58 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



importance to Bartram's facts. As early as 1827 a reviewer of 

 the Travels regretted that Bartram 



had not written with a greater degree of systematic precision, and with 

 fewer pages of exclamatory admiration at the beauties and wonders 

 of Nature . . . We hardly observe the real value of the numerous 

 facts he has collected, until we become sufficiently acquainted with the 

 book to skip the passages that may be fairly styled notes of admiration. 

 However, his work has a great deal of interesting matter in it, and will 

 always be referred to as conveying a good general idea of the countries 

 tlirough which he passed.''^ 



A more modern scientific investigator, John R. Swanton, of the 

 American Ethnological Society, considers the Travels " one of 

 our best early works upon this section. The fascination of his 

 style," he continues, " and the atmosphere of mystery which he 

 threw about the earthworks of the region visited combined to 

 give his ' Travels,' and the theory of the Mound Builders 

 along with it, a wide circulation." * It is true that Swanton 

 refutes Bartram's theory, but it is to be noted that he uses 

 Bartram's own facts with which to refute it. Bartram believed 

 that the aboriginal mounds he had observed were built by a 

 separate race of Mound Builders who had preceded the Ameri- 

 can Indians. This theory, according to Swanton, "' was accepted 

 and defended for a century afterwards by the greater number 

 of antiquarians who touched upon the problem, continuing, 

 indeed, until the intensive work in the mound area undertaken 

 by Cyrus Thomas in the eighties . . ." ^ That any ethnological 

 theory propounded a century and a half ago should prove, in 

 the light of modern scholarship, erroneous is not at all remark- 

 able. That Bartram should supply part of the ammunition 

 with which to demolish his own conjectures is remarkable only 

 when one fails to distinguish between Bartram the cautious 

 scientific exprorer, the meticulous amasser of facts, and Bar- 

 tram the sentimental Quaker commentator, the eighteenth-cen- 

 tury amateur philosopher. Swanton has an explanation of his 



'' The American Quarterly Review, II, 226. 



* '" The Interpretation of Aboriginal Mounds by Means of Creek Indian 

 Customs." Report of Smithsonian Institution, 1927, p. 495. 

 *lbid., 496. 



