90 Canadian Record of Science. 



Mining, etc. — That these people were miners, is evident 

 irom the prevalence of various mineral fragments and imple- 

 ments. At Mound City, near Chillicothe, has been found 

 galena, none of which can be found in Ohio. Obsidian also 

 is found in the shape of instruments, which they must have 

 transported from the Rocky Mountains. Ancient mining 

 shafts are found in Minnesota, where the solid rock had 

 been excavated to the depth of 60 feet. On Isle Eoyal 

 there are pits 60 feet deep, worked through nine feet of solid 

 rock, at the bottom of which is a rich vein of copper, and 

 in the two miles of excavations in the same straight line 

 have been found the mining implements in great numbers. 

 Such advancement in mining, sagacity in warfare, industrial 

 pursuits, and geometric skill, as their works display, prove 

 their great superiority of race over the modern Indian. 

 Their implements, some of them most elaborately made, 

 their brick-making and various other ingenious works, 

 enable us to place them high as an industrial people, while 

 their sacred enclosures, and altars, and tablets, together 

 with the numerous evidences of their being an agricultural 

 nation, enable us to place them far above the modern Indian 

 in the scale of civilization. 



The people of the United States, though much to be com- 

 mended because of their prudence and forethought in laying 

 out their modern towns and cities along the various water 

 courses, which serve as the different highways of commerce, 

 have by no means shown a superior sagacity in that respect 

 to the Mound-builders, whose great centres of population 

 are now mostly occupied, or are encroached upon by the 

 modern cities. 



We may with safety assert that the population about 

 Newark, and Xenia, and Mound City, was far above what it 

 is now. The country about Dayton, Miamisburg, Oxford, 

 Hamilton and Marietta was, undoubtedly, in the days of the 

 Mound-builders moving with a greater mass of human beings 

 than it can boast of to-day. 



And if those peaceable and industrious inhabitants were 

 as numerous as their remains indicate, what must have been 

 the strength of those invading hordes who caused their 



