54 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



stood by examining the specimens or a good series of 

 figures. Very numerous tools and utensils of shell have 

 also been found in the mounds, a moderate quantity in 

 copper, with many ornaments of mica and some of silver 

 and of gold. 



Ancient Mounds and Earthworks. 



The general character of the mounds and earthworks of 

 various parts of the United States, and which are more 

 especially abundant in the great valley of the Mississippi 

 and its tributaries, is sufficiently known, though their vast 

 numbers and the great variety of form and structure 

 which they present is hardly understood in England. A 

 voluminous memoir will shortly be published by the 

 Bureau of Ethnology, which will give most important 

 information on the entire subject. In some parts of 

 Indiana and Kentucky a hundred mounds have been 

 found in a hundred acres. The enclosed area of the 

 ancient earthworks at Aztalan, Wisconsin, is more than 

 fourteen hundred feet long and near seven hundred wide. 

 The great mound of Cahokia, St. Louis, was ninety feet 

 high, and covered an area of seven hundred feet by five 

 hundred feet, with an inclined road up one side to reach 

 the flat platform on the top. Another almost equally 

 large mound exists at Seltzer town, Mississippi. In 

 Louisiana are some curious platform mounds, in the form 

 of squares or parallelograms, connected by terraces. Be- 

 sides the wonderful Fort Ancient in Ohio, containing five 

 miles of embankment, now, sad to relate, being gradually 

 destroyed by cultivation, there are in Georgia and other 

 southern states several fortified mountain-tops, recalling, 

 in their inaccessibility, the hill-forts of India, 



Ash-j^its, Cemeteries and Bouse sites. 



Another curious class of works are the ash-pits, dis- 

 covered a 'few years since near Madison ville, Ohio. Mr. 

 Putnam, curator of the Peabody Museum, has opened no 

 less than one thousand of these pits, and has obtained 

 from them a large amount of implements, ornaments, pot- 



