OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 53
proficiency. Many of the vases recovered from the mounds display, in respect to material, finish, and model, a marked superiority to anything of which the existing Indian tribes are known to have been capable, and compare favorably with the best Peruvian specimens. Though of great symmetry of proportions, there is no good reason to believe that they were turned onalathe. Their fine finish seems to have been the result of the same process with that adopted by the Peruvians in their manufactures. e of them are tastefully ornamented with scrolls, figureSof birds, and other devices, which are engraved in the surface, instead of being embossed upon it. The lines appear to have been cut with some sharp, gouge-shaped instrument, which entirely re- moved the detached material, leaving no ragged or raised edges. Nothing can exceed the regularity and precision with which the ornaments are executed. The material of which the vases are composed is a fine clay, which, in the more delicate specimens, was worked nearly pure, or possessing a very slight silicious intermixture. Some of the coarser specimens have pulverized quartz mingled with the clay, while others are tempered with salmon-colored mica, in small flakes, which gives them a ruddy and rather brilliant appearance, and was perhaps introduced with some view to ornament as well as utility. None appear to have been glazed ; though one or two, either from baking or the subsequent great heat to which they were subjected, exhibit a slightly vitrified surface.
The site of every Indian town throughout the West is marked by the fragments of pottery scattered around it ; and the cemeteries of the various tribes abound with rude vessels of clay, piously deposited with the dead. Previous to the Discovery, the art of the potter was much more important and its practice more general than it afterwards became, upon the introduction of metallic vessels. The mode of preparing and moulding the material is minutely described by the early observers, and seems to have been common to
