328 



hills. Other monuments not less curious, are the commo- 

 dious roads of immense length, which the natives have traced 

 from time immemorial, and which lead from the banks of 

 the Arkansa, near Littlerock, to Saint-Louis on the right, 

 and by the settlement of Mont Prairie as far as Nachitoches, 

 on the left. (Journal of Travels in the Arkansa territory, 

 1821, p. 28.) 



Do the characteristic features of colossal stature, and white 

 colour, attributed to nations now destroyed, owe their origin 

 to the ideas of power and physical force in general, to the 

 feeling of the intellectual preponderance of the Europeans, 

 or are those features linked with the fables of white men, 

 legislators, and priests, which we find among the Mexicans, 

 the inhabitants of New-Grenada, and so many other Ame- 

 rican nations } The skeletons contained in the tumuli, of the 

 trans-alleghanian country, belong, for the most part, to a 

 stunted race of men, of lower stature than the Indians of 

 Canada and the Missouri. (Archceologia Americana, Vol. i, 

 p. 209.) The bodies found on the banks of the Merrimack, 

 have even renewed in some authors, the fable of the pygmies. 

 (Morse, Modern Geography, 1822, p. 211.) \ 



An idol discovered at Natchez (Archaol. Vol. i, p. 215. 

 Annates des Voyages, Vol. xix, p. 45, 428), has been justly 

 compared by M. Malte-Brun, to the images of celestial spirits, 

 found by Pallas among the Mongul nations. If the tribes 

 who inhabit the towns on the banks of the Mississipi, issued 

 from the same country of Aztlan, it must be admitted that 

 the Tolteques, the Chichimeques and the Azteques, from the 

 inspection of their idols, and their essays in sculpture, were 

 much less advanced in the arts than the Mexican tribes, who, 

 without deviating towards the east, have followed the great 

 path of the nations of the New World, directed from north 

 to south, from the banks of the Gila towards the lake of Nica- 

 ragua. In the narrative of the voyage of Mr. Eversman to 

 Bokhara, we find a striking description of a mountain made 



