OE THE OLD AND NEW WORLD. 261 



Mississippi Valley, of the fauna peculiar not only to southern, but to 

 tropical latitudes, suggestive either of arts derived from a foreign 

 source, and of an intimate intercourse maintained with the central 

 regions where the civilization of ancient America attained its highest 

 development, or else indicative of a migration from the south, and 

 an intrusion into the northern area of the continent, of the race of 

 the ancient graves of Central America, bringing with them into 

 their new area the arts of the tropics, and models derived from the 

 animals familiar to their fathers in the parent-land of the race. 



That such a migration,— rather than a contemporaneous existence 

 of the same race over the whole area thus indicated, and maintaining 

 intimate intercommunication and commercial intercourse, is the 

 more probable inference, is suggested on various grounds. If the 

 Mound Builders had some of the arts and models, not only of Central 

 America, but of Peru, they had also the native copper of Lake 

 Superior, and mica believed to be traceable to the Alleghanies, while 

 the gigantic tropical shells of the Gulf of Mexico have been found 

 alike in these ancient mounds and in the graves along the shores of 

 Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. The fact indeed that among the 

 specimens of their most elaborate carving, some of the objects re- 

 present birds and quadrupeds belonging to latitudes so far to the 

 south, naturally tends to suggest the idea of a central region where 

 the arts were cultivated to an extent unknown in the Mississippi 

 regions, and that those objects manufactured in the localities where 

 such models are furnished by the native fauna, remain only as the 

 evidences of ancient commercial relations maintained between these 

 latitudes and the localities where now alone such are known to 

 abound. But in opposition to this, full value must be given to the 

 fact that neither the relics, nor the customs which they indicate, 

 appear to pertain exclusively to southern latitudes, nor are such found 

 to predominate among the singular evidences of ancient and more 

 matured civilization either in Central or Southern America, while the 

 varied nature of the materials employed in the arts of the Mound 

 Builders, indicate a very wide range of relations ; though it cannot 

 be assumed that these were maintained in every case by direct inter- 

 course. 



, The earlier students of American Archaeology, like the older Celtic 

 Antiquaries of Britain ; gave full scope to a system of theorising 

 which built up comprehensive ethnological schemes on the very 

 smallest premises ; but in the more judicious caution of later writers 

 ^here is a tendency to run to the opposite extreme. Dr. Schoolcraft 



