HISTORICAIi FOOTPRINTS IN AMERICA. 305 



merchant, who put up this piece of sculpture, with the accompanyinej 

 quatrain, as a lampoon on M. Bigot, French Intendant and Presi- 

 dent of the Council ; and paid for his caustic wit with his life. But 

 the date of the assassination of M. Philibert, the supposed lampoonist, 

 is proved to have been long subsequent to that of 1732, inscribed on 

 the stone ; and the origin and special significance of the inscription 

 remain an enigma. 



In the able and well digested resume of American Archaeology pre- 

 pared by the learned librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, 

 he remarks : " We should be glad to see gathered into one chapter, 

 under an appropriate head, all the evidences of Art beyond the ability 

 of the natives, that must be assigned to an ante-Columbian period, and 

 all other indications of a foreign people, before that era, in the United 

 States. They cannot be numerous ; and the point is of sufficient im- 

 portance to be distinctly presented with all the force it possesses. 

 They have hitherto proved unsubstantial whenever we have attempted 

 to grasp them."* The Dighton Rock, the inscribed rock on Cun- 

 ningham's Island, Lake Erie ; the much controverted " Grave Creek 

 Stone ; " and a contemptibly gross forgery with the date 1587, "dis- 

 covered, according to most respectable authority, on a plate of mica 

 upon the breast of a skeleton, buried after the ancient manner, in a 

 mound near that at Grave Creek, from whence the more celebrated 

 inscribed stone was derived : " are all noticed, and some of them dis- 

 missed too gently by their courteous reviewer. 



The invention of spurious inscriptions : from the notorious gold 

 plates of the Mormon Gospel, to the " Ohio Holy Stone," and the 

 new version of the Ten Commandments, partly in Hebrew and partly 

 in unknown characters, engraved on a stone tablet, discovered under 

 an ancient mound at Newark, Ohio, in 1860 ; have for the most part 

 been the work of such illiterate and shallow knaves, that they scarcely 

 merit serious notice, were it not for the amount of discussion they ex- 

 cited, before the all engrossing civil war preoccupied the public mind 

 with its stern realities. The former relic, clumsily made out of com- 

 mon hone-stone, has been repeatedly engraved. A State Geologist of 

 high repute pronounced its material to be " wow«CM/z7e, a stone entirely 

 unknown among the rocks or minerals of the Ohio region ;" and a dis- 

 tinguished free-mason, "well informed upon the history of his order, 

 and upon antiquities in general," certified that "the stone was one 



• Jrchceolosy of the United States: by W. F. Haven, p. 134. 

 Vol. IX.' T 



