[Edward Manning Ruttenber (1872)] mounds, finds them composed of different strata of earth, arranged horizontally to the very edge, and ascribes their creation to the power that shaped the globe into vales and hillocks.1 The mounds, it is 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 1 Hitchcock. 18 THE INDIAN TRIBES feeble fortifications that are sometimes found in their vicinity, afford no special evidence of connection with other continents.1 "Among the more ancient works" of the west, says another writer,2 " there is not a single edifice, nor any ruins which prove 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 remain to inflame the curiosity, are composed of earth." To add force to this sweeping blow at the beautiful theories