learned how to unite in erecting their communal dwellings; and surely the higher the grade the greater the power.

The Mound-builders were formerly regarded as a race so remote from the present Indian tribes that there could be nothing in common between them, yet all recent inquiries tend to diminish this distance. Many Indian tribes have built burial mounds for their dead. Squier, after the publication of his great work on the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, made an exploration of those of Western New York, and found, contrary to all his preconceived opinions, that these last must have been made by the Iroquois. Some of the most elaborate series of works, as those at Marietta and Circleville, Ohio, have yielded from their deepest recesses articles of European manufacture, showing an origin not farther back than the historic period. Spanish swords and blue glass beads have been found in the mounds of Georgia and Florida. But we need not go so far as this to observe the analogies of structure. If we look at Professor Putnam's ground

plan of a fortified village of the Mound-builders on Spring Creek, in Tennessee, and compare it with a similar plan of a Mandan village as given by Prince Maximilian of Neuwied in 1843, we find their arrangement to be essentially the same. Each is on a promontory protected by the bend of a stream; each is surrounded by an embankment which was once, in all probability, surmounted by a palisade. were the houses, distributed more plan, more formally and conventionally in that of the Prince

FORTIFIED MANDAN VILLAGE.

of Neuwied; in other respects the two villages are almost duplicates. To see how they may have looked when occupied, we may compare them with a representation of a vil lage of the Onondagas, attacked by Champlain in 1615. This

wood-cut is reproduced from one in the "Documentary History of New York." It is clear that the Mound-builders had much in common with those well-known tribes of Indians the Mandans and Onondagas, in their way of placing and protecting their houses; and another comparison has lately been

made which links their works on the other side with the New Mexican pueblos. Mr. Morgan has caused to be prepared a conjectural restoration of the High Bank mounds in Ross County, Ohio, on the theory that in that instance the houses of the inhabitants were "Long Houses" in structure, and were built for defensive purposes on top of the embankment. This makes the villages into pueblos, and Mr. Morgan therefore baptizes the settlement anew with the name of "High Bank Pueblo."

A mere glance at his restoration will show how

much there was in common between the various types of what he calls the aboriginal American race.

It remains to be considered whether the very highest forms. of this race-the Aztecs and the Mayas-were properly to be called civilized. It is a matter of definitions; it depends upon what we regard as constituting civilization. Here was a people whose development showed strange contradictions. The ancient Mexicans were skilled in horticulture, yet had no beasts of burden and no milk, although the ox and buffalo were within easy reach. They were a trading people, and used money, but had apparently no system of weighing. They used stone tools so sharp that Cortez found barbers shaving with razors of ob

sidian in the public squares; they worked in gold and copper, yet they had not learned to make iron tools from the masses of that metal which lay, almost pure, in the form of aerolites, in their midst. They could observe eclipses and make a calendar, yet it is still doubtful whether they had what is properly to be

called an alphabet. It is certain that they had a method of picture-writing, not apparently removed in kind from the sort of pictorial mnemonics practised by many tribes of Indians at the present day; and all definite efforts to extract more than this from it have thus far failed. Brasseur de Bourbourg be

lieved that he had found in 1863, in the library of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid, a manuscript key to the phonetic alphabet of the Mayas. It was attached to an unpublished description of Yucatan (“Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan"), written by Diego de Landa, one of the early Spanish bishops of that country. Amid the general attention of "Americanists," Brasseur de Bourbourg tried his skill upon one of the few Maya manuscripts, but with little success; and Dr. Valentini, with labored analysis, has lately given his reasons for thinking the whole so-called alphabet a Spanish fabrication. The very question of the alphabet remains, therefore, still unproved, while Tylor, the highest living authority on anthropology, considers it essential to the claim of civilization that a nation should have a written language. Tried by this highest standard, therefore, we cannot yet say that either the Aztecs or the Mayas were civilized.

To sum up the modern theory, the key to the whole aboriginal American society is given in the pueblos of New Mexico, representing the communal household. This household is still to be seen at its lowest point in the lodges of the roving Indians of the North, and it produced, when carried to its highest point, all the art and architecture of Uxmal, and all the so-called civilization which the Spanish conquerors admired, exaggerated, and overthrew. The mysterious mounds. of the Ohio Valley were erected only that they might give to their builders the advantages possessed without labor by those who dwelt upon the high table- lands of New Mexico. The great ruined edifices in the valley of the Chacos are the same in kind with the ruined "palaces" of Yucatan. All these lodges, palaces, and pueblos alike—are but the communal dwellings of one great aboriginal race, of uncertain origin and history, varying greatly in grade of development, but one in institutions, in society, and in blood. This is the modern theory, a theory which has given a new impulse to all