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larly mature conceptions for so much backwardness in other respects. The elements of mathematical science are visible in the perfect circles, squares, octagons, ellipses and four-cornered mounds adjusted to the points of the compass; in the art of military defense, and in the surprising accuracy and truth to nature of the works of the sculptor and ceramic artist. They were on the high road to true culture and the religious tone of the great mass of their monuments stamps them as a thoughtful people. They suddenly disappeared from the Valley leaving little other trace behind save their maize, their tobacco and a very faint and uncertain tradition, if indeed it refers to them.

A degree of sacredness was attached by the modern Indian to the pipe and tobacco, which were favorite offerings on the mound altars, and still more closely associated with religious ideas in the minds of the Builders than in those of the Indians.

The Ohio was named by the modern Iroquois, but possibly the Mound Builders left their name, or the name of one of their tribes or provinces, to the Alleghany Mountains; although it appears impossible to tell whether or not that name is only the relic of a hunter tribe of which so many were annihilated by the fierce confederacy of New York. The elaborate defenses along the northern tributaries of the Ohio intimate that a struggle, lasting for generations, preceded the final catastrophe. This was produced by, perhaps, the strong Indian confederacy of the Five Nations and prolonged by the Mound Builders' fortifications. But suddenly the mines of Lake Superior were abandoned while they were yet engaged in raising a huge mass of ore and never, apparently, revisited. Unfinished altars remained forever uncovered; the fortress, the sacred inclosure and the temple mound became suddenly solitary, and the forest proceeded to reassert its control over them.

They must have been hotly pursued into the lower Valley for they did not rear there fortifications such as they had been

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WHY THEY SUDDENLY DISAPPEARED.

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driven from above, and indeed all their locations were extremely accessible to the swift bark, or log, canoe of the Indian. A miserable remnant of prisoners probably dragged out a weary and desolate life in slavery, while the more intelligent and enterprising spared from slaughter abandoned the beautiful Valley, nor felt themselves safe till they were hundreds of miles beyond the Rio Grande, and at length found themselves near the lake of Mexico. Like the central mountain plateau of Asia and the woods of Germany, the highlands of the Rocky Mountains seem to have sent forth swarm after swarm of fierce, warlike, and (in this case) wholly barbarous tribes, which flowed, wave after wave, eastward into the Valley and south toward Mexico. During some of these destructive attacks of the Chichimecs, as all the barbarians were called by the Toltecs, a colony fled to Central America for refuge and carried their architectural tendencies to a still higher and more perfect stage of development.

Such seem to be the reasonable conclusions from the facts revealed in earth and stone, and by the records of Mexican and Central American history preserved by Jesuit missionaries in New Spain. Apparently only a wandering tribe from the foot of the Andes could introduce maize and tobacco and a knowledge of the fauna of those tropical regions. The Valley was too thinly populated by the men who had been contemporary with the mammoth and mastodon to have any opposition raised to their settlement along the rivers of the middle and eastern Valley, and for unknown centuries they dwelt in security until the numbers and valor of the hunter tribes around Lake Ontario accumulated danger and, finally, ruin.

They were not to be left to build up a political and social structure here that might waste too many of the treasures of the Valley on the childhood of humanity and an imperfect civilization. These treasures must be held fairly intact and the ground kept clear for the utmost development of the civilization matured with so much pains and care around the

Mediterranean and on the shores of Western Europe. The quiet and busy agricultural dwellers in the Valley, after ages of undisturbed growth or, in later times, of successful defense by their superior intelligence, were suddenly found unable to resist the fierce, determined onslaught of the bravest of the Indian tribes. In all probability a few thousand warriors of the forest, knowing no mercy and delighting in the slaughter of the flying foe who had long resisted them by virtue of his fortifications, drove before them the millions of the Mound Builders as Alexander scattered the vast armies. of Persian Darius.

What agonies of terror, what scenes of dreadful carnage, may then have been witnessed by mounds and prairies and streams, we can scarcely hope to know. Undoubtedly in great mental distress and bodily suffering the escaped remnant abandoned their fields, their temples, and the streams whose banks they and their ancestors had beautified by incessant toil. It must have been one of the most fearful catastrophes of warring humanity.

The retreat of the ten thousand Greeks, recorded by Xenophon, and the distresses of De Soto's little army after his death, must have been trifles compared to this exodus of the disheartened, terrified, and perishing remnant of a great nation. Their houses left behind decayed; their temples rotted and disappeared from the mounds; the forests reappeared over their pleasant valleys and hills and sacrificial altars. No one entered into their labors or reaped the reward of their painstaking industry. Their very names vanished from the Valley, unless it is recorded by the mountains forming its eastern boundary. The Valley rested in its weighty service to man until the people worthy of it should appear to build a mightier social and political fabric and make full use of all its varied and abundant sources of wealth. The Indian tribes left them essentially untouched.

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