for anything we find. Nowhere, however, in America do these people ever seem to have risen to the elevation of using even rude stones to adorn their tombs or temples. Nor do they appear to have been acquainted with the use of iron or of bronze; all the tools found in their tombs being of pure unalloyed native copper — both of which circumstances seem to separate these American mound-builders entirely from our rude-stone people in anything like historic times.
Unfortunately, also, the study of the manners and customs of the Red-men, who occupied North America when we first came in contact with them, is not at all likely to throw any light on the subject. They have never risen beyond the condition of hunters, and have no settled places of abode, and possess no works of art. The mound-builders, on the contrary, were a settled people, certainly pastoral, probably to some extent even agricultural; they had fixed well chosen unfortified abodes, altogether exhibiting a higher state of civilization than we have any reason to suppose the present race of Red-men ever reached or are capable of reaching.
Although, therefore, it seems in vain to look on the Red Indians who in modern times occupied the territories of Ohio and Wisconsin as the descendants of the mound-builders, there are tribes on the west coast of America that probably are, or rather were, very closely allied to them. The Hydahs and the natives inhabiting Vancouver's Island and Queen Charlotte's Sound seem both from their physical condition, and more so from their works of art, to be just such a people as one would expect the mound-builders to have been. If this is so, it again points to Northern Asia, and not to Europe, as the country where we must look for the origin of this mysterious people; and it is there, I am convinced, if anywhere, that the solution of our difficulties with regard to this phase of North American civilization is to be found.
Central America.
When we advance a little farther south, we meet in Mexico and Yucatan with phenomena which are the exact converse of those in Ohio and Wisconsin. There everything is in stone; earth either
