Mesopotamia, in the era of the patriarch Job, one thousand five hundred and fifty years before the advent of Christ, is certainly remarkable, and is suggestive both of the antiquity and origin of the tribes.

Geology is not without its testimony in this connexion. The antiquity of human occupancy in the Mississippi valley is so extreme, that it appears to mingle its evidences with some of its more recent geological phenomena. The gradual disintegration and replacement of strata in that quarter of the country, involve facts which are quite in accordance with evidences of ancient eras drawn from other sources. It is some seven and twenty years since the earliest evidences of this kind arrested my attention. I was then descending the valley of the Unicau or White river, in the present area of Arkansas. This is one of that series of large streams which descends the great slope or Wassershied, extending from the foot of the Rocky Mountains into the lower Mississippi. These streams have carried down for ages the loosened materials of the elevated and mountainous parts of that great range into the delta of the Mississippi, filling up immense ancient inlets and seas, and pushing its estuary into the Mexican gulf. They are still to be regarded as the vast geological laboratory in which so large a part of the plains, islands and shores of that great off-drain of the continent have been prepared. The evidences referred to in the descent of the Unicau, consisted of antique, coarse pottery, scoria and ashes, together with a metallic alloy of a whitish hue, but capable of being cut partially with a knife. There were also deposites of bones, but so decayed and fragmentary as to make it impossible to determine their specific character. All these were, geologically, beneath the various strata of sand, loam and vegetable mould, supporting the heavy primitive forest of that valley. At Little Rock, in the valley of the Arkansas, vestiges of art have recently been found in similar beds of denudation, at considerable depths below the surface of the wooded plains. They consisted of a subterraneous furnace, together with broken clay kettles. In other portions of this wide slope of territory, a species of antique bricks have been disinterred.¹³ It is in this general area, and in strata of a similar age, that gigantic bones, tusks and teeth of the mastodon, and other extinct quadrupeds, have been so profusely found within a few years, particularly in the Osage valley.

But the greatest scene of superficial disturbance of post-human occupancy, appears in the great alluvial angle of territory which lies between the Mississippi and Ohio, extending to their junction. This area constitutes the grand prairie section of lower Illinois. The Big Bone Lick of the Ohio, the original seat of the discovery of the bones of the megalonyx and mastodon, announced by Mr. Jefferson to the philosophers of Europe, connects itself with this element of continental disturbance. Its western limits are cut through by the Mississippi, which washes precipitous cliffs of rock, between a promontory or natural pyramid of limestone, standing in its bed called Grand Tower, and the city of St. Louis, extending even to a point opposite the junction of the Missouri. Directly opposite these secondary cliffs, on the Illinois shore, extends transversely for one hundred miles, the noted alluvial tract called the American bottom. This tract discloses, at great depths, buried trunks of trees, fresh-water shells, animal bones and various wrecks of pre-existing orders of the animal and vegetable creation. On the banks of the Sabine river, which flows into the Ohio, there was found, some few years ago, in the progress of excavations made for salt water, coarse clay kettles of from eight to ten gallons capacity, and fragments of earthenware, imbedded at the depth of eighty feet. The limestone rocks of the Missouri coast, above noticed, which form the western verge of this antique lacustrine sea, have produced some curious organic foot-tracks of animals and other remains; and the faces of these cliffs exhibit deep and well marked water lines, as if they had been acted on by a vast body of water, standing for long and fixed periods, at a high level, and subject to be acted on by winds and tempests. Indeed, it requires but little examination of the various phenomena, offered at this central point of the Mississippi valley, to suppose that the southern boundary of this ancient oceanic-lake, ran in the direction of the Grand Tower and Cave in rock groups, and that an arm of the sea or gulf of Mexico, must have extended to the indicated foot of this ancient lacustrine barrier. At this point, there appear evidences also of the existence of mighty ancient cataracts. The topic is one which has impressed me as being well entitled to investigation, and is hastily introduced here among the branches of inquiry bearing on my subject. But it cannot be dwelt upon, although it is connected with an interesting class of kindred phenomena, in other parts of the west.

I have already occupied the time, which I had prescribed to myself in these remarks. It has been impossible to consider many topics, upon which a true understanding of the antique period of our history depends. But I cannot close them, without a brief allusion to the leading traits and history of the Red Race, whose former advance in the arts, and whose semi-civilization in the equinoctial latitudes of the continent, we have been contemplating.

That these tribes are a people of great antiquity, far greater than has been assigned to them, is denoted by the considerations already mentioned. Their languages, their astronomy, their architecture and their very ancient religion and mythology, prove this. But a people who live without letters, must expect their history to perish with them. Tradition soon degenerates into fable, and fable has filled the oldest histories of the world, with childish incongruities and recitals of gross immoralities. In this respect, the Indian race have evinced less imagination than the Greeks and Romans, who have filled the world with their lewd philosophy of genealogy, but their myths are quite as rational and often better founded than those of the latter. To restore their history from the rubbish of their traditions, is a hopeless task. We must rely on other data, the nature of which has been mentioned. To seek among ruins, to decypher hieroglyphics, to unravel myths, to study ancient systems of worship and astronomy, and to investigate vocabularies and theories of language, are the chief methods before us; and these call for the perseverance of Sysiphus and the clear inductive powers of Bacon. Who shall touch the scattered bones of aboriginal history with the spear of truth, and cause the skeleton of their ancient society to arise and live? We may never see this; but we may hold out incentives to the future scholar, to labor in this department.

Of their origin, it is yet premature, on the basis of ethnology, to decide. There is no evidence—not a particle, that the tribes came to the continent after the opening of the Christian era. Their religion bears far more the characteristics of Zoroaster, than of Christ. It has also much more that assimilates it to the land of Chaldea, than to the early days of the land of Palestine. The Cyclopean arch, and the form of the pyramid, point back to very ancient periods. Their language is constructed on a very antique plan of thought. Their symbolic system of picture writing is positively the oldest and first form of recording ideas the world ever knew. The worship of the sun is the earliest form of human idolatry. Their calendar and system of astronomy reveal traits common to that of China, Persia, or Hindostan. Mr. Gallatin, from the consideration of the languages alone, is inclined to think that they might have reached the continent within five hundred years after