GEOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATIONS AND DISCOVERIES IN 1869. 



293 



A necessary complement to this foregoing 

 table is one of the mean temperature of each sea- 



son, and of the year, of most of these places, 

 and of others which Dr. Foster also furnishes : 



TABLE OF TEMPEEATUEES AT SEVEEAL STATIONS IN NOETH AMERICA. 



Dr. Foster has considered at some length 

 the mounds scattered over almost all portions 

 of the Mississippi Valley, and in an essay of 

 great heauty sums up the conclusions to which 

 explorers have been led by their examinations 

 in regard to the race which reared these vast 

 structures. From various data he concludes 

 that they must have been built at least a 

 thousand years ago, and by a race of different 

 physical characteristics, and a very much higher 

 civilization, than any of the tribes of roving 

 Indians now found in the United States. Their 

 implements, and the substances found in some 

 of the mounds, indicate that they were an agri- 

 cultural and horticultural people; yet they 

 could not have had the assistance of any of the 

 domestic animals in their agriculture. The 

 horse, the ox, the goat, and the llama, were 

 alike unknown to them, and the buffalo, or 

 bison, which, with all the appliances of modern 

 times, has never been domesticated, was not 

 more submissive to them. They had imple- 

 ments of stone and of copper, but, lacking tin, 

 they could not make bronze, and consequently 

 could not make the copper (which they do not 

 seem to have smelted, but only hammered) in- 



to cutting-instruments. They were familiar 

 with the plastic arts, and had even made some 

 progress in the manufacture of fictile ornaments, 

 and in sculpture. Their clothing was not made 

 of skins, but was woven by hand in a slow and 

 painful way, from a textile fibre analogous to 

 hemp, and they had perforated gauges of chlo- 

 rite slate or soapstone, to determine the size 

 of the threads which they spun. Their prin- 

 cipal food was maize, with perhaps the occa- 

 sional addition of the flesh of wild animals, and 

 fish ; but of the maize they made a variety of 

 dishes, among others a thin and wafer-like 

 bread, of which the Indian tribes of our time 

 have no knowledge. In selecting sites for their 

 mounds and structures, they showed an intel- 

 ligent and cultivated taste, the localities being 

 in almost every case those which our own 

 people have chosen as most advantageous for 

 the planting of large towns. Cincinnati, St. 

 Louis, Marietta, Circleville, Chillicothe, Newark 

 (Ohio), Chattanooga, Beloit, and other large 

 towns and cities, are all built where the mound- 

 builders had previously reared their structures. 

 The following table, for which we are in- 

 debted to Colton's Journal of Geography, fur- 



