308 HISTORICAL FOOTPRINTS IN AMERICA. 



such a hint what might not learned ingenuity have done to unriddle 

 the mysteries of the New World in the year of grace, 1232 ? Unhap- 

 pily its fate has been to fall into the hands of Mr. Samuel F. Haven 

 for literary editing, which he does in this unromantic fashion : 



" We have before us the ' Alabama St.me ' found, some thirty years 

 ago, near the Black Warrior river. To our eyes it reads HlSPx\N. 

 ET IND.REX. as plainly as the same inscription on a Spanish quar- 

 ter of a dollar somewhat worn. The figures may be as above repre- 

 sented, but of course they cannot be intended for a date," unless 

 indeed it be 1632. The " Rutland stone," duly honoured in the 

 Antiquitates AmericancB, next comes under review, with its supposed 

 characters graven and then filled in with a black composition. But 

 this is a counterpart to the famous " Runamo Inscription " cut on the 

 surface of a flat rock at Hoby, between Carlshamn and Runamo in 

 Bleking, a Province of Sweden. Saxo Grammaticus tells us in the 

 preface to his Historia Banica that King Waldemar the Great, in the 

 twelfth century, sent emissaries skilled in Runic lore to read and copy 

 the inscription. Olaus Wormius tried it again nearly five hundred 

 years after. But what both had failed to decypher. Professor Magnusen 

 of Copenhagen mastered in 1834, and made it out to be an inscription 

 in old-northern runes, and regular alliterative verse, referring to the 

 heroes in the battle of Braavalle, fought, A.D., 680. To no fitter 

 seer could the "Rutland Stone," with its regular series of literal 

 characters, be despatched. But, alas for the credit of the Antiqua- 

 rian craft, the Runamo inscription had by this time been discerned to 

 be nothing more than the natural markings on a block of graphic 

 granite : and to the same class of relics the Rutland Stone must be re- 

 ferred. Old enough it is for the most ambitious stickler for the anti- 

 quity of the New WorlcT; ancient indeed as the oldest of those records 

 interpreted by the author of " the Testimony of the Rocks ;" and 

 inscribed by the same hand that formed its rocky matrix. 



But from such learned and unlearned blunderings, — not without 

 their value from the curious illustrations they afford of the change 

 from the exclusive pedantry and dilettantism of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury of Europe, to the widely diffused, but superficial knowledge of 

 the American nineteenth century ;— it is pleasant to turn to an inscrip- 

 tion of early date which invites consideration as a genuine, though 

 rudely executed record of the sixteenth century. The " Manlius 

 Stone," now referred to, was discovered about the year 1820, in the 



