188 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



dotted with hamlets, which grew to towns, and these in time to 

 cities. The intervals between them were covered with grain-fields 

 and orchards, of which the growth was so luxuriant that it seemed 

 to prove the soil to be now for the first time opened to the sun- 

 light. Thus several generations passed ; but in time the invading 

 hosts pressed through the great natural water-gap, which once 

 connected the Hudson with the lakes, or crossed the Alleghanies 

 from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and took possession of the basin 

 of the Ohio. Here they entered their promised land the valley 

 of the Mississippi a region which by its broad topographical 

 unity, its universal fertility, its network of navigable waters, and 

 its unequaled mineral resources, is without a rival on the earth's 

 surface in its fitness to become the home of a great nation. Here, 

 too, the wandering and stealthy savage was in full possession, 

 and resisted the invasion of his hunting-grounds with his charac- 

 teristic ferocity. 



Ultimately, however, he was compelled to yield to the superior 

 numbers and intelligence of the whites, and, within fifty years 

 from the first struggle on the " dark and bloody ground " of Ken- 

 tucky, he had practically abandoned all the territory east of the 

 Mississippi. 



"When the forests were opened in this region, it was for the 

 first time discovered that the nomadic Indian was not autoch- 

 thonous, and that he had been preceded by a sedentary and par- 

 tially civilized people, who had cultivated the soil, worked the 

 mines, and left behind them a vast series of monuments which 

 extended from the Alleghanies to the prairies, from the Lakes to 

 the Gulf. These monuments consisted of mounds, walls, fortifica- 

 tions, and other structures composed of earth or rough stone, and 

 among them the mounds (chiefly sepulchral) were so conspicuous 

 from their numbers and size that the people by whom they were 

 constructed and whose name and history had been utterly lost 

 for want of other designation were called the Mound-builders. 



The records of this ancient people, with the lessons they teach 

 in regard to their degree and kind of culture and their ethnical 

 relations, will be referred to again. Meantime we will pass to 

 notice a still more extensive and interesting series of monuments 

 which attest the ancient occupation of America by civilized man. 



Long before the Northern whites had entered the valley of the 

 Mississippi, and had discovered the first traces of the mound- 

 builders, the Spaniards who invaded Mexico and Peru found 

 there a civilization in many respects superior to their own a 

 civilization which extended throughout Mexico, the Isthmus, and 

 the west coast of South America to the frontiers of Chili ; that 

 had produced cities that rivaled in extent and in the magnificence 

 of their buildings those of the Old World cities that were lighted 



