"If this object does not date from the age of the stratum from which obtained, it can only be a relic of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, buried beneath the alluvium deposited more recently by the Illinois River. The country is a level prairie, and 'Peoria Lake' is an expansion of the river ten miles long and a mile and a half broad. It is certainly possible that in such a region deep alluvial deposits may have formed since the visits of the French in the latter part of the seventeenth century. _But it is not easy to admit an accumulation of one hundred and fourteen or one hundred and twenty-feet_, since such a depth extends too much below the surface of the river. In Whiteside County, fifty miles northwest from Peoria County, about 1851, according to Mr. Moffat, _a large copper ring was found one hundred and twenty feet beneath the surface_, as also something which has been compared to a boat-hook. Several other objects have been found at less depths, including _stone pipes and pottery, and a spear-shaped hatchet_, MADE OF IRON. If these {p. 358} are not 'ancient,' their occurrence at depths of ten, forty, fifty, and one hundred and twenty feet must be explained as I have suggested in reference to the 'coin.' An instrument of iron is a strong indication of the civilized origin of all." This is indeed an extraordinary revelation. Here we have a copper medal, very much like a coin, inscribed with alphabetical or hieroglyphical signs, which, when placed under the microscope, in the hands of a skeptical investigator, satisfies him that it is not recent, and that it _passed through a rolling-mill and was cut by a machine_. If it is not recent, if the tooth of time is plainly seen on it, it is not a modern fraud; if it is not a modern fraud, then it is really the coin of some pre-Columbian people. The Indians possessed no currency or alphabet, so that it dates back of the red-men. Nothing similar has been found in the hundreds of American mounds that have been opened, so that it dates back of the mound-builders. It comes from a depth of _not less than eighty feet in glacial clay_, therefore it is profoundly ancient. It is engraved after a method _utterly unknown to any civilized nation on earth, within the range of recorded history_. IT IS ENGRAVED WITH ACID! It belongs, therefore, to a civilization unlike any we know of. If it had been derived from any other human civilization, the makers, at the same time they borrowed the round, metallic form of the coin, would have borrowed also the mold or the stamp. But they did not; and yet they possessed a rolling-mill and a machine to cut out the coin. What do we infer? That there is a relationship between our civilization and this, but it is a relationship in which this represents the parent; and the round metallic {p. 359} coins of historical antiquity were derived from it, but without the art of engraving by the use of acid.