A careful examination of the remains of the pre-historic races other than the measurement of crania has contributed largely to our fund of information concerning their life and habits. Science has rendered us pretty familiar with some of the diseases to which they were subject. Dr. Farquharson has described a singular manifestation of disease of the cervical vertebræ, shown in a peculiar roughening of the articular surfaces, and also by a true or bony anchylosis of these points. He concludes that the people of the mounds must have been possessed of a considerable degree of civilization and facilities for the care of the sick during a long period, in order to have effected the cure which the condition of the bones indicate had taken place.[268] One of the most alarming discoveries, however, is that which apparently shows the general prevalence of syphilis. That this loathsome disease was common among the various tribes of Equinoctial America is attested to by the discoverers and their successors, and has been much commented upon, and held by some authors to have been of American origin. The most recent supporter of this view is Professor Jones, to whom we have already referred.[269] He found in most of the mounds which he explored in Tennessee bones bearing syphilitic nodes, and believes them to be the oldest traces of the disease in existence. Dr. Farquharson made similar discoveries in the Iowa and Illinois mounds. Prof. Putnam, however, attributes the nodes to other diseases. That flattening of the leg-bone or tibia, peculiar to pre-historic man in Europe, and perhaps the result of rugged exertion in climbing mountains and traversing the country with that rapidity which the chase required where the horse is wanting, is more noticeable in the remains of some of the Mound-builders than in any other people. This peculiarity of the tibia called platycnemism, is probably a provision of nature, securing a firmer and better defined process upon which the muscles of the leg could fasten themselves, and its prominence among the people of the mounds indicates the possession of great pedestrian powers.[270]