It would appear that man had penetrated to the heads of every stream tributary to the Mississippi. Through the Colorado basin, throughout the length and breadth of all the Southern rivers; to the rivers of New England, the great St. Lawrence basin, and the Red River of the North, and even far Yukon in Alaska,—these primitive stone-age people carried their simple arts and established their villages. In the Cumberland and Tennessee valleys such multitudes of them lived that even after a hundred years of ruthless destruction of the stone grave cemeteries, there still remain thousands of unopened sepulchres. Apropos of these stone graves, General Gates P. Thruston, of Nashville, who has studied ancient man in Tennessee more than forty years, reports by letter to me as follows: “I think that there must have been forty thousand graves within twenty-five miles of Nashville. I should think there were probably at one time as many as one hundred thousand prehistoric inhabitants in the two valleys. The village-sites and cemeteries cannot be numbered.” The officials at Washington have underestimated, it seems to me, the number of Indians in the United States, because they have recorded the Indian of the historic period rather than the Indian of the past. De Soto and Coronado both reported continuous population throughout the regions traversed by them. Yet shortly after the year 1700 small-pox, measles, cholera, and other diseases destroyed entire tribes. Untold thousands of our Indians perished during these epidemics. The case of the Mandans is well known. The early colonists made frequent reference to the spread of these plagues throughout the country. [Illustration: FIG. 722. (S. 1–2.) Views of an unknown object of stone, found in 1885 on a ranch on the Columbia River, Oregon. W. F. Parker’s collection, Omaha. ] Fourteen years ago I compiled an archæologic map for the State of Ohio; the last entry being made in 1897. At that time there were 3292 various monuments and village-sites recorded. Since then Professor Mills has continued the work and added to the total. Constant travel over the State of Ohio in the past years leads me to believe that there were in ancient times at least twenty thousand monuments great and small in that state. All considered, the population in North America in pre-Columbian times must have been considerable during two or three thousand years, if not for a longer period. THE STONE AGE IN HISTORIC TIMES