86 Wisconsm Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 



goats and many turkeys, big and fat." The point where we 

 located this halt is not over one-half a mile from this famous 

 historic tree, which was fully four feet in diameter. It is 

 probable that 203 years ago some of Hennepin's party blazed 

 an elm sapling as a guide, and now the marks of that 

 hatchet are revealed as sharp and distinct as when first 

 made. 



At the time Dr. Lapham and I surveyed the large group 

 of mounds, near Racine, in September, 1850, there was a pin 

 oak sapling growing on the centre of a small mound situ- 

 ated near the house of William Bull. That sapling is now 

 fifty-six inches in diameter although that species of tree is 

 ordinarily not a rapid grower. 



Trees that are planted on the mounds, in Mound Ceme- 

 tery have made a rapid growth being much larger than 

 those planted at the same time in the adjacent grounds. 



It has been asserted over and over again, without fear of 

 contradiction, that the " Mound builders were an agricul- 

 tural people and the Indians not." The truth is that the In- 

 dians well deserved the name agricultural. 



When white men came to America they found corn in 

 cultivation from latitude forty degrees south, to 

 the St. Lawrence river of the north. Corn must have 

 originated in a warm country, probably in Mexico. How 

 it could have been adapted to the short summers of the re- 

 gions so far north, is a matter of interesting inquiry. With- 

 out other agricultural education than that derived from their 

 own unrecorded and necessarily imperfect observations, the 

 Indians pushed the production of corn from the Gulf of 

 Mexico to the St. Lawrence, Canada, ages before the white 

 man visited them, and it was to the natives that the early 

 settlers were indebted, not only for the seed corn, but for 

 instruction as to planting and cultivation. An annual like 

 corn may extend itself east or west along the same isother- 

 mal line by accidental causes, but it could not have moved 

 into a much colder climate without skillful cultivation and 

 careful attention to the selection and improvement of va- 

 riety. It must have required ages to change it to such a de- 

 gree as to fit it to grow and ripen in Canada. 



