discovery would have been made. It is possible that there still exists there, uninvaded, a sepulchral chamber, for many of the larger mounds have been found to contain two, in vertical line below the apex, among such being the great mound on the Ohio, at the mouth of Grave Creek, West Virginia.

The early settlers of Marietta, who were nothing if not classical, gave Greek and Latin names to the ancient works, by

which they are known locally to the present day, as the Capitolium and Quadranaou, applied to the elevated squares, and Sacra Via, to the graded way.

Of the "Effigy Mounds," the chief field is southern Wisconsin, and some contiguous territory in the northwest, but there are several in Ohio, and one of the greatest of all occurs there- the famous "great serpent mound" of Adams county. It is a giant basso relievo of earth forming a serpent, lying extended in graceful curves with its tail in a triple coil, upon the summit of a hill near Brush Creek. Upwards of a thousand feet in length, the embankment comprising the body being five feet in height, with a base at the middle of thirty feet, diminishing very nicely and naturally towards the head and tail, this colossal representation strikes one with something very akin to awe, which is not lessened by the significance that in all of the remains of the ancient Mexican and Central American races, the serpent is shown to have been, in the minds of their builders, the symbol of life and power. In the case of the Adams county figure, the gigantic reptile has its vast jaws extended, and holds between them the form of

and visited by archæologists from the whole country, is well preserved, and there is assurance that it will continue to be, for the ground on which it lies is now the property of Harvard College. For many years this work enjoyed the distinction if not of being positively unique, at least of being the largest of the effigy remains in Ohio, or perhaps in the entire country; but lately a far larger serpent has been traced near Morrow, in Warren county, in the same quarter of the State as Adams countythe southwestern. Portions of this work have, unfortunately, been destroyed, but a corps of men who have investigated it under the orders of Prof. Putnam, of Harvard, have determined that the body of the monster serpent extended its undulating lines for a distance of at least nineteen hundred feet. The greater part of the body of this serpent is enveloped in the forest, and the massive head, which chanced to lie in a field given over to the process of clearing," and the plough has been obliterated. On the rounded body of the serpent are growing massive trees, which are centuries old, while the rotted remains of equally large ones lie among them, and the whole surface of the region is covered to the depth of a foot or more with leaf-mould and loam, the product of centuries of decay since the great serpent was modelled upon the face of the earth.

Of the Works of Defense, which form a very interesting class, of which the very best examples are in the Ohio field, not much has yet been said. Attesting less the civilization of the Mound Builders than their warlike character and that foresightedness, prudence and patience, which enabled them to make elaborate and effective preparation for their selfpreservation, these works cannot be ignored by those who would form a proper conception of the people who once held possession of the great valleys. The most notable examples of this class of works are a fortified hill in Butler county, with quite intricately and ingeniously defended entrances; that heretofore alluded to on Paint Creek; "Fort Hill," in Highland county, in which an area of forty-eight acres on an isolated elevation, rising ruggedly, precipitously from Brush Creek, is enclosed by an embankment of earth and stone; and "Fort Ancient," in Warren county, in which is shown distinctive evidence of the sagacity

FORT HILL, HIGHLAND CO., O.

This is notably the case at "Fort Hill," where the remains of a village are to be seen in the valley near at hand, the usual abode, it is conjectured, of the colony which fortified the hill crest as a place of ready refuge in emergency.

Greatest of all the groups of works in Ohio, and presenting in the elements which constitute it, examples of almost every class or division of the ancient remains, is the system near Newark, Licking county. When this portion of the State was first settled the fact was revealed to the astonished pioneers, that a former race had thought so well of the then forest-grown country, that in a dim, uncertain age, antedating the hoariest monarch of that forest, they had toiled there in the building of enclosures which embraced twelve miles of walls, besides numerous detached works and tumuli. Of these, the most magnificent, extensive and intricate of the Mound Builders'

works, not only in Ohio but in the whole region of the Northern States, a considerable portion have been preserved and are the Mecca of hundreds of archæological pilgrimages. The works occupy an area of two miles square and originally pretty thoroughly covered that expanse. The walls- some of them thirty-five feet in height, but many of them of far less altitude and their labyrinthine character, the strange forms of the "effigy " mounds-as the "eagle" and the "alligator," the unmistakable evidences of colossal labor expended upon them, the skill in design and accuracy of measurements and proportions, impress even the most stolid observer with the dignity of the race that reared them and with their numerical extent. Here as truly as at Palenque or Uxmal was a forest-buried city, vast, mysterious, and, as ever, where antiquity and insoluble mystery confront the beholder, awe-compelling. To construct such works, even to-day with the aid of horse-power and labor-enhancing implements, would require the employment for a number of years of an army of many thousands of men.

FORT ANCIENT, WARREN Co., O.

But, in dwelling upon the fascinating profusion and variety and vastness of the Mound Builder remains in Ohio, I must not forget that there are other regions of

exceeding richness, and special districts which closely rival any in the field I have been considering. And this fact--the existence of such rich fields widely remote from each other-is perhaps more convincingly assertive than any other of the immensity as regard numbers of the ancient race.

As a close second in the plentifulness and interesting character of the remains to those in the Scioto Valley, is a stretch of the Illinois bottom land extending along the Mississippi from East St. Louis southward. The site of St. Louis itself, on the other side of the river, was originally literally covered with mounds, while on what is called the "American bottom," on the Illinois side, are over two hundred within a comparatively small territory. In one county alone - Mercer-the tumuli and other earth-structures are estimated, by conservative explorers, to number at least one thousand.

The monster mound of the whole northern or United States region, the great Cahokia Mound, as it is called, is in this district-Madison county, Illinois. It stands in the midst of a group of sixty other tumuli and is a Temple Mound-one of the true teocalli-its features being in close analogy with those of the truncated pyramids on which the temples of Mexico were situated; and there can be little doubt that it once bore upon its lofty summit a great edifice similar to, but probably less magnificent than, those in which the ancient priesthood held their solemn and sanguinary religious ceremonials.

Cahokia Mound, which is exceedingly well-preserved-and the owner of which wishes to dispose of it to the government, or to other custodians, who will guarantee its future preservation-is a commanding elevation, upwards of a hundred feet high, and extends in the form of a parallelogram, the sides of which measure seven hundred and five hundred feet, respectively. The top of the great truncated pyramid is flat, and divided into two parts, the northern end being a few feet higher than the southern, and the two surfaces having together an area of about two hundred by four hundred and fifty feet, containing one and one half acres. Upon the southern end, about thirty feet above the base, is a terrace, or apron, containing about two acres of

ground, and upon the western side, at an elevation of sixty feet, or thereabouts, is another broad terrace, though of less extent than the former. In the middle of the lower and larger terrace at the base of the mound, is a projection supposed to be the remains of a graded ascent from the plain. The base of this colossus of the earth-structures covers sixteen acres of ground, and merely in the matter of superficial area Cahokia is said to be the largest pyramid in the world, surpassing those of Egypt.

The immense works which have here been briefly described, with thousands more like them, and some scarcely inferior in size, together with the innumerable tumuli that dot the valleys of the whole Mississippi basin, incontestably prove that a vast race dwelt here. The character of the works themselves, the profusion of implements and ornaments in stone, flint and copper, the gorgets, bracelets, amulets, pipes, knives, axes, notably the pottery, and more than all else, the crumbling skeletons themselves, bear testimony to the fact that this race was one entirely distinct from the American Indians. This testimony is supported by divers other significant facts, among which is the almost entire absence of tradition among the Indians linking them with the people who built the mounds. The Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians, indeed, as an exception had a legend of the Mound Builders, but it distinctly disavowed the descent of their nation from them and asserted that they were a distinct and powerful people, through whose land they, the Delawares, had passed ages ago, after fighing a mighty battle with them. They called this people the Allegewi, which name combined with hanne (stream) has come by process of linguistic evolution Allegheny, the name of the river which marks the eastern limit of the Mound Builder country.

Whence came and whither vanished this mysterious race,-this mighty current of the blood of the earth that seemingly only emerged from obscurity to flow into oblivion? A little light has been thrown upon these problems by the patient study of a few scholars. The consensus of opinion among the most thorough seems to be, that the Mound Builders were of Oriental or Asiatic origin, and that they reached America by

way of its western shore. The recent find near Chillicothe is regarded by archæologists as contributing a fragment of cumulative evidence to the mass of minute data supporting this theory of origin.

As to the destiny of the race, or, rather, the direction of its passing from the field we have been reviewing, it seems highly irrational, from a study of the earth-works, the mortuary remains entombed in them, and the various artobjects which they enclose, to form any other opinion than that the nation gradually pushed its way down the valley of the Mississippi, and eventually spread into Mexico, very likely occupying the whole stretch of country from Lake Superior to the land of the Montezumas. Simultaneously, it is thought, that for a considerable period they held all this country, relinquishing the northern portions of it reluctantly, and only under pressure of an enemy, against whom the great works of defense we have been considering were raised.

The character of the earth-remains* denotes a constant development as one follows them southward, while the rude arts which the people practised, as for instance that of making pottery, are shown by the relics unearthed to have undergone a gradual but marked improvement in proportion to the distance southward at which they are found. So, too, do the crania found in the mound sepulchres give evidence of a constant growth of the Mound Builder intellectually, indicating a considerable betterment of type as the race journeyed towards its destiny in Mexico.

Perhaps, some day, the elaborate and accurately presented hieroglyphics, and the masses of information preserved in such great works as Lord Kingsborough's (which cost its author besides his life, three hundred thousand dollars), may be the means, in the hands of other scholars and writers on Mexican antiquities of revealing with definiteness the secret of the Mound Builders' destiny and much of their history.

But in the meantime there is not wanting

*The writer of this paper acknowledges his indebtedness for the drawings which illustrate the article to Squier and Davis's "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley," one of the important publications of the Smithsonian Institution.

evidence from the side of Mexican history, though incomplete and necessarily far from satisfactory,--that the people who, in the northern United States, and down the valley of the Father of Waters, reared the comparatively humble and yet massive earth-remains, performed a prouder work and reached a higher civilization, in the south, as a component part of the ancient Maya race. The fragment which, though one of the latest, was one of the strongest, amalgamated in the composite Maya people, was known as the Nahua nation, and there is evidence in their own history, as handed down through Mexican and Spanish authorities, that they came from the North, where they long had dweltfrom a land which they called Hue hue Tlapalan.

That the Mound Builders were the Nahuas and the land of their long sojourn, the misty, traditional Hue hue Tlapalan was the region of the upper Mississippi and the Ohio- the region in which their multitudinous monuments still remain to excite the wonder of a greater race is pretty effectually argued

by several students of American antiquities. One of the ablest authors who takes this view of the subject deduces from what has come down to our era and race of Maya history that the era of the exodus of the people from the North, or rather of the appearance of the Nahuas in Mexico, was the year A. D. 241, or sixteen and a half centuries ago.

If the Mound Builders and the Nahuas were identical, then we find that the people who built the mounds and fortifications of the North, and who then had in all probability no written language, finally became an integral part of a great nation which reared what are now the most splendid ruins of Mexico, left innumerable hieroglyphical writings, and who, in the time of Cortez, were found to have approximated the true length of the year within two minutes and nine seconds, thus rivalling the learned astronomers of the Orient, and that, too, while the nation of the Conqueror and other Europeans were following a system of time measurement which had placed them nearly ten days in error.

ALFRED MATHEWS.

VIII.- WASHINGTON IRVING*

F

ORTY years have now elapsed since Washington Irving completed, with his ebbing life, the edifice of his literary reputation, by the publication of the faithful and patriotic study of the "Life of Washington." His fame as a writer, we all know, however, does not rest upon that product of his latterday pen. It rests upon the achievements of a period, forty years earlier, when the world with him was young, and he revelled in the fresh joyousness and bubbling humor of his untethered genius. To Irving, the era which saw the "Knickerbocker History of New York" and the "Sketch Book" first given to the world was one of whimsical fancies and gay indolence, an era in which the heart was more active than the brain, and when the imagination was not sub

* See the biography of the author, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. XIII., p. 372.

ordinated to the judgment. It was the adolescent stage in American letters, when literature was fain to imp its wing for flight, but had hardly confidence to make the required effort. The modesty of Irving's aim when he began to write, and thereby create a new interest besides politics in the youthful Republic, is thus indicated in a sentence. "My writings," he said, “may appear light and trifling in our country of philosophers and politicians; but if they possess merit in the class of literature to which they belong, it is all to which I aspire." Considering his scanty and fitful education, and above all his delicate health, one may express surprise that he was so confident and successful. And yet, if his body was in youth feeble, he had from the first a thoroughly healthy, though never vigorous, mind. In creative gifts he was gracefully rather than richly endowed, and the canvas upon which he worked was that of the sketcher rather than the