As before remarked, “temple mounds” increase in numbers and importance as we go south. In Kentucky they are more frequent than in the States north of the Ohio River, and in Tennessee and Mississippi they are still more abundant.36 We also learn that they are often surrounded, or nearly so, with moats or ditches, as if to fortify their location. Our next cut illustrates such an arrangement—a circular wall of earth four feet high and two thousand three hundred feet in circumference, incloses four mounds, two of which are temple mounds. According to the late Prof. Forshey, temple mounds abound in Louisiana. He described a group situated in Catahoola County, in which the principal mound has a base of more than an acre, a height of forty-two feet, and the upper platform an area of nearly one-third of an acre. The smaller mounds are arranged around this larger one. This group is defended by an embankment. From this point for a distance of twenty miles along the river, are scattered similar groups of mounds; in all cases the smaller ones arranged around the larger one, which is presumably the site of a temple. Temple Mounds inclosed in a Circle. A digression right here may not be devoid of interest. We are not sure but that the dim, uncertain light of history falls on the origin of this group of mounds. When the French first commenced their settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley, the Natchez Indians was the most powerful tribe in all that section. In the course of time, wars ensued between them and the French, and in the year 1730 they fled into Upper Louisiana, and settled at the place where these mounds are now found. But the French followed them a year or so afterwards, and nearly exterminated. them. Some of our scholars think that they erected these mounds.37 The historian of that epoch simply says they had “built a fort there.” It is however questioned whether they had time to build works of such magnitude. But they were both a mound-building and a mound-using people, and we are not prepared to say how long it would take them to do the work, until we know the number engaged, methods employed, and other considerations.38 If they did not build these works, they doubtless cleared them of trees and utilized them; and this place was therefore the scene of the final downfall of the Natchez—a people we have every reason to regard as intimately connected with the prehistoric mound-building tribes.