The evidences are abundant that some mysterious rites were performed at the altar mounds; cremation only may have been practised, but we fear that even more awful and heart-sickening ceremonies took place upon these altars as well as upon the high temple sites in which human victims may have been offered to appease the elements or the sun or moon by their death agonies. What splendid ceremonial, what mystic rites administered by a national priesthood in the presence of a devout multitude may have accompanied these horrible sacrifices, are beyond even the limits of conjecture. Besides cremation, inhumation was also practised extensively. Multitudes of mounds were devoted either partly or exclusively to such uses. Mr. Tomlinson, the owner of the Grave Creek Mound, who sank a shaft from its original summit to its centre, and intercepted it by a tunnel along the surface of the ground, speaking of the latter excavation, remarks: “At the distance of one hundred and eleven feet we came to a vault, which had been excavated before the mound was commenced, eight by twelve feet and seven in depth. Along each side and across the ends, upright timbers had been placed, which supported timbers thrown across the vault as a ceiling. These timbers were covered with loose unhewn stone, common to the neighborhood. The timbers had rotted and tumbled into the vault. * * * In this vault were two human skeletons, one of which had no ornaments, the other was surrounded by six hundred and fifty ivory (shell) beads, and an ivory (bone) ornament six inches long.” Thirty-five feet above the bottom vault another was found containing a skeleton decorated with copper rings, plates of mica and shell disks. The number of disks cut from the shell known as the _Buscycon perversum_ and collected by the excavators was 2350; of mica 250 specimens, and of the little shell known as _Marginella apicina_, 500; all of which had been pierced and strung as beads. Ten skeletons were subsequently found together upon enlarging the horizontal tunnel. Ashes, charcoal and burnt bones were also discovered in large masses. Though this was the largest of this class of mounds, still the general characteristics of the contents are the same in all of them, and are usually disposed in the same relative position to each other.[69] One of the most interesting explorations of sepulchral mounds was that conducted in the autumn of 1865 by Professor O. C. Marsh, assisted by Mr. Geo. P. Russell, of Salem, Mass., in what is known as the “Taylor Mound,” situated two and a half miles south of Newark, Ohio. The mound was ten feet high and eighty feet in diameter, and was surmounted by a forest of oak trees ranging from two and a half to eight feet in thickness, while the decaying trunks of a former growth were lying upon the ground. The mound was excavated from the apex downward. Five feet from the surface a pipe and a tube of stone unknown in Ohio were found. Seven feet from the top, in a