41. Plan of burials in same mound. 98 42. Copper plate from Etowah mound. Georgia. 100 43. Copper plate from Etowah mound. Georgia. 101 44. Copper badge from Etowah mound. Georgia. 102 45. Copper badge from Etowah mound. Georgia. 103 46. Engraved shell from Etowah mound. Georgia. 103 47. Engraved shell from Etowah mound. Georgia. 104 48. Copper plate from Illinois mound. 105 49. Copper plate from Indian grave. Illinois. 106 BURIAL MOUNDS OF THE NORTHERN SECTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES. BY CYRUS THOMAS, PH.D. INTRODUCTORY. All the works of the mound-builders of our country are exceedingly interesting to the antiquarian and are valuable as illustrating the habits, customs, and condition of the people by whom they were formed, but the sepulchral tumuli surpass all others in importance in this respect. Although usually simple in form and conveying thereby no indications of the characteristics of the people by whom they were erected, yet when explored they reveal to us, by their internal structure and contents, more in regard to the habits, beliefs, and art of their authors than can be learned from all their other works combined. From them we are enabled to learn some traits of ethnical character. The gifts to, or property of, their dead deposited in these sepulchers illustrate their arts and customs and cast some rays of light into their homes and daily life, and the regard for their dead indicated by the remaining evidences of their modes of burial and sepulchral rites affords some glimpses of their religious beliefs and superstitions. The larger and more imposing works, as the pyramidal mounds, the enclosures, canals, etc., furnish indications of their character, condition, strength, and culture-status as a people or tribe, but the burial mounds and their contents, besides the evidences they furnish in regard to the religious belief and art of the builders, tell us something of individual traits, something of their social life, their tastes, their personal regard for each other, and even something of the diseases to which they were subject. What is still more important, the modes of burial and vestiges of art found with the dead furnish us undoubted evidences of tribal distinctions among the authors of these works, and, together with the differences in external form, enable us to determine in a general way the respective areas occupied by the different tribes or peoples during the mound-building age.