population as she did her peculiar trees, and plants, and animals, and birds. The geologist examines the relics of the west, and

where imagination fashions artificial walls, he sees but crumbs of decaying sandstone, clinging like the remains of mortar to blocks of greenstone that rested on it ; discovers in parallel intrenchments a trough that subsiding waters have ploughed through the centre of a ridge, and explains the tessellated pavement to be but a layer of pebbles aptly joined by water ; and, examining the finds

mounds,

them composed of to

arranged

the

horizontally creation to the power that hillocks.

The

different

strata

of earth,

very edge, and ascribes

their

shaped the globe into vales and it is mounds, true, may have been selected by

the aborigines as the site of their dwellings, fortifications, or burial places ; but the mouldering bones, from hillocks which are crowned by trees that have defied the storms of many cen turies,

the graves of earth from which they are dug, and the

Hitchcock.

THE INDIAN TRIBES

feeble fortifications that are sometimes found in their vicinity,

no special evidence of connection with other continents. 1 "Among the more ancient works" of the west, says another 2 " there is not a single edifice, nor any ruins which prove writer, afford

the existence, in former ages, of a building composed of impe rishable materials. No fragment of a column, nor a brick, nor a single hewn stone large enough to have been incorpo rated into a wall, has been discovered. The only relics which