652 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
may be mentioned Silbury Hill in England, an artificial mound 175 feet high. 
While the great majority of these old world relics are of unquestionable pre-his- 
toric origin, there are many which have been reared within the historic period. 
Of these the most conspicuous examples are the tumuli of Queen Thyra and 
King Gorm, in Denmark ; the Kouloba tumulus in the Crimea and the cairn 
raised to the memory of the Prince-consort, Albert, to which each member of 
the English royal family contributed a stone. If we turn to reminiscences of the 
past, contained in ancient literature, we find that Semiramis buried her husband 
King Ninus under a great mound of earth ; that over the grave of his friend 
Patroclus, Achilles heaped a mound upwards of a hundred feet in diameter ; 
that the tomb of Alyattes, King of Lydia, was a tumulus of stone and earth 
nearly a mile in circuit ; that Alexander the Great caused a mound to be heaped 
over the grave of his friend Hephaestian at a cost of nearly one million dollars ; 
and that according to the earliest historians mound-burial was practiced by the 
Scythians, Etruscans, Greeks, Germans, and many other nations. Nor are 
fortifications, or embankments, less abundant. Sometimes these are long ramparts 
like that which stretches from Bristol Channel to the Dee ; sometimes they are 
isolated fortresses like those in the Scottish highlands and elsewhere. These are 
almost identical with American works of the same character. 
Throughout the broad extent of territory over which the Mound-builders 
wandered, but chiefly on the river courses that form the Mississippi system, their 
remains are found in great profusion, and may be placed in the following cate- 
gories : 
I. Mounds. These are various in character and have been classed as 
temple, altar, burial, observatory and residence mounds. But besides those 
which can be identified as belonging to either of these classes there are many 
whose status is not at all obvious. Some of these are conjectured to have served 
as garden beds ; but these, as well as the so called residence tumuli, are more 
properly described as terraces than as mounds. The temple mounds are of var- 
ious forms, rectangular, octagonal, oval, conical, etc., and their truncated tops, 
usually spacious and at a commanding elevation, suggest the teocallis and huacas 
of Mexico, Central America and Peru, and have given them their supposed relig 
ious character. Like these southern structures they are ascended by graded 
ways or terraced steps or spiral paths. Mounds of this class are rare in the 
northern habitat of their builders ; but at Cahokia in Illinois, in various parts of 
Missouri, Ohio, and Indiana, and in almost every southern State west of the 
Alleghanies, from Virginia to Texas, these relics of antique devotion are abundant 
and worthy of attention. The great mound at Cahokia covers a space of eight 
acres, is ninety feet in height and the platform on the summit is nearly two acres 
in extent. Around this mound an immense number of smaller tumuli are scat- 
tered, presenting a scene similar to that viewed by Cortez from the summit of 
the pyramid of Cholula. While this class of mounds occur but rarely in higher 
latitudes of the Mound-builder's territory, they grow more numerous and remark- 
able toward the south ; seeming to insist in unmistakable language that progress 
