began at the lowest stage of savagery and developed to the highest, and was in many places passing into barbarism when the good queen sold her jewels." _Major J. W. Powell, Prehistoric Man in America; in "The Forum," January, 1890._ "The writer believes … that the majority of American archæologists now sees no sufficient reason for supposing that any mysterious superior race has ever lived in any portion of our continent. They find no archæological evidence proving that at the time of its discovery any tribe had reached a stage of culture that can properly be called civilization. Even if we accept the exaggerated statements of the Spanish conquerors, the most intelligent and advanced peoples found here were only semi-barbarians, in the stage of transition from the stone to the bronze age, possessing no written language, or what can properly be styled an alphabet, and not yet having even learned the use of beasts of burden." _H. W. Haynes, Prehistoric Archæology of North America (volume 1, chapter 6, of "Narrative and Critical History of America")._ {47} "It may be premised … that the Spanish adventurers who thronged to the New World after its discovery found the same race of Red Indians in the West India Islands, in Central and South America, in Florida and in Mexico. In their mode of life and means of subsistence, in their weapons, arts, usages and customs, in their institutions, and in their mental and physical characteristics, they were the same people in different stages of advancement. … There was neither a political society, nor a state, nor any civilization in America when it was discovered; and excluding the Eskimos, but one race of Indians, the Red Race." _L. H. Morgan, Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines: (Contributions to North American Ethnology, volume 5.), chapter 10_. "We have in this country the conclusive evidence of the existence of man before the time of the glaciers, and from the primitive conditions of that time, he has lived here and developed, through stages which correspond in many particulars to the Homeric age of Greece." _F. W. Putnam, Report, Peabody Museum of Archæology, 1886._ ALSO IN _L. Carr, The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley_. _C. Thomas, Burial Mounds of the Northern Sections of the United States: Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1883-84_. _Marquis de Nadaillac, Prehistoric America_. _J. Fiske, The Discovery of America, chapter 1._ See, also, MEXICO; PERU; and AMERICAN ABORIGINES: ALLEGHANS, CHEROKEES, and MAYAS. AMERICA: 10th-11th Centuries. Supposed Discoveries by the Northmen.