You have selected, out of a wide field of aboriginal nations, the history and ethnography of the Iroquois, as the theme of your particular inquiries. To us, at least, these Tribes, stand in the most interesting relations. They occupied our soil; they gave names to our rivers and mountains. They figure in the foreground of our history. The very names of the minor streams and lakes we dwell beside, bring up, by association, the free and bold race, who once claimed them as their patrimony. Before Columbus set out, on his solitary mule, to solicit the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella, they were here. Before Hudson dropped anchor north of the, to him, wonderful peaks of the Ontiora, or Highlands, they were here. Other Indian races have left their names on other portions of the continent. The names of the Missouri and Mississippi, the Alleghany and the Oregon, we trace to other stocks of red men. But the Akonoshioni, or Iroquois, has consecrated the early history of Western New-York. Their history is, to some extent, our history; and we turn, with intellectual refreshment from the thread-bare themes of Europe and the Europeans, to trace the humble sepulchres where the Iroquois buried his dead--the mounds, which entombed his rulers or his battle slain,--or lifted on high, his sacrificial lights--the long and half obliterated trenches of embankments which encompassed his ancient towns--the heaps of stone that lie at the angles and sally ports of his simple fortresses, on the circular trenches, which enclosed his beacon fires on the mountain tops. It is in localities of this kind, that the ploughman turns up fragments of the Red Man's time wasted and broken pottery--his stone pestles, his carved pipes, and his skilfully chipped arrow heads, and spear heads, and tomahawks of stone. These, and analogous remains, are the objects of our antiquarian researches. Prouder monuments he had none. There was neither column, nor arch, statue nor inscription. But we may trace, by a careful inspection of the objects, the state and progress of his ancient and rude arts. We may denote, by their occurrence, in the same localities, the era of the arrival of the white man. We may establish other eras, from geological changes,--the growth of forest trees, and other inductive means. There are three eras in American antiquity. 1. Vestiges of their primary migration and origin. 2. Vestiges of their international changes and intestine wars, prior to the discovery of the continent by Columbus. 3. Evidences of wars, migrations and remains of occupancy, subsequent to the arrival of Europeans. These are to be studied in the inverse order of their being stated. We must proceed from the known to the unknown--from the recent, to the remote.