A race possessing considerable civilization may, we know, pass away, as the Assyrians and the Pyramid builders have. In one of the Pacific islands—Easter Island—a thousand miles from the nearest land, there are hundreds of carved images of stone, fifty or sixty feet high, and weighing perhaps a hundred tons each. The people who made these must have been very numerous and must have had considerable skill. Yet they have passed away. The arts of Nineveh and Babylon have only lately become known, so that, you see, the works of a race may easily become hidden from us who follow. Quite lately, too, the works of a partly civilized people have been discovered in Ohio in America. There are there hundreds of mounds and earth embankments forming fortified camps. Some of them are several miles round, and they could only have been made by a very numerous and intelligent people who knew something about geometry; for the circles, squares, and angles of these earthworks are quite as correct as we could make them. Among the multitude of things found here are copper tools made by hammering, ornamental pottery, silver beads, plates of mica with scrolls and designs engraved on them, and carefully carved pieces of stone. These carvings are most curious and excellently finished. They represent human heads and many animals, such as the bear, otter, wolf, beaver, raccoon, frog, rattlesnake, heron, crow, &c. A people, then, who could do these things and took pleasure in doing them must have possessed great intelligence and a knowledge of things far beyond a simple state. They even had religious ideas, such as they were, for they had places for sacrifice. All their works are now overgrown by forests, but it is impossible to mistake them; yet the native Indians of Ohio living now have no idea that such a people lived in their country before them, and no tradition at all about a people whose civilization was so far superior to their own. We may come nearer to our own times, and look at the Assyrians and Egyptians. Until quite recently nothing was known about the Assyrians except what could be learned from the few references made to them in Scripture and some ancient writers; but Mr. Layard dug up their cities, and found that they possessed the arts of building, sculpture, working in metals, and a written language. All this was buried under the sand of a desert! Then there is the great Pyramid of Egypt, built in a way that we could not surpass, and with much knowledge of geometry and other sciences.[29] The men who designed and constructed these works could not have lived among a half-barbarous people; and as these are the highest works of the people, how much there must have been that went before, of which there is no trace now, when Assyria and Egypt were in _their_ age of stone axes and flint arrow-heads.