"Widely scattered throughout the United States, from sea to sea, artificial mounds are discovered, which may be enumerated by the thousands or hundreds of thousands. They vary greatly in size; some are so small that a half-dozen laborers with shovels might construct one of them in a day, while others cover acres and are scores of feet in height. These mounds were observed by the earliest explorers and pioneers of the country. They did not attract great attention, however, until the science of archæology demanded their investigation. Then they were assumed to furnish evidence of a race of people older than the Indian tribes. Pseud-archæologists descanted on the Mound-builders that once inhabited the land, and they told of swarming populations who had reached a high condition of culture, erecting temples, practicing arts in the metals, and using hieroglyphs. So the Mound-builders formed the theme of many an essay on the wonders of ancient civilization. The research of the past ten or fifteen years has put this subject in a proper light. First, the annals of the Columbian epoch have been carefully studied, and it is found that some of the mounds have been constructed in historical time, while early explorers and settlers found many actually used by tribes of North American Indians; so we know that many of them were builders of mounds. Again, hundreds and thousands of these mounds have been carefully examined, and the works of art found therein have been collected and assembled in museums. At the same time, the works of art of the Indian tribes, as they were produced before modification by European culture, have been assembled in the same museums, and the two classes of collections have been carefully compared. All this has been done with the greatest painstaking, and the Mound-builder's arts and the Indian's arts are found to be substantially identical. No fragment of evidence remains to support the figment of theory that there was an ancient race of Mound-builders superior in culture to the North American Indians. … That some of these mounds were built and used in modern times is proved in another way. They often contain articles manifestly made by white men, such as glass beads and copper ornaments. … So it chances that to-day unskilled archæologists are collecting many beautiful things in copper, stone, and shell which were made by white men and traded to the Indians. Now, some of these things are found in the mounds; and bird pipes, elephant pipes, banner stones, copper spear heads and knives, and machine-made wampum are collected in quantities and sold at high prices to wealthy amateurs. … The study of these mounds, historically and archæologically, proves that they were used for a variety of purposes. Some were for sepulture, and such are the most common and widely scattered.