The works of the Mound-Builders extend over a wide area, and include many other structures besides those of a sepulchral character. The people by whom they were executed must have been in a condition very different from the forest tribes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, though congregated at many favourite points in large communities, they may have been isolated by extensive tracts of forest from the regions beyond the river-systems on which they were settled. The country lying remote from the larger tributaries of the Mississippi was probably in the era of the Mound-Builders, as in later times, covered with forest; while perchance on outlying regions, or beyond the great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, the progenitors of modern Indian tribes lurked: like the barbarians of ante-Christian Europe, beyond the Rhine and the Baltic. The fertile valley of the Scioto appears to have been one of the seats of densest population, as indicated by the numerous works which diversify its surface. Corresponding evidence preserves the traces of an equally numerous population in the Miami Valley; and the mounds and earthworks of various kinds throughout the state of Ohio are estimated at between eleven and twelve thousand. They are stated to be scarcely less numerous on the Kenhawas in Virginia than on the Scioto and Miamis, and are abundant on the White River and Wabash, as also upon the Kentucky, Cumberland, Tennessee, and numerous other tributaries of the Ohio and Mississippi. Works accumulated in such numbers, and, including many of great magnitude and elaborateness of design, executed by the combined labour of large bodies of workmen, afford indisputable evidence of a settled and industrious population. Beyond those carefully explored regions, traces of other ancient structures have been observed at widely separated points; though caution must be exercised in generalising from data furnished by casual and inexperienced observers. All primitive earthworks, whether for defence, sepulchral memorials, or religious rites, have certain features in common; and the tendency of the popular mind is rather to exaggerate chance resemblances into forced analogies and parallels, than to exercise any critical discrimination. Including, however, all large earthworks essentially dissimilar from the slight structures of the modern Indian, they appear to stretch from the upper waters of the Ohio to the westward of Lake Erie, and thence along Lake Michigan, nearly to the Copper Regions of Lake Superior. Examples of a like character have been traced through Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Nebraska Territory; while in the south their area is bounded by the shores of the Gulf of Florida and the Mexican territory, where they seem gradually to lose their distinctive character, and pass into the great teocallis of a higher developed Mexican architecture. Their affinities are indeed more southern than northern. They are scarcely, if at all, to