68 A Brief Chapter on Sacrificial Mounds. 



stones and clay always present upon these elevations, are probably 

 the remains of altars similar to those discovered in the altar- 

 mounds ; and we do no violence to probability in further attributing 

 the construction of a more elaborate and enduring altar of a 

 single stone to the same development in arts which the 

 mounds themselves exhibit, in their general features, as we proceed 

 southward. 



It is said that the custom of the Chinese, 2,300 years before our era, 

 was to offer sacrifices to the supreme being. Chanty, on four great moun- 

 tains, called the four Yo. The sovereigns, finding it inconvenient to go 

 thither in person, caused eminences, representing these mountains, to 

 be erected near their habitations. Heaven was thus worshiped upon 

 a mound round and high, to represent the sky; and Earth, upon 

 a tumulus square and low, to represent the earth. However satis- 

 factory may be the clue thus afforded to the origin or meaning 

 of these forms, the frequent reduplication of the square and circle in 

 the mounds, and also in the earthen inclosures of the Mound-Builders, 

 is a circumstance worthy of careful examination. The Creeks, who 

 may have remotely derived the elements of their semi-civilization from 

 the mysterious race of the mounds, displayed the same attachment to 

 these forms in their public structures. They too, in common with 

 other southern tribes who may be supposed to have felt, more or less 

 directly, the influence of the civilization of the extinct races whom they 

 or their predecessors supplanted, were sun-worshipers, and maintained 

 a continual fire, as we are told by Bartram and other early witnesses, 

 within a circular edifice, called the " Kotunda," which, from its form, 

 was held to be a symbol of the sun. 



From the considerations thus briefly adduced, we can not doubt the 

 prevalence, among the Mound-Builders, of religious customs in the 

 main similar to those prevailing among the Mexican races before the 

 conquest ; and the substantial identity, in type as well as in details of 

 construction, of the elevations upon which religious rites were cele- 

 brated, leads to an inference of a similar identity of the races who 

 constructed them in both sections of the continent. 



Though ignorant of the minor features of their sacrificial worship, 

 excepting so far as adopted by the Aztec races, there is no reason for 

 supposing the cannibalism prevalent among the Aztecs as part of their 

 ritual, was practiced by the Mound-Builders. On the contrary, this 

 barbarous custom of the Aztecs originated, according to their own 

 testimony, among themselves ; and was a feature entirely inconsistent 

 with the more humane and elevated system which they appropriated 

 from the Toltecs and other races who preceded them. The Missouri 



