HISTORICAL FOOTPRINTS IN AMERICA. 309 



Township of Manlius, Onondaga County, New York, by a farmer, 

 when gathering the stones out of a field brought for the first time into 

 cultivation. It is an irregular spherical boulder, about fourteen 

 Inches in diameter, now deposited in the Museum of the Albany In- 

 stitute. On one side, which is smooth and nearly flat, the following 

 inscription is rudely, but regularly cut, with the device, at the divid- 

 ing line, of a serpent twining round a tree : 



Leo. De L : : 1 1 

 VI, 1520 X 



The letters on the right side are somewhat defaced; but the stone looks 

 like a rude memorial hastily executed by some explorer, on the most con- 

 venient tablet at hand, either as a memento and evidence of his hav- 

 ing reached the spot, — in itself a fact of no slight interest, when the 

 date and locality are considered ; — or as the record made by some 

 friendly hand to mark the last resting place of a companion who had 

 persevered thus far among the first explorers of the New World's mys- 

 teries. But like most American inscriptions, that of the Manlius Stone 

 has been tortured into meanings not very easily discernible by any 

 ordinary process of interpreting such simple records. " By the figure 

 of a serpent climbing a tree," says one ingenious decypherer* " a well- 

 known passage in the Pentateuch is clearly referred to. By the date 

 the sixth year of the reign of the Pontiff, Leo X. has been thought to 

 be denoted. This appears to be probable, less clearly from the in- 

 scriptive phrase : Leo de Lon YI. than from the plain date, 1520, 

 being six years after the Pontiff took the chair :" which, however, it 

 is not, as Giovanni de Medici succeeded Juhus II. in March, 1513. 

 Mr. Buckingham Smith recently submitted to the American Antiqua- 

 rian Society a paper devoted to the elucidation of inscribed stones 

 found on ancient Indian sites,f among which he includes both the 

 Grave Creek Stone and the Dighton Rock. Applying the same rule 

 to those as to the Manlius Stone, he discovers in their characters, 

 initials or ciphers used in the Catholic church, and renders them as 

 abridged invocations to Christ and the Virgin Mary. Of the Manlius 

 Stone he says, with more hesitation, "as, in the year of Christ, 1520, 

 Giovanni de Medici (Leo X.) sat upon the Papal throne, the words 

 might possibly have been LEO DEcimus PONtifex MAXimus." 

 Again the same inscription is assumed by another interpreter to be 



* Schoolcraft's 'Notts on the Iroquois, p. 326. • 



f Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, April, 1863, p. 33. 



