[26] "Hunter's Memoir of his Captivity (from childhood to the age of nineteen) among the Indians," p. 180, 181. He also adds (p. 307):--"The Indians do not pretend to any correct knowledge of the tumuli or mounds that are occasionally met with in their country.... One tradition of the Quapaws states that a nation differing very much from themselves inhabited the country many hundred snows ago, when game was so plenty that it required only slight efforts to procure subsistence, and when there _existed no hostile neighbours to render the pursuit of war necessary_." And Stephen's "Central America" (i. 142) notices the absence of all weapons of war from the representations in sculpture at Copan, and says:--"In other countries, battle scenes, warriors, and weapons of war, are among the most prominent subjects of sculpture; and from the entire absence of them here, there is reason to believe that the people were not warlike, but peaceable, and easily subdued." Mr Grote in his "Plato"[27] says-- "There existed," even "in his (Plato's) time, a great variety of distinct communities--some in the simplest, most patriarchal, cyclopian condition, _nothing more than families_; some highly advanced in civilisation, with its accompanying good and evil, some in each intermediate stage between these two extremes. Each little family or sept exists at first separately, with a patriarch whom all implicitly obey, and peculiar customs of its own. Several of these septs gradually coalesce together into a community, choosing one or a few lawgivers to adjust and modify their respective customs into harmonious order."[28] [27] III., ch. xxxvii. Leges, 337. [28] I find incidental corroboration of this view in "The Archæology of Prehistoric Annals" of Scotland, by Dr Wilson--"The infancy of all written history is necessarily involved in fable. Long ere _scattered families_ had _conjoined_ their _patriarchal unions into tribes_, and clans acknowledging some common chief, and submitting their differences to the rude legislation of the arch-priest or civil head of the commonwealth, treacherous tradition has converted the story of their birth into the wildest admixture of myth and legendary fable."--_Introd._, p. 12.