280 Recent Literature. { March, 
the region of the mounds at the time of their discovery by civil- 
ized men. As in the far north, the Aleuts up to the time of their 
discovery were, by the testimony of the shell-heaps, as well as 
their language, the direct successors of the early Eskimos—so in 
the fertile basin of the Mississippi, the Indians were the builders 
or the successors of the builders of the singular and varied struc- 
tures just described. The pottery of the mound-builders is quite 
fully described and illustrated, and it is remarked that if the 
American pottery be “compared with that from the middens of 
the lake-dwellers of Switzerland, who are supposed to have 
reached a similar stage of civilization, one is astonished at the in- 
feriority of the latter.” 
he views respecting the period in which the mound-builders 
lived, and their relations to the Indian tribes at the time of the 
conquest are moderate and sensible. The mound-builders were 
. Group of Sepulchral Mounds. 
a numerous, tolerably homogeneous people, with nearly similar 
rites and much the same arts; they were sedentary, “ for 
nomads could not have erected such temples or constructed Such 
intrenchments ;” they were also agricultural as well as fond of 
trading. “All testify to the fact that the men, whose traces we 
are seeking, had long since risen from the barbarism of savagery, 
and that they had attained to a state of comparative culture.” 
e Indians of Florida and Alabama, whose mound-building 
habits were described by Garcilasso de la Vega; those of Geor- 
gia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas, who disputed the 
advance of De Soto in their fortified walled towns; the Indians 
