their remains, as distinctly as if we had historical records of them.
The Mound-Builders occupied, often in thickly settled communities, the
region about our great Northern Lakes, the valleys of the Mississippi,
the Ohio, the Missouri, and the regions watered by the affluents of
these rivers, and a wide and irregular belt along the coast of the Gulf
of Mexico. There is little or no evidence that the same race inhabited
any part of the country now occupied by the Eastern and Middle States;
but some few traces of them are found in North and South Carolina.

[Sidenote: Ancient Mounds.]

The chief relics left by this comparatively polished race are the very
numerous mounds, or artificial hills, found scattered over the country.
These are sometimes ten, and sometimes forty and fifty, feet in height,
with widely varying bases. They present many forms; they are circular
and pyramidal, square and polygonal, and in some places are manifestly
imitations of the shapes of beasts, birds, and human beings. There are
districts where hundreds of these mounds appear within a limited area.
Sometimes--as at Aztalan, in Wisconsin, and at Newark, in the Licking
Valley--a vast series of earthwork enclosures is discovered, sometimes
with embankments twelve feet high and fifty broad, within which are
variously shaped mounds, definitely formed avenues, and passages and
ponds. These enclosures amply prove, aside from the geological evidences
of their antiquity, the existence of a race very different from the
Red Indians. They were clearly a people not nomadic, but with fixed
settlements, cultivators of the soil, and skilful in the art of military
defence.

[Sidenote: Altars and Temples.]