SCHOOLCRAFT'S NATIONAL WORK. 135 



We received, a year or two since, a careful drawing of a piece of foreign copper 

 money, found, in the interior of Ohio, in digging a well ; and happened to have its 

 exact counterpart among a collection of modem oriental coins. 



We have at hand Jewish phylacteries that were taken from beneath the soil in 

 a country village, where, it was declared, Jews were never known to have been ; 

 but a follower of Moses was ultimately traced to the very spot where these were 

 found. 



We have the following inscription, discovered, according to most respectable 

 authority, on a plate of mica upon the breast of a skeleton, buried after the ancient 

 manner, in a mound near that at Grave Creek, from whence the more celebrated 

 inscribed stone was derived. 1 



" Trem Nebo, thou who did Py for me 

 and ray son Jero and wife peto. 

 1587. AYilliaw Welch." 



Our faith has not, thus far, been strengthened by sight; and we should be at a 

 loss to form a list of evidences pointing to the presence of an ancient people of 

 foreign origin at any mysterious period of time, or to collect a series of traditions 

 worthy to be presented as possessing an historical value. It is not less desirable 

 that all claims of the kind, having a shade of plausibility, should be by some one 

 assembled for investigation, however frequently, in particular instances, they may 

 have proved to be fallacious. 



Mr. Schoolcraft's views of the antiquities of the United States are often emphat- 

 ically expressed — 



" The aboriginal archaeology has fallen under a spirit of misapprehension and 

 predisposition to exaggeration. The antiquities of the United States are the 

 antiquities of barbarism, and not of civilization. Mere age they undoubtedly have ; 

 but it must require a heated imagination to perceive much, if anything at all, 

 beyond the hunter state of arts, as it existed at the respective eras of the Scandi- 

 navian and Columbian discoveries." (Vol. I. Introduction.) 



" There is nothing, indeed, in the magnitude and structure of our western mounds 

 which a semi-hunter and semi-agricultural population, like that which may be 

 ascribed to the ancestors or Indian predecessors of the existing race, could not have 

 executed. The interior of these earthy pyramids has disclosed nothing beyond 

 a rude state of the arts, or, at best, such arts of pottery and sculpture, shell-work 

 and stone implements, as are acknowledged to belong to the hunter or semi-hunter 

 races before they or their descendants had fallen into their lowest state of barbarism, 

 or that type in which they were found by the colonists between 1584 and 1620. 

 There is little to sustain a belief that these ancient works are due to tribes of more 

 fixed and exalted traits of civilization, far less to a people of an expatriated type 

 of civilization, of either an Asiatic or European origin, as several popular writers 

 very vaguely, and with little severity of investigation, imagined." (Ibid., p. 62.) 

 " It is a mistake to suppose that the pipe-sculptures of the Scioto valley — the 



1 From James E. Wharton, Esq., Editor of the Wheeling Times and Gazette. 



