By the Rev. A. C. Smith. 



175 



the province of Constantine there is another tumulus, called 

 by the French " the tomb of Syphax," 166 feet in diameter, and 16 

 feet in height. 1 But little acquainted as we are with the interior 

 of Africa we learn that there are other mouuments of a sepulchral 

 character, erected by a race whose very name has perished, who 

 not only showed in the large tumuli they erected over their dead a 

 similarity of custom with their Northern and Eastern contempo- 

 raries ; but who erected for religious purposes quadrangular pillars 

 of stone of enormous size, with others lying transversely on the 

 top, bearing a striking resemblance to those at Stonehenge, and 

 proving an identity of worship as well as of sepulture. 2 



And now we cros3 the Atlantic to the New World and are perhaps 

 astonished to find there similar monuments of considerable antiquity, 

 the work of the aborigines of a remote age, and containing the 

 bones of the ancient inhabitants. And yet the aborigines of 

 America seem to have had grander conceptions of earth-works, and 

 to have carried them out on a far more gigantic scale than any 

 with which we are acquainted in the Old World, for it was their 

 practice first to heap up an enormous mound, 3 the interior of which 

 served as a sepulchre for their Kings and principal persons, and 

 then to surmount the tumulus with a temple of hewn stone : often 

 they would encase their mound of earth with a solid wall of stone, 

 and almost universally, ranges of shallow steps led up to the summit, 

 sometimes nearly 200 feet above the plain. At Copan in Honduras 

 there exist to this day the ruins of one of these structures of earth 

 and stone, so gigantic in dimensions, that it can only be compared 

 to the area of the great pyramid at Ghizeh : it is 624 feet in length, 



1 Idem, p. 320. 



2 Bartli's Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa, passim: 

 See particularly the account and illustration of the aboriginal structure near the 

 glen of Wadi Ran, near Tripoli, p. 58 — 61 of vol. i. 



3 The learned author of the Lost Solar System of the Ancients discovered, 

 declares, that it is impossible to read the descriptions which Herodotus and 

 Diodorus Siculus have left of the temple of Jupiter Belus, without being struck 

 with the features of resemblance which the Babylonian monument presents when 

 compared with the teocallis of Anahuac, (vol. i., p. 353 ; also vol. ii. ? 145). 



