126 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



DISCOVERIES ILLUSTRATING THE LITERATURE 

 AND RELIGION OF THE MOUND BUILDERS. 



BY EDMUND ANDREWS, A. M.. M. D., 

 Prof, of Surgery in Chicago Medical College. 



Looking back into the dawn of American history, we see certain 

 figures stalking dim and phantom-like across the horizon. So 

 unreal do they appear, that were it not for the massive earthworks 

 they have left behind them, we might well disbelieve their ex- 

 istence. 



Little by little we have gained information respecting them. 

 They were miners and coppersmiths of considerable skill, but 

 apparently wrought their metal solely by hammering, yet they 

 occasionally had molten bronze chisels, which they probably im- 

 ported from Mexico. They possesped shells from the sea, plates 

 of mica from the Alleghanies, and Obsidian from the Rocky Moun- 

 tains. They probably sent copper to Mexico, and in the graves of 

 Yucatan have been found heads of their Lake Superior chloras- 

 tralite. They were farmers, and cultivated broad fields with hoes 

 and spades made of flint and wood. They wove cloth, made pot- 

 tery, and erected earthworks of such enormous size and number 

 as to astonish even the white men who now occupy their deserted 

 cities. Their skeletons often exceed six feet in height, their skulls, 

 which are generally brachycephalic, are flattened at the occupit 

 like those of the modern Indians, but enclosed a large sized brain. 

 This comprises nearly all that we have hitherto known about the 

 vanished races. 



The exploration of the interiors of their mounds has generally 

 been conducted in a very slovenly and ineflicient way. It would 

 seem that in sacrificial mounds, the builders were accustomed to 

 deposit sacred records inscribed on stone, but so incomplete have 

 been our examinations, that hitherto only a few of them have been 

 disinterred, and these more by accident than by any real skill of 

 the discoverers. 



