When we examine the American continent, with a view to its ancient occupancy, we perceive its surface scarified with moats and walls--its alluvial level plains and vallies bearing mounds, teocalli and pyramids. Its high interior altitudes, in the tropical regions, are covered with the ruins of temples and cities--and even in the temperate latitudes of the north, its barrows and mounds are now found to yield objects of exquisite sculpture, and many of its forests, beyond the Alleghanies, exhibit the regularity of antique garden beds and furrows,[2] amid the heaviest forest trees. Objects of art and implements of war, and even of science, are turned up by the plough. These are silent witnesses. With the single exception of the inscription stone, found in the great tumulus of Grave Creek, in Virginia, in the year 1838,[3] there is no monument of art on the continent, yet discovered, which discloses an alphabet, and thus promises to address posterity in an articulate voice. We must argue chiefly from the character of the antique works of art. [2] MSS. of the Am. Ethn. Society. Vide Catalogue, Vol. I. [3] Trans. Am. Ethn. Society. Vol. I. But although the apparent hieroglyphics of Yucatan and Central America have not been read, nor a history of much incident, or a remote antiquity, deduced from the pictorial scrolls of Mexico, it is impossible not to assign to the era of American antiquities, a degree of arts, science, agriculture and general civilization, to which the highest existing nomadic or hunter tribes had no pretence. It is a period of obscurity, of which inquirers might perhaps say, that the darkness itself is made to speak. It tells of the displacement of light. All indeed beyond the era of Columbus, is shrouded in historical gloom. We are thus confined within the short cycle of some three hundred and fifty years. A little less than twelve generations of men. Beyond this period, we have an ante-historical period, which is filled, almost exclusively, with European claimants of prior discovery. We will name them in their order. They are the Scandinavians, the Cimbri and tribes of Celtic type, and the Venetians. Still prior, is the Asiatic claim of a predatory nation, who, in the days of the Exodus, lived in caves and dens of the earth, under the name of Horites,[4] and who culminated at a later era, under the far-famed epithet of Phoenicians--a people whose early nautical skill has, absolutely, no cotemporary. [4] Forster.