ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 



297 



tribes inhabiting it had no knowledge or tradition of 

 any preceding race of higher civilisation than them- 

 selves. Yet we find that such a race existed ; that they 

 must have been populous and have lived under some 

 established government ; while there are signs that they 

 practised agriculture largely, as, indeed, they must have 

 done to have supported a population capable of execut- 

 ing such gigantic works in such vast profusion ; for it 

 is stated that the mounds and earthworks of various 

 kinds in the state of Ohio alone, amount to between 

 eleven and twelve thousand. In their habits, customs, 

 religion, and arts, they differed strikingly from all the 

 Indian tribes ; while their love of art and of geometric 

 forms, and their capacity for executing the latter upon so 

 gigantic a scale, render it probable that they were a 

 really civilised people, although the form their civilisation 

 took may have been very different from that of later 

 peoples, subject to very different influences and the 

 inheritors of a longer series of ancestral civilisations. 

 We have here, at all events, a striking example of the 

 transition, over an extensive country, from comparative 

 civilisation to comparative barbarism, the former leaving 

 no tradition and hardly any trace of its influence on 

 the latter. 



As Mr. Mott well remarks : — Nothing can be more 

 striking than the fact that Easter Island and North 

 America both give the same testimony as to the origin 

 of the savage life found in them, although in all circum- 

 stances and surroundings the two cases are so different. 

 If no stone monuments had been constructed in Easter 

 Island, or mounds containing a few relics saved from 

 fire, in the United States, we might never have suspected 



