Southward beyond the great lakes, and especially within the area of the Mound-Builders, a manifest improvement is noticeable. Alike in their stone carvings and their modelling in clay, the more artistic design and better finish of industrious settled communities are apparent. Still further to the south, the diversified ingenuity of fancy, especially in the pottery, is suggestive of an influence derived from Mexican and Peruvian art. The carved work of some western tribes was also of a higher character. But taking such work at its best, it cannot compare in skill or practical utility with the industrial arts of Europe’s Neolithic age. This region has now been visited and explored by Europeans for four centuries, during a large portion of which time they have been permanent settlers. Its soil has been turned up over areas of such wide extent that the results may be accepted, with little hesitation, as illustrations of the arts and social life subsequent to the occupation of the continent by its aboriginal races. But we look in vain for evidence of an extinct native civilisation. However far back the presence of man in the New World may be traced, throughout the northern continent, at least, he seems never to have attained to any higher stage than what is indicated by such evidences of settled occupation as were shown in the palisaded Indian town of Hochelaga; or at most, in the ancient settlements of the Ohio valley. Everywhere the agriculturist only disturbs the graves of the savage hunter. The earthworks of the Mound-Builders, and still more their configuration, are indeed suggestive of a people in a condition analogous to that of the ancient populace of Egypt or Assyria, toiling under the direction of an overruling caste, and working out intellectual conceptions of which they themselves were incapable. Yet, even in their case, this inference finds no confirmation from the contents of their mounds or earthworks. They disclose only implements of bone, flint, and stone, with some rare examples of equally rude copper tools, hammered into shape without the use of fire. Working in the metals appears to have been confined to the southern continent; or, at least, never to have found its way northward of the Mexican plateau. Nothing but the ingeniously sculptured tobacco pipe, or the better-fashioned pottery, gives the slightest hint of progress beyond the first infantile stage of the tool-maker.