th and breadth of the land, can a more
suitable element, for the work be found, than is furnished by the
history and antiquities and institutions and love, of the free, bold,
wild, independent, native hunter race? They are, relatively to us, what
the ancient Pict and Celt were to Britain, or the Teuton, Goth and
Magyar to Continental Europe. Looking around, over the wide forests, and
transcendent lakes of New York, the founders of this association, have
beheld the footprints of the ancient race. They saw here, as it were, in
vision, the lordly Iroquois, crowned by the feathers of the eagle,
bearing in his hand the bow and arrows, and scorning, as it were, by the
keen glances of his black eye, and the loftiness of his tread, the very
earth that bore him up. History and tradition speak of the story of this
ancient race.--They paint him as a man of war--of endurance--of
indomitable courage--of capacity to endure tortures without
complaint--of a heroic and noble independence. They tell us that these
precincts, now waving with yellow corn, and smiling with villages, and
glittering with spires, were once vocal with their war songs, and
resounded with the chorusses of their corn feasts. We descry, as we
plough the plain, the well chipped darts which pointed their arrows, and
the elongated pestles, that crushed their maize. We exhume from their
obliterated and simple graves, the pipe of steatite, in which they
smoked, and offered incense to these deities, and the fragments of the
culinary vases, around which, the lodge circle gathered to their forest
meal. Mounds and trenches and ditches, speak of the movement of tribe
against tribe, and dimly shadow forth the overthrow of nations. There
are no plated columns of marble; no tablets of inscribed stone--no gates
of rust-coated brass. But the MAN himself survives, in his generation.
He is a WALKING STATUE before us. His looks and his gestures and his
language remain. And he is himself, an attractive _monument_ to be
studied. Shall we neglect him, and his antiquarian vestiges, to run
after foreign sources of intellectual study? Shall we toil amid the
ruins of Thebes and Palmyra, while we have before us the monumental
enigma of an unknown race? Shall philosophical ardor expend itself, in
searching after the buried sites of Nineveh, and Babylon and Troy, while
we have not attempted, with decent research, to collect, arrange and
determine, the leading data of our aboriginal history and