THE MOUNDS WERE NOT MADE BY INDIANS.

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striking general similarities, and in none of them were the traits revealed by the mounds of their builders paralleled. Possibly a single exception should be made in the case of the Natchez; but they were few in number, and their tribal organization was broken up before they had been much studied. It is said that their traditions referred their origin and former home to the borders of Mexico. At least they appear to have had no history to give of the origin of the mounds. If they were a branch of the ancient Mound Builder race they must have been almost completely degenerate.

The Indians were quite incapable of the vast labors which produced these structures, nor was there, from whatever side they were viewed, any trace of degeneracy or change of direction in their qualities and manner of life. They were all of one piece, so to speak. Their social, political and traditional policies were harmonious, and showed them to be true children of nature; the original untutored and savage instinct was completely crystallized. They had no account to render concerning the mounds, and had in no respect an affinity for the condition of society under which they must have been produced.

The Indians sometimes had fortifications, they had burial rites, occasionally they produced monuments and some few sculptures and works of art; but there was a wider difference between them and the products of the Mound Builders than between the last and the results of modern civilization. In those points relating to the absolute necessities of a hunter's life they had some skill, but in every other direction rudeness and simplicity were absolute. They were very strong in many of their mental traits, but strong precisely where the Mound Builders were weak, and that strength was all employed to resist progress toward civilization. No hint in institutions, in mental qualities, or in language, authorizes the supposition that their race could have been bent from its original wildness so as to develop a primitive civilization and then

recover its original tone and quality. Had this been the case it would have been an anomaly in history. In fact, every known law of mental philosophy opposes the supposition, as do also all the facts yet collected.

The race of the Mounds much more resembles the early Chaldeans and Egyptians, while the Indians resemble more nearly, in several points, the nomads of Arabia, the indomitable descendants of the hunter Esau, "whose hand was against every man." Only a race of slaves submitting quietly to absolute authority can be organized and compelled to produce such vast and numerous monuments of a primitive people.

A more favorable train of influences would perhaps have reproduced in the American Indian the history of the strongwilled and enterprising Teutonic race of Europe. But the American lacked the modifying elements which Western Asia, Southern Europe and Northern Africa exerted on the wanderers of the Steppes and the rude warriors of the German forests.

CHAPTER XII.

THE CHARACTER OF THE MOUND BUILDERS AND THEIR

INSTITUTIONS.

With the lapse of years, and by the increasing exactness and caution of investigation that has been noticed as a special feature of the last half-century, some indications of the mental condition of the Mound Builders have been fairly established. It required much study and care to distinguish between the skulls of the old Mound Builders and the modern Indians, who sometimes buried their dead in the mounds; but after a time these "intrusive burials," as they are called, were found to be so unlike the original ones as to be easily distinguished by a competent observer, and a very marked difference was noticed between the crania of the earlier and later race. By the persevering researches of able men many skulls, unquestionably those of the Builders of the Mounds, have been collected, and the information they convey made out.

They had a retreating forehead, and the mass of the brain was about as much less than that of the modern Indian as his is less than that of the modern European. The Mound Builders were not an intellectual race. It was long questioned whether this low forehead was not due to the fashion of applying external pressure to it in infancy, as has been practiced by the Flathead Indians and some other American tribes; but the conclusion has been reached that this was not the case. Sculpture in the ancient ruins of Central America reveals the same type of head, and various facts intimate that it was the natural form of the skull. On the other hand, the distribution of the brain, which has much to do with the tendencies and capabilities of character, were favorable. The arrange