120 



THE CANADIAN SPORTSMAN AND NATURALIST. 



A GENEEAL DELUGE. 



(Continued from page 104 .) 



The American continent bears unmistakable 

 traces of a race who lived contemporaneous 

 with those people. They, too, were mound, 

 pyramid and artifici.il lake builders ; they were 

 sun-worshippers, as were those who reached 

 Asia, and, like them had their idols, to whom 

 they made animal and human sacrifices ; they 

 faced the east in their worship, and buried their 

 dead looking the same direction, and each had 

 a large array of priests who administered to 

 their gods ; each employed ornamented funeral 

 urns in which they deposited the ashes of their 

 worthy dead, and each used the phallic emblem 

 in the same manner. In short, each were 

 parts of the great wave of h umanity, going out 

 of a common centre, one rolling eastward, the 

 other westward, to escape a then impending- 

 calamity. Each had similar features- 1 and 

 similar forms of expression ; each carried for- 

 ward a similar civilization; each had made 

 similar advances in mineralogy ; each employ- 

 ed the now lost art of hardening copper for 

 stone-cutting, and used the precious metals for 

 ornamentation. And, to climax the whole, 

 each had a loritten languaye.% Famine, pesti- 

 lence, and exterminating war, an overwhelm- 

 ing ocean wave, or someother direful calamity 

 swept all away. His labors only remain to tefl 

 that he has been. Savage man, from some 



tin an excavation made in the lower stage, or esplanade 

 of the principal mound, I found embedded in the walls ot 

 the cut, and so firmly fixed in the wall that it was with 

 difficulty extracted, the head of an idol ivith Asiatic fea- 

 tures. * * It would be of thrilling interest to be able to 

 ascertain how the conception of the A static face origi- 

 nated. — .S. B Evans in his letter of May 25th, 1S81; to 

 the Chicago Times, describing his visit to the pyramid of 

 Cholulu, Mexico. 



JTheir monuments indicate that they had entered upon 

 a career of civilzation ; they lived in stationary communi- 

 ties, cultivating the soil and relying on its generous yield 

 for support ; they clothed themselves, in part at least, in 

 garments regularly spun and woven ; they modeled clay and 

 carved stone, even of the most obdurate characters, into 

 images representing animate objects, including even the 

 human face and form, with a close adherence to nature; 

 they mined and cast copper in a variety of useful forms ; 

 they quarried mica, steatite, chert and the novacuhte 

 slates, which they wrought into articles adapted to personal 

 adornment, to domestic use, or to the chase ; they col- 

 lected brine of the salines into earthen vessels, moulded in 

 baskets which they evaporated into a form which admitted 

 of transportation ; they erected an elaborate line of de- 

 fence stretching for many hundred miles, to guard against 

 the sudden irruption of enemies ; they had a national reli- 

 gion, in which the elements were the objects of supreme 

 adoration ; temples were erected upon the platform 

 mounds, and watch-fires lighted upon the highest sum- 

 mits ; and in the celebration of the mysteries of their 

 faith, human sacrifices were probably offered. — Foster's 

 Pre- Historic Races of the United States, pp. 350 and 351. 

 (To be continued.) 



less favored region, gained control, and intru- 

 ded his dead into the mounds and places of 

 sepulchre of the lost, and now, so far as 

 America is concerned, wholly extinct race. 



The antiquarian and scientist, and the theo- 

 logian as well, should cease investigations 

 among the ruins of Asia for the birthplace of 

 humanity, but such may, with profit, find a 

 perfect resemblance between ancient Asiatic 

 and Anierican civilizations, and almost demon- 

 strate that the latter is coeval with or antidutes 

 the former by thousands of years ; that the 

 western is quite as old as the eastern hemis- 

 phere, and that here has been wrought changes 

 of which the human mind has but a feeble 

 conception ; that the marks of an ancient and 

 advanced civilization all around us give indi 

 cations of still older ones which cycles of sub- 

 mergence and emergence are ever developing 

 to observing man ; and which, if human 

 records could be preserved through all the 

 mutations of time, would ultimately reveal 

 much that at present is concealed from the 

 earnest investigator. 



In a preceding article we stated that even 

 scientists, had claimed too brief a period for the 

 age of the earth. A hundred thousand years 

 leave but trifling changes on the earth's 

 surface, when the vast whole is taken into 

 account. A portion of a continent may be en- 

 gulfed and another may emerge from the ocean ; 

 new islands may appear, or seas be drained, 

 but the general appearance will remain the 

 same. The changes are not so marked or fre- 

 quent now as during earlier periods, when the 

 internal heat was greater, the surface thinner, 

 and the shock was more universal. 



Geologists, as if fearful that a statement of the 

 long period which has elapsed since the earth 

 was a molten incandescent mass, revolving 

 on its own axis, as well as round the sun, carry- 

 ing with it several satellites, all of which, save 

 the moon, have been completely swallowed up 

 and lost in the parent earth, are content to 

 demonstrate the thousands of years which 

 would be required to silt up the valley of the 

 Nile ; to show how vast a period would be re- 

 quired for the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri, 

 and the tributaries, to fill up an arm of the 

 ocean from Cairo to the Gulf of Mexico ; to 

 abrade the rock of Niagara and form the mighty 

 chasm, more than two hundred feet in depth, 

 and seven miles in length, through which flow 

 the waters of the great lakes on their way to 

 to the ocean ; or to build up a chalk cliff nearly 

 a mile in height, as found in England, from 

 minute shells of microscopic animalcule. 



