j 2 Some Considerations on the Mound Builders. 



ognized difference between the stone implements of the 

 two. Both were great smokers, and lavished all their 

 artistic skill in carving and beautifying their pipes. The 

 Mound Builders appear to have kept their infants 

 strapped to boards, as the Indians do. This inference 

 was drawn by Morton and by Squire from the flatness 

 of the occiput of the skull. The same characteristic is 

 noted by Mr. Jones in an authentic skull recently dis- 

 interred in Georgia. They appear to have had similar 

 amusements. The Natchez, Choctaws, Cherokees, and 

 other Southern tribes, and also the Mandans, in the 

 Northwest, were much addicted to a game called chungke 

 by the Choctaws and Mandans, and nettecawaw by the 

 Cherokees. 



The game was played with disks of hard stone, that 

 were greatlv prized on account of the labor required to 

 rub such hard stone into the required shape. These 

 same stone disks, called bv Squire and Davis discoid 

 stones, were used by the Mound Builders. It is, how- 

 ever, only an inference that they were used for the same 

 purpose. 



And while one great difference between the Mound 

 Builders and the modern Indians is that, among the 

 former, the men must have labored; while among In- 

 dians labor is left to the squaws, still the difference was 

 not absolute. For the Choctaws worked habitually in 

 their corn-fields with the squaws, and even hired them- 

 selves out to the French as laborers. 



WHAT BECAME OF THEM. 



As to the final question, what became of the Mound 

 Builders, little can be said beyond conjecture. Civiliza- 

 tion, as a rule, radiates from a centre ; and when, from 



