To the second race he attributes those vast mounds of earth found throughout the whole western regions, from Lake Erie and Western Pennsylvania to Florida and the Rocky mountains. Some of them contain the skeletons of human beings, and display immense labor. Many of them are regular mathematical figures—parallelograms and sections of circles; showing the remains of gateways and subterraneous passages. Some of them are eighty feet high, and have trees growing on them apparently five hundred years old. The soil upon them differs, generally, from that which surrounds them; and they are most common in situations where it since has been found convenient to build towns and cities. Many fragments of earthenware, of curious workmanship, have been dug up throughout this vast region; some representing drinking vessels, some human heads, and some idols. They all appeared to be made by the hand, and hardened in the sun. These mounds and earthen implements indicate a race inferior to the first, which were acquainted with the use of iron. The third race are the Indians now existing in the western territories. In the profound silence and solitude of these western regions, and above the bones of a buried world, how must a philosophic traveller meditate upon the transitory state of human existence, when the only traces of two races of men are these strange memorials! On this very spot generation after generation has stood, has lived, has warred, grown old, and passed away; and not only their names, but their nation, their language has perished, and utter oblivion has closed over their once populous abodes! We call this country the new world. It is old! Age after age, and one physical revolution after another, has passed over it, but who shall tell its history? Priest has concluded that the Carthaginians, Phœnicians, Persians, Hindoos, Chinese, Japanese, Roman, and Greek nations of antiquity, and others, as well as Europeans after their civilization, had more to do with the peopling of the wilds of America than is generally supposed. Ledyard, in a letter to Mr. Jefferson, from Siberia, says, “I never shall be able, without seeing you in person, and perhaps not then, to inform you how universally and circumstantially the Tartars resemble the aborigines of America. They are the same people—the most ancient and the most numerous of any other; and, had they not a small sea to divide them, they would all have still been known by the same name. * * * With respect to national or genealogical connexion, which the remarkable affinity of person and manners bespeaks between the Indians on this and the American continent, I declare my opinion to be, without the least scruple, and with the most absolute conviction, _that the Indians on the one and on the other are the same people_.”[11]