ries terminates and another begins." On the upper lakes, and to a
certain extent in Michigan, Iowa, and Missouri, but particularly in
Wisconsin, the outlines of the inclosures (elsewhere more regular in
form) were designed in the forms of animals, birds, serpents, and even
men, appearing on the surface of the country like huge _relievos_. The
embankment of an irregular inclosure in Adams County, Ohio, is
described as follows by Squier and Davis, Mr. Squier having made the
drawing of it for the work published by the Smithsonian Institution:

"It is in the form of a serpent, upward of 1000 feet in length, extended
in graceful curves, and terminating in a triple coil at the tail. The
embankment constituting this figure is more than 5 feet high, with a
base 30 feet wide at the centre of the body, diminishing somewhat toward
the head and tail. The neck of the figure is stretched out and slightly
curved. The mouth is wide open, and seems in the act of swallowing or
ejecting an oval figure which rests partly within the distended jaws.
This oval is formed by an embankment 4 feet high, and is perfectly
regular in outline, its transverse and conjugate diameters being
respectively 160 and 80 feet. The combined figure has been regarded as a
symbolical illustration of the Oriental cosmological idea of the serpent
and the egg; but, however this may be, little doubt can exist of the
symbolical character of the monument."

Figure 9 gives a view of this work.

No symbolic device is more common among the antiquities of Mexico and
Central America than the form of the serpent, and it was sometimes
reproduced in part in architectural constructions. One of the old books,
giving account of a temple dedicated to Quetzalcohuatl, says, "It was
circular in form, and the entrance represented the mouth of a serpent,
opened in a frightful manner, and extremely terrifying to those who
approached it for the first time."

[Illustration: Fig. 9.--Great Serpent, Adams County, Ohio.]

On the Ohio and its tributaries, and farther south, where the mounds are
numerous, the inclosures have more regular forms; and in the Ohio Valley
very often their great extent has incited speculation. At Newark, Ohio,
when first discovered, they were spread over an area more than two miles
square, and still showed more than twelve miles of embankment from two to
twenty feet high. Farther south, as already stated, the inclosures are
fewer and smaller, or, to speak more ex