26 ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES. 



elaborate one, and more highly finished than that of Captain Heart, from which it 

 differs in a few slight particulars, being evidently drawn from a subsequent survey. 



A few j'ears later, Col. Sargent forwarded to Rev. Dr. Belknap, the historian, and 

 also to the American Philosophical Society, a paper, with drawings of ornaments and 

 implements taken from the mounds at Cincinnati ; which formed the text of an 

 elaborate treatise on the subject of western antiquities, read before the Philosophical 

 Society by Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton. 1 



In 1787, Dr. Barton, then a student of medicine at Edinburgh, commenced the 

 publication of a work entitled " Observations on Some Parts of Natural History." 

 The first part, which alone was printed, relates to antiquities, and contains an 

 account of the discoveries at Muskingum, and remarks on the first peopling of the 

 country. This was noticed the same year in the London " Critical Review," where 

 the writer, differing from what he supposes to be the opinion of the author, viz : 

 that America derived its inhabitants from the north of Europe, is disposed to regard 

 the south of Europe as the source of their origin. Dr. Barton intended merely to 

 assume, as an hypothesis, that the Danes were the ancestors of the race that built 

 the mounds and fortifications, while the country at large had probably been peo- 

 pled from a thousand sources. 2 



In 1788, Rev. Samuel Kirkland, missionary to the Senecas, of New York, ob- 

 served the remains of embankments and inclosures in Monroe and Genesee Counties, 

 in that State. 



Notices of earthworks are not infrequent, about this period, in the journals of 

 travellers, and persons connected with the army at the West. The third volume 

 of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society contains an extract 

 from the MS. journal of a gentleman connected with the forces under the command 

 of Gen. St. Clair, in which the vestiges of ancient "fortifications" are spoken of as 

 " ever presenting themselves to the view." The writer says he has been told that 

 they owe their origin to the Welsh ; referring evidently to the statement of Isaac 

 Stuart, of what he professed to have learned from certain Indians respecting their 

 origin from a foreign country, supposed, from their knowledge of the Welsh lan- 

 guage, to be Wales ; which statement was printed in some of the newspapers, in 

 October, 1785. 3 



1 See "Massachusetts Magazine," July, 1795, and "Transactions of Am. Phil. Society," TV, 1799. 

 Dr. Barton's paper was in the form of a letter to Rev. Joseph Priestley. 



a Letter to Dr. Priestley, Trans, of Am. Phil. Society, IV. 



a The circumstances that may be adduced to prove the former existence of a Celtic colony in the 

 southern regions of the United States arc certainly curious, and exhibit some remarkable coincidences. 



The Scandinavian tales of an " Irish Christian people," somewhere south of the Chesapeake, relate 

 to a period nearly two centuries prior to the alleged expedition of Madoc, but deserve to be noticed in 

 this connection. The same localities, near the Gulf of Mexico, have been assigned to them that are 

 designated as the original abode of the followers of the Welsh chieftain. Then we have the story of 

 the Rev. Morgan Jones, that the Tuscaroras understood his preaching "in the British tongue," about 

 A. D. 1660 ; and the less definite accounts of "one Stedman," and " one Oliver Humphreys," respect- 

 ing natives, somewhere near Florida, who spoke Welsh. To these are to be added the statement of 

 Mr. Charles Beatty, a missionary, who visited the interior in the year 1766. Benjamin Sutton, a 

 captive, informed him that he had been with the Choctaws to an Indian town, a very considerable 



