66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



implements. The weakness of this argument has been well shown by 

 Mr. Albert Mott in his very original but little known presidential 

 address to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool in 

 1873. He maintains that "our most distant glimpses of the past are 

 still of a world peopled as now with men both civilized and savage ; " 

 and " that we have often entirely misread the past by supposing that 

 the outward signs of civilization must always be the same, and must 

 be such as are found among ourselves." In support of this view he 

 adduces a variety of striking facts and ingenious arguments, a few of 

 which I w T ill briefly summarize. 



On one of the most remote islands of the Pacific Easter Island 

 2,000 miles from South America, 2,000 from the Marquesas, and more 

 than 1,000 from the Gambler Islands, are found hundreds of gigantic 

 stone images, now mostly in ruins, often thirty or forty feet high, 

 while some seem to have been much larger, the crowns on their heads 

 cut out of a red stone, being sometimes ten feet in diameter, while 

 even the head and neck of one are said to have been twenty feet high. 1 

 These once stood erect on extensive stone platforms, yet the island 

 has only an area of about thirty square miles, or considerably less than 

 Jersey. Now, as one of the smallest images eight feet high weighs 

 four tons, the largest must weigh over a hundred tons if not much more; 

 and the existence of such vast works implies a large population, 

 abundance of food, and an established government. Yet how could 

 these coexist in a mere speck of land wholly cut off from the rest of 

 the world ? Mr. Mott maintains that this necessarily implies the 

 power of regular communication with larger islands or a continent, 

 the arts of navigation, and a civilization much higher than now exists 

 in any part of the Pacific. Very similar remains in other islands 

 scattered widely over the Pacific add weight to this argument. 



The next example is that of the ancient mounds and earthworks 

 of the North American Continent, the bearing of which is even more 

 significant. Over the greater part of the extensive Mississippi Val- 

 ley four well-marked classes of these earthworks occur. Some are 

 camps, or works of defense, situated on bluffs, promontories, or iso- 

 lated hills; others are vast inclosures in the plains and lowlands, 

 often of geometric forms, and having attached to them roadways or 

 avenues often miles in length ; a third are mounds corresponding to 

 our tumuli, often seventy to ninety feet high, and some of them cov- 

 ering acres of ground ; while a fourth group consist of representations 

 of various animals modeled in relief on a gigantic scale, and occur- 

 ring chiefly in an area somewhat to the northwest of the other classes, 

 in the plains of Wisconsin. 



The first class the camps or fortified inclosures resemble in gen- 

 eral features the ancient camps of our own islands, but far surpass 

 them in extent. Fort Hill, in Ohio, is surrounded by a wall and ditch 



1 Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1870, pp. ]77, 178. 



