hese
precious ancient works should have been destroyed to make place for the
present town; but within a few years one of the most marvelous of the
Mound Builders' works, the great Serpent Mound near Loudon, in Adams
County, has been preserved to after time by the friends of science, and
put in the keeping of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

[Illustration: Serpent Mound 019L]

The state of Ohio has passed a law protecting the land around it as a
park, and there is now reason to hope that the mound will last as long
as the rocky bluff on which the serpent lies coiled. This huge idol is
more than twelve hundred feet long, and is the most wonderful symbol
in the world of the serpent worship, which was everywhere the earliest
religion of our race.

The largest military ruin is the famous Fort Ancient in Warren County,
where, on a terrace above the Little Miami River, five miles of wall,
which can still be easily traced, shut in a hundred acres. In Highland
County, about seventeen miles southeast of Hillsborough, another great
fortress embraces thirty-five acres oh the crest of a hill overlooking
Brush Creek. Itswalls are some twenty-five feet wide at the base, and
rise from &ix to ten feet above the ground. Within their circuit are
two ponds which could supply water in time of siege, and in the valley,
which the hill commands, are the ruins of the Mound Builders' village,
whose people could take refuge in the fort on the hilltop and hold it
against any approaching force.

For the rest, the works of the Mound Builders, except such as were too
large to be destroyed by the farmer, have disappeared almost as wholly
as the Mound Builders themselves. Their mole-like race threw up their
ridges and banks and larger and lesser heaps, and then ceased from the
face of the earth, as utterly as if they had burrowed into its heart.
They may have fled before the ancestors of the savages whom our
ancestors found here; they may have passed down peacefully into Mexico
and built the cities which the Spaniards destroyed there. Or, they
may have come up out of Mexico, and lost the higher arts of their
civilization in our northern woods, warring with the wild tribes who
were here before them. In either case, it is imaginable that the Mound
Builders were of the same race as the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians,
and it is probable that they were akin to the Zufiis of our own day. The
snake dances of the Zufiis are a relic of the old ser