Although we have no means left us of determining the cause by which the change was produced, the day dawned on them not less abruptly than that of the Aztecs of Mexico, or the Incas of Peru, when their sacred fires were extinguished, their altars desecrated, and the "primeval forest slowly resumed its sway over the deserted temples and silent cities of the dead," thus leaving glimpses of an unwritten history, full of interest, even in a tantalizing form. The remains of the American mound-builders are replete with surprise for us, which the magnificence of Montezuma's capital throws in the shade; and, while reading with implicit faith the narrative of the conqueror, we cannot but think the age of America's infancy lies buried in these older mounds. The chasm between these monumental mounts and the present time has never been bridged by any historian, however well versed in archæological records, or chronological _data_--except their belief in the resurrection of the body, which may be inferred from the careful manner in which they disposed of their friends after death. It is within the remembrance of some persons still living that tribes of Indians now extinct have been seen passing through the country on pilgrimages to the graves of their sires, where they regard the earth that entombs the dust of their friends as too sacred for any thing but a shrine. When the Spanish invaders came to conquer Mexico, they disinterred the bones from the mounds, when the Indians entreated them to desist, "as their owners would not find them together when they returned." "Ancestral veneration was a peculiar trait belonging to the aborigines, which is shadowed with an air of melancholy." In these _tumuli_ were deposited all the implements which the departed were supposed to require on their entrance into the unexplored regions. Here we find the ax upon which months and years had been expended in reducing to useful proportions, attrition being the only means employed; also the mortar and pestle, to pound their maize; the stone spear and arrow-head, to kill game; the bone fish-hook, to seize the astonished finny tribe as they swam though the purling streams of the newly-found paradise; the calumet, to be used while communing face to face with the Great Spirit; the pearl ornaments, to deck their persons in a becoming manner for their new position; the essential wampum, that no reflections could be cast as to their former condition in life, as lacking the important requisite to become a member of the _élite_ society in the "long-fancied mild and beautiful hunting-grounds."