First, this testimony will be found to set aside once and for all the exaggerated statements as to the high grade of civilization reached by these first Americans. It does not appear that the mound-building Indians occupied a higher plane than that reached by the Indians as first known by Europeans. One of the most exaggerated notions of these Indians is that which ascribes to them very perfect ideas of measurement; the alleged mathematical accuracy of certain of their monumental works having been cited repeatedly as a sign of their advanced stage of civilization. It has even been affirmed that their mathematical accuracy could hardly be excelled by the most skillful engineers of our day. Recent explorations have dispelled this entertaining theory: "The statement so often made that many of these monuments have been constructed with such mathematical accuracy as to indicate not only a unit of measure, but also the use of instruments, is found upon a reëxamination to be without any basis, unless the near approach of some three or four circles and as many squares of Ohio to mathematical correctness be sufficient to warrant this opinion. As a very general and in fact almost universal rule the figures are more or less irregular, and indicate nothing higher in art than an Indian could form with his eye and by pacing."[3] The fanciful theory of a great teeming population during the mound-building era is equally without foundation. Even the size and extent of the mounds do not imply a great population. An authority of reputation gives figures from which it can be shown that four thousand men, each transporting an equivalent of one wagon-load of earth and stone a day, could have erected all the mounds in the state of Ohio (which contains a greater number than any other in the Union) in one generation.[4] When it is realized that the art for which the earliest Indians have been most extolled was not, in reality, in advance of that known by the ordinary Indian, and that the population of the country in the mound-building era cannot be shown to have exceeded the population found when the first white men visited the Indian races, it is easy to see in the erection of the mounds, the burial of dead, the rude implements common to both, the poor trinkets used for ornamentation, the houses each built, the weapons each employed, a vast deal of additional testimony proving that the "Mound-builder" and Indian were of one race. Thus the true historical method must be to compare what is definitely known of the earliest Indians with the relics and memorials which are surely those of the mound-building era in order to reach undoubted facts concerning the prehistoric Indians. This applies equally to customs, weapons, edifices, ornaments, and what is of present moment to our study: highways of travel.