Ohio. Obsidian also is found in the shape of instruments, which they
must have transported from the Rocky Mountains. Ancient mining shafts
are found in Minnesota, where the solid rock had been excavated to the
depth of 60 feet. On Isle Royal there are pits 60 feet deep, worked
through nine feet of solid rock, at the bottom of which is a rich vein
of copper, and in the two miles of excavations in the same straight
line have been found the mining implements in great numbers. Such
advancement in mining, sagacity in warfare, industrial pursuits, and
geometric skill, as their works display, prove their great superiority
of race over the modern Indian. Their implements, some of them most
elaborately made, their brick-making and various other ingenious
works, enable us to place them high as an industrial people, while
their sacred enclosures, and altars, and tablets, together with the
numerous evidences of their being an agricultural nation, enable us to
place them far above the modern Indian in the scale of civilization.

The people of the United States, though much to be commended because
of their prudence and forethought in laying out their modern towns and
cities along the various water courses, which serve as the different
highways of commerce, have by no means shown a superior sagacity in
that respect to the Mound-builders, whose great centres of population
are now mostly occupied, or are encroached upon by the modern cities.

We may with safety assert that the population about Newark, and Xenia,
and Mound City, was far above what it is now. The country about
Dayton, Miamisburg, Oxford, Hamilton and Marietta was, undoubtedly, in
the days of the Mound-builders moving with a greater mass of human
beings than it can boast of to-day.

And if those peaceable and industrious inhabitants were as numerous as