They may have been embankments surrounding towns and cultivated fields, but little has yet been found which can be cited as proofs of residence within the area so inclosed. We should not be surprised, however, if such would ultimately prove to be the case, since we now know that the Mound Builders of Tennessee did fortify their villages by means of embankments and ditches.63 A number of writers think that these regular inclosures were in some way connected with the superstitions of the people. In other words, that they were religious in character. Mr. Squier remarks, “We have reason to believe that the religious system of the Mound Builders, like that of the Aztecs, exercised among them a great, if not a controlling, influence. Their government may have been, for aught we know, a government of the priesthood—one in which the priestly and civil functions were jointly exercised, and one sufficiently powerful to have secured in the Mississippi Valley, as it did in Mexico, the erection of many of those vast monuments, which for ages will continue to challenge the wonder of men. There may have been certain superstitious ceremonies, having no connection with the purpose of the mound, carried on in inclosures especially dedicated to them.”64 Another late writer to whom we have several times referred, tells us there is no doubt but what a “religious view” was the controlling influence in the erection of these works, and that they express a “complicated system of symbolism,” that we see in them evidence, of a most powerful and wonderful religious system.65 Still such assertions are easier made than proven, and until we know somewhat the purpose for which they were used, how are we to know whether they were sacred or not? Casting conjectures, for the moment, aside, let us learn what we can from the works themselves. From their large extent they could only be reared by the expenditure of great labor. This implies some form of government sufficiently centralized and powerful to control the labors of large bodies of men. Moreover, they were sufficiently advanced to have some standard of measurement and some way of measuring angles. The circle, it will be remembered, is a true circle, and of a dimension requiring considerable skill to lay out. The sides of the octagon are equal, and the alternate angles coincident. Every year the plow sinks deeper into these crumbling embankments, and the leveling forces of cultivation are continually at work, and the time is not far distant when the curious traveler will with difficulty trace the ruins of what was once, to the Mound Builders, a place of great importance.