50 



FOSSIL MEN. 



Between the Esquimaux and Tinne on the north 

 and the St. Lawrence and its lakes on the south, and 

 stretching down the Atlantic coast as far as Florida, 

 lay the numerous tribes of Algonquins and their allies, 

 resembling each other in physical characters and 

 language, and whom tradition and other indications 

 concur in tracing to a migration entering America 

 from the equatorial Atlantic. Many of these tribes 

 were hunters and fishermen, but in the temperate and 

 warmer regions they had acquired the rudiments at 

 least of agriculture. They are the typical American 

 Indians of the early English colonists. 



In Central America, Mexico, and the rich alluvial 

 plains of the Mississippi and its tributaries, were 

 the Toltecans, or primitive Mexicans, and the Alle- 

 ghans, or " mound-builders " of the Mississippi and 

 Ohio a people now known by little more than their 

 bones and the remains of their works. In physio- 

 gnomy and bodily frame they seem to have presented 

 some of the softer features of the Polynesians, from 

 whom perhaps they were in whole or in part derived. 

 Simple and primitive tillers of the soil, they possessed 

 a higher degree of the instinct of combination for 

 great public works and of artistic skill than the other 

 North American tribes. Their huge communistic 

 barracks or hotels, the so-called palaces of Central 

 America, Yucatan, and Mexico, the Pueblos of the 

 Colorado, and the mound- villages of the Mississippi, 

 with their sacrificial and burial-mounds, still remain 

 as gigantic monuments of their skill and industry. 



