112 FIELD AND FOREST. 



To recover their language has given rise to a fund of pseudo-arch- 

 aeology. Many enterprising and ingenuous persons have endeavored 

 to supply what is wanted from their own invention and have exhibited 

 to a credulous public curiously inscribed stones, bearing characters 

 that have some resemblance to several of the languages of Europe 

 either existing or extinct. The Icelandic, Norse, Phenician, Hebrew, 

 Egyptian, Aztec and others have been used to interpret inscriptions 

 or the speech of the tribes now living, but up to this time no trace of 

 any kind free from suspicion, has been brought forward, in any way 

 trustworthy as a mound builders language. That which damages 

 these inventions most is their polyglot character, since it is evident 

 that a semicivilized and homogeneous people, as they appear to have 

 been, would not require more than one mode of speech to converse 

 with each other on their every day business. The majority of these 

 inventions also claim to resemble the old languages of Europe as the 

 Runic or bardic from the North, or from the Medterranean shore, as 

 the Phenician, Egyptian or Hebrew. It is pertinent here to ask, if 

 these people came from Eastern Asia, why not seek for characters in 

 which the language of that part of the world is expressed rather than 

 from Southern Europe? But it is unreasonable to suppose that the 

 mound builders possed a written language at all, when as is well known, 

 the ancient Mexicans, with all their higher grade of culture, had not 

 attained to that point for intercommunication, but had to depend upon 

 picture writing for despatching public messages. 



These inscriptions as usually brought before the attention of the 

 antiquary are on small thin pieces of dark slate or limestone of square 

 or rounded outlines, never large enough to contain any valuable infor- 

 mation, and are declared to have been found in mounds or indian 

 graves, or in digging wells, or cisterns from ten to fifty feet below the 

 natural surface. The best known example of the kind, is the small 

 oval flat stone from the mound of Grave Creek in West Virginia — 

 still by many believed to be genuine. An account of it with all its 

 published variations and alleged meanings is given by Gen'l. Whittlesey 

 in the historical and archaeological tracts, published by the Western 

 Reserve Historical Society at Cleveland, Ohio. This author, in a vig- 

 orous manner, attacks all these mound stuffing frauds and has exposed 

 the diverse interpretations assigned by learned savans and others to 

 this Grave Creek specimen and many others of its class. 



