XLII REPORT OF THE BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY. 



a highl}' developed religion, with lioiue.s and liusbaiidry and 

 advanced textile, fictile, and ductile arts, with a language, per- . 

 haps with letters, all swept away before an invasion of copper- 

 hued Huns from some unknown region of the earth, prior to 

 the landing of Columbus. These hypothetic semiciA'ilized 

 autochthons, hnagined to have been thus rudely exterminated 

 or expelled, have been variously identified by ethnologists 

 with the ancestors of the Aztecs or the Toltecs, the Mayas, the 

 Colhuas, the Chichimees, or the Pueblos, who have left no 

 sign of their existence save the rude and feeble fortifications 

 into which they fled froni their foes, and the silent and obscure 

 elevations in which their nobles found interment. 



Only about a hundred years have passed since scientific men 

 became fully aware of these remarkable antiquities. They 

 were first discussed by Dr. Fi-anklin, Thomas Jefferson, Presi- 

 dent Ezra Stiles of Yale College, Noah Webster, and their 

 contemporaries, wIkj advanced various theories to account for 

 the origin of the mounds. Franlvlin and Webster ^YeYe inclined 

 to attribute to De Soto and other Spanish explorers the few 

 that had l)een found and described, but Webster afterward 

 abandoned this theory and ascribed the mounds to the Indians. 

 Dr. Benjamin S. Barton, in 1797, set forth the conclusion that 

 the mounds were not built by the living Indians or their pre- 

 decessors, but by a people of higher cultivation, with established 

 law and order and a well disciplined i)olice. His work, "New 

 Views on the Origin of the Tribes of America," seems, in fact, 

 to have been the first publication of the theory of the "lost 



races." 



At the beginning of this century the students of American 

 archeology received two important accessions, Rev. T. M. Har- 

 ris, of Massachusetts, and Bishop Madison, of Virginia. Both 

 of them traveled extensively in tlie mound region, and both 

 were of scientific tastes and liabits of mind. Bishop Madison 

 saw in these antiquities no evidence of an art higher than or 

 of tendencies different from those of existing Indians, while Dr. 

 Harris thought that they evinced proofs of skill and culture 

 im])l}ing the hand of a superior race and the influence of a 

 higher civilization. 



