30 
toner's address. 
The table-lands in the regions East of the Rocky 
Mountains have yielded to our explorers, and particu- 
larly to that sagacious and indefatigable worker in pal- 
at this day to ascertain the extent of the resuUing emigration, or its 
influence, if any, on the Western World. 
Recurring to the still earlier period of the Mound-Builders, and 
the probable date to which we are referred for the time of the con- 
struction of their great works, a thousand years before the Christian 
era, it is remarkable that this was the period of greatest Phoenician 
activity, the epoch of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, of Gautama 
or Buddha in Hindustan, and possibly of Zoroaster in Persia. In the 
twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth century before Christ, the great 
movement of the nations, beginning with the war of the Lunar Race, 
for the imperial throne of Hindustan, and marked by the establish- 
ment of the Fifth Dynasty in Assyria, the Milesian settlement in Spain 
and Ireland, the contests of the Pelopeds, Dardanians, and Heracleids 
in Greece and Asia Minor, and the colonization of the Etrurians in 
Italy, exerted an influence upon the world that has been traced to the 
most distant regions of the eastern continent ; and it would not be 
surprising to learn that America was embraced within the same in- 
fluence. 
If the vague intimations of Phoenician and Carthaginian enterprise 
in the Atlantic Ocean given us by Plato and other writers have any 
foundation in fact, and if those daring navigators steered westward 
from the Slraits of Hercules in the track subsequently taken by the 
great Genoese and coasted the shore near which De Soto led his fear- 
less band, they would have reached, as did the latter, the Great Father 
of Waters, the Mississippi. And if they entered and occupied the 
country, their forts and habitations would naturally be found scattered 
along the valley of that river and through the region drained by its 
tributaries. Now, the traces of the Mound-Builders are found mainly 
in the Mississippi Valley. They are faint, if indeed they exist at all, on 
the Atlantic and Pacific slope ; and the inference is very strong, that 
the mysterious race which preceded the nomadic Indian in the center 
of our continent must have entered the country from the Gulf of 
Mexico. 
In this connection, it may be stated, also, that the auriferous region 
of Ophir, with which Solomon and his Phoenician allies traded, and 
