occupied the time, which I had prescribed to myself in
these remarks. It has been impossible to consider many topics, upon
which a true understanding of the antique period of our history
depends. But I cannot close them, without a brief allusion to the
leading traits and history of the Red Race, whose former advance in the
arts, and whose semi-civilization in the equinoctial latitudes of the
continent, we have been contemplating.

That these tribes are a people of great antiquity, far greater than has
been assigned to them, is denoted by the considerations already
mentioned. Their languages, their astronomy, their architecture and
their very ancient religion and mythology, prove this. But a people who
live without letters, must expect their history to perish with them.
Tradition soon degenerates into fable, and fable has filled the oldest
histories of the world, with childish incongruities and recitals of
gross immoralities. In this respect, the Indian race have evinced less
imagination than the Greeks and Romans, who have filled the world with
their lewd philosophy of genealogy, but their myths are quite as
rational and often better founded than those of the latter. To restore
their history from the rubbish of their traditions, is a hopeless task.
We must rely on other data, the nature of which has been mentioned. To
seek among ruins, to decypher hieroglyphics, to unravel myths, to study
ancient systems of worship and astronomy, and to investigate
vocabularies and theories of language, are the chief methods before us;
and these call for the perseverance of Sysiphus and the clear inductive
powers of Bacon. Who shall touch the scattered bones of aboriginal
history with the spear of truth, and cause the skeleton of their
ancient society to arise and live? We may never see this; but we may
hold out incentives to the future scholar, to labor in this department.

Of their origin, it is yet premature, on the basis of ethnology, to
decide. There is no evidence--not a particle, that the tribes came to
the continent after the opening of the Christian era. Their religion
bears far more the characteristics of Zoroaster, than of Christ. It has
also much more that assimilates it to the land of Chaldea, than to the
early days of the land of Palestine. The Cyclopean arch, and the form
of the pyramid, point back to very ancient periods. Their language is
constructed on a very antique plan of thought. Their symbolic system of
picture w