1130 General Notes. | November, 
productions of agriculture. They were advanced in the art of 
spinning, weaving, metallurgy and keramic. They fortified them- 
selves with circumvallation and buried their dead in mounds. A 
cataclysm cut off these people from the historic Indians who are 
absolutely new-comers upon the soil, as were the whites who 
succeeded them. Now Dr. Schmidt holds that the same revolu- 
tion of sentiment which has substituted in geology a gentle and 
gradual evolution for the preceding notion of sudden breaks in 
creation will also take away the theory of mound-cataclysms and 
prove the continuity of social history on our continent. 
One of the favorable symptoms of this change of opinion is 
the substitution of mound-anatomy, ochthotomy, for the older 
process of mound-rummaging. The Naturatist defines anthro- 
pology to be the application of natural history methods and appa- 
ratus to human phenomena. Mound-anatomy is the application 
of the methods of the biological laboratory to the examination of 
a mound. Dr. Schmidt, after giving a good résumé of the dis- 
tribution and classes of mounds, in which he always eliminates 
the marvelous, the extraordinary and the mythical, follows 
very closely Professor Putnam in his latest researches. 
truth,” says he, “the mounds tell us nothing of the political 
organization of their builders, the sacrificial mounds are nothing 
more than burial tumuli for cremation. We make an absolute | 
step in knowledge when we say that we know nothing of the 
sociology and religion of the mound-builders.” Furthermore, in 
studying the geographical distribution of mounds, it is seen that 
i i It is not to be supposed 
climatic variation. These types of remains speak of different 
peoples who developed their several ideas. The thousand and 
one perishable things that have fallen victims to time and fre 
more definitely expressed this separation, and the things that 
remain are like the few words in common throughout the Aryan 
tongues, telling of a common origin further back. The crania of 
the mound-builders are, for the most part, artificially deformed, 
as are those of many modern tribes of America. The time 0 
these peoples extends from many centuries before Columbus far 
into the historic period of the continent. 
On the other hand, when we seek to compare the mound- 
builders with the modern Indians, we find our ignorance almost 
as profound respecting the latter. Nothing is more unjust than 
to place in opposition an exaggerated view of the former with 
the most degraded types of Indians. In New England, New 
York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, all through the South, the early 
_ Settlers were actually kept from starving by the aboriginal maize 
_ fields. In all of these self-same localities were fortifications, Cif- 
= lations, fossettes, platforms, as among the mound-builders. 
‘mound-builders trace animal forms in earth? the Indians 
PARR x 
