d pages, with more than ninety
engravings, under the title of _Aboriginal Monuments of New-York,
comprising the results of Original Surveys and Explorations, with an
Appendix_. This is now, we believe, on the eve of publication. A second
volume is entitled, _The Serpent Symbol, and the Worship of the
Reciprocal Principle, in America_. It contains, also, extended
incidental illustrations of the religious systems of the American
aborigines, and of the symbolical character of the ancient monuments in
the United States. It will form a large octavo of two hundred and fifty
pages, with sixty-three engravings, and will be published by Mr. Putnam.

The first of these works, constituting part of the second volume of the
"Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge," may be regarded as a
continuation of the author's _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi
Valley_, forming the first volume of those contributions. It gives a
succinct account of the aboriginal remains of the state of New-York,
which were thoroughly investigated by the author, under the joint
auspices of the Smithsonian Institution and the New-York Historical
Society, in 1848. It strips the subject of all the absurd hypotheses and
conjectures with which it has been involved by speculative and fanciful
minds, and gives us a new and full statement of facts, from which there
is no difficulty in getting at correct results. The appendix, which
forms quite half of the volume, is devoted to the consideration of
several of the more interesting questions stated in connection with the
subject of our antiquities generally, and has a closer relation to the
previously published volume than to the present memoir. The _rationale_
of symbolism is very elaborately deduced from an analysis of the
primitive religious structures of the Greeks, and applied, as we think,
with entire success, to the elucidation of the origin and purposes of a
large part of the monumental remains in the western United States.
Indeed this whole work is dependent on, and illustrative of, the other,
which must be imperfectly understood without it.

The same is true of the second work, on the "Serpent Symbol," etc.,
which, however, is chiefly devoted to inquiries into the philosophy and
religion of the aboriginal American nations, and the relations which
they sustained to the primitive systems of the other continent. The
principal inquiry is, how far the identities which, in these respects,
confessedly existed betwee