ly curved serpent, 1,000 feet long, with jaws
agape as if to swallow an egg-shaped figure in front; in Granville, in
the same State, one in the form of a huge crocodile; in Greenup County,
Ky., an image of a bear, which seems leaning forward in an attitude of
observation, measuring 53 feet from the top of the back to the end of
the foreleg, and 105-1/2 feet from the tip of the nose to the rear of
the hind foot.

[Illustration: Big Elephant Mound, Wisconsin.]

The sites of towns and cities were artfully selected, near navigable
rivers and their confluences, as at Marietta, Cincinnati, and in
Kentucky opposite the old mouth of the Scioto. Points for defence were
chosen and fortified with scientific precision. The labor expended upon
these multitudinous structures must have been enormous, implying a vast
population and extensive social, economic, and civil organization. The
Cahokia mound, opposite St. Louis, is 90 feet high and 900 feet long.

The Mound-builders made elegant pottery, of various design and accurate
shapes, worked bone and all sorts of stones, and even forged copper.
There are signs that they understood smelting this metal. They certainly
mined it in large quantities, and carried it down the Mississippi
hundreds of miles from its source on Lake Superior. They must have been
masters of river navigation, but their mode of conveying vast burdens
overland, destitute of efficient draft animals as they apparently were,
we can hardly even conjecture.

The Mound-builders, as we have said, were related to the antique
populations of Mexico and Central America, and the most probable
explanation of their departure from their Northern seats is that in face
of pestilence, or of some overpowering human foe, they retreated to the
Southwest, there to lay, under better auspices, the foundations of new
states, and to develop that higher civilization whose relics, too little
known, astound the student of the past, as greatly as do the stupendous
pillars of Carnac or the grotesque animal figures of Khorsabad and
Nimrud.

So much has been written about the American Indians that we need not
discuss them at length. They were misnamed Indians by Columbus, who
supposed the land he had discovered to be India. At the time of his
arrival not more than two hundred thousand of them lived east of the
Mississippi, though they were doubtless far more numerous West and
South. Whence they came, or whether, if this was a human deed at all,