But the comparatively virgin soil of the New World has examples of like primitive workmanship in reserve, to illustrate the significance of some of those amorphous flints which bear the evidence of art, and yet seem almost too artless for any purpose of man. The valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries have a special attraction as the sites of numerous earthworks and other remains of a prehistoric race, known, from one prominent class of their structures, as the Mound-Builders. In more recent centuries, within the period of European intercourse with the New World, the same valleys have been occupied by warlike tribes of the Red Indian race; and now that an industrious population has supplanted their ephemeral lodges with the cities and farmsteads of the Anglo-American settler, the traces even of the latest aborigines seem primitive as those of Europe’s neolithic era. During the summer of 1874 I devoted part of the long vacation to an inspection of some of the most remarkable earthworks and other ancient remains of this interesting locality; and among other objects illustrative of its past history, I visited the Flint Ridge, a siliceous deposit of the carboniferous age, which extends through the State, from Newark to New Lexington, and has been worked at various points to furnish materials for native implements. Here I had an opportunity of exploring the ancient pits from which it is assumed that the constructors of the gigantic earthworks of the neighbouring valleys procured the flint, or hornstone, of which their weapons and implements were chiefly made. The point visited is on the summit of an undulating range of hills about ten miles distant from the city of Newark and its remarkable earthworks, hereafter described. At various points along the ridge, both there and in other parts of the State, numerous funnel-shaped pits occur, varying from four or five to fifteen feet deep; and similar traces of mining may be seen in other localities, as at Levenworth, about three hundred miles below Cincinnati, where the grey flint, or chert, abounds, of which large implements are chiefly made. The sloping sides of the pits are in many cases covered with the fractured flints, broken up, and partially shaped as if for purposes of manufacture. There for the first time I looked upon true counterparts of the drift implements; and in the course of an hour or two had no difficulty in procuring specimens closely repeating many forms familiar among those common to the cave-earth and the drift-gravel of France and England.