"Behold! what works were these in times of old?" "A nation departing, leaves this trace behind. "I wandered by a goodly town Beset with many a garden fair, And asked of one who gathered down "Some thousand years went by, and then I asked how old the wood might be. -Arabian Tales. XII. REMAINS OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATION IN NORTH AMERICA. Discovery America. WHEN, on an October morning in 1492, an adventurous mariner looked out from his gallant little ship, upon the shores of of this western world, he supposed it to be none other than the eastern border of the older continent. And the people he called Indians, because he supposed them to be one with the inhabitants with which Europe had been long familiar in Southern Asia. But when, nineteen years. later, Balboa, looking from the heights of the Isthmus of Darien, discovered a vast ocean extending far to the north and the south and the west, it first became apparent that America was a separate continent. And the people, on further investigation, were pronounced a distinct race or division of the human family. This at once raised the question whence they came? The generally received opinion that the human family descended from a single pair, found a new complication in this people, so far separated by wide reaches of ocean from the home of the infant race. Whence came the Indian ? Of the various theories advanced, that their. progenitors had crossed Behring's Straits. from the dreary regions of Siberia, in search of a more genial clime; that they had drifted unwittingly in Chinese junks upon this fair land; that they were degenerate offspring of the Norsemen, who, centuries before, peopled the shores of Greenland, none were entirely satisfactory, for neither of them was capable of proof. Moreover, it afterward appeared that the Indian in different sections of America corresponded to the real or fancied types of nearly all the races, so that all the theories practically failed. It is not our purpose now to inquire which of these theories is most plausible, nor to attempt to settle the question as to how long a time the Indian occupied the soil of America before the voyage of the valiant Genoese in 1492. For while perplexed with this problem we encounter another still more mysterious and remote, and having in it, therefore, more of curious interest, if not the promise of more satisfactory results. It concerns a race that perished here when the A race The earlier race. Indian came, or possibly long before. whose mysterious footprints are not hard to trace or difficult of interpretation. And yet a race that long baffled conjecture and almost defied investigation. But we have one or two clues with which to begin. The favorite method of preserving the memory of great men and great events, in all times, has been by means of monuments. And the the mightiest structures of the world are those erected in memory of the dead, or of events in which human lives were given as the price of conquest or victory. Homer recognizes this general truth, when in his stately verse he makes the valiant Trojan say of his heroic enemy, "The long-haired Greek To him upon the shores of Hellespont, A mound shall heap! that those in after times This is the monument of one long since Borne to his grave, by mighty Hector slain." Monumental records. The pyramids of Egypt were long considered but kingly monuments; and if, as now appears, they were built for other uses also, we can only say they served a double purpose, whereof the former was not the least. The practice of building monuments obtained among the early peoples of America no less than with those who built the |