ANCIENT COPPER-MINES OF ISLE R OVALE. 615 



Persians. The Scythian kings are entombed in tumuli along the banks 

 of the Dnieper. Orestes, bewailing his father, Agamemnon, says : 



"If but some Lycian spear 'neath Ilium's walls 



Had lowly laid tliee, 

 A mighty name in the Atridan halls 



Thou woaldst have made thee. 

 Then hadst thou pitched thy fortunes like a star, 

 To son and daughter shining from afar, 

 Beyond the wide- waved sea the liigh-lieaped mound 



Had told for ever 

 Thy feats of battle, and with glory crowned 



Thy high endeavor." 



In Asia Minor the tomb of Alyattes, the Lydian king, has a cir- 

 cumference of nearly a mile, requiring ten minutes to ride round its 

 base. In the same neighborhood, near the lake Gygsea, are numerous 

 other circular mounds. 



The same practice was continued into the later days of Grecian 

 history. Alexander raised a mound over Demaratus, which, Plutarch 

 says, was " eighty cubits high and of vast circumference." The tumulus 

 erected on the plain of Marathon, in commemoration of the one hun- 

 dred and ninety-two Athenians who fell in the battle, is near the sea, 

 and is to be seen by all travelers. It is about one hundred feet in cir- 

 cumference, and about twenty-five feet high. Finally, coming within 

 the scope of modern history, the construction, at the order of the Eng- 

 lish Government, of a mound of earth on the plains of Waterloo, at- 

 tests the tenacity of that sentiment of veneration for the dead who 

 die in the service of their country, and the persistence of a practice, 

 which seems to be common to all mankind and to have survived from 

 prehistoric times, of resorting to the mound of earth, as being at once 

 the easiest made and the most enduring monument in memory of the 

 departed. 



The practice of mound-building not being distinctive of any race, 

 tribe, or epoch of the human family, it may be considered not at all 

 unlikely that the aboriginal tribes of America, perhaps without ex- 

 ception, had their ceremonies and habits of burial, if not other rites of 

 a sacred character, in one way and another associated with the erection 

 of mounds of earth. Indeed, it w^ould be a remarkable exception if 

 the native Americans did not erect mounds. They possessed the land 

 without molestation prior to the discovery of Columbus. They had 

 the necessary elements of perpetuity and stability, at least so far as 

 these can be predicated of savage tribes. They cultivated the soil and 

 conducted a considerable trade with their neighbors. They exhibited 

 all other characteristics common to mankind in an uncivilized state. 

 The denial of their resort to mound-building, for the same purposes 

 as other tribes in similar circumstances, carries with it the necessity 

 to account for such an anomalous exception. 



