THE EARLY MAN OF NORTH AMERICA. 583 



races using their hands to less advantage, as well as other bodily 

 orsrans, the seats of the senses. 



Savages exercise their minds less, and personify more than we do. 

 Like children, they say more readily no than yes to all questions 

 affecting their bodily advantage. They are afraid of change. All 

 children and all savages are conservative. The savage has not passed 

 the mental state of our own children. It is impossible for a child to 

 conceive of any change in the world outside until it has had some expe- 

 rience of such changes and has reflected upon them. Even then it is 

 hard for the child to understand the appearance of this city of Buffalo, 

 for instance, ten years before the time when its mind first received 

 permanent impressions. It is from this fact that youth appears so 

 long when we look back upon it, as well as from the fact that our 

 early impressions made upon the " clean slate " of the brain are more 

 enduring, underlying and peering through our subsequent experiences. 

 Even to ourselves, sensible to the hope of change, and therefore of 

 a bettered condition of things, it is difficult and even distasteful to 

 turn to the record of the past and make it give up its dead. It is 

 hard for us to make a mental picture of the site of this city when 

 Red Jacket lived hereabouts ; scarcely possible, when, farther back 

 still, in 1687, La Hontan traversed this place. But in the history of 

 North America we can go back by the light of creditable documents 

 to the year 986, when Biarne, the son of Bard son, set sail from Ice- 

 land, and, losing his way, came in sight of Newfoundland. Back of 

 the earliest discovery by our race of this continent of North America 

 must lie the history of the Indian. In Mexico traditional historic 

 accounts take us back as far as the sixth century. And, for a still 

 earlier time and its events, we have to penetrate the surface of this 

 continent itself. The earth holds the further answers to these ques- 

 tions. In a story of ancient Greece, we read that there was a dispute 

 as to whether Salamis had formerly belonged to the Athenians or the 

 Megarians. When it was referred to Solon, he caused the graves to 

 be opened. It was found then that their occupants were buried accord- 

 ing to the custom of the Athenians, and not of the Megarians. The 

 dead men settled that question. The testimony of the dead Athenians 

 dispensed with the formula of an oath, and was yet accepted. No 

 appeal was necessary after such evidence, just as no statute of limita- 

 tion could bar a trial of such importance. It was a case of supple- 

 mentary proceedings that commanded respect. 



The earth of this continent shows us that before the Indians there 

 has been a people whom we call Mound-builders that is, mounds 

 were thrown up here by men whose bones we find in them, lying 

 among rough tools and utensils, and after the mounds we name the 

 race, who, perhaps, were not a different people from the Indians. 



But for these mounds we would not know of the men who built 

 them. They are mentioned in no history, human or divine. "What 



