Iroquois and other fierce and warlike tribes were inserting themselves like a wedge between the remains of the Alleghans on the south, and the Eries, the Hurons, and the Hochelagans on the north. Such is the history as its general features present themselves to my mind, after long study of the fragmentary evidence which remains. I could not, without several chapters of discussion, give the details of this evidence, but shall devote the remainder of this paper to some portions of it which especially concern my present purpose. The features of old Alleghans, or civilised mound-builders, are preserved to us only by their sculptures and terra-cottas, and principally by the heads represented on the curiously-formed tobaccopipes, which they devoted in great numbers on their "altar hearths" to their gods or manitous; and the few skulls which have been secured from the grave-mounds correspond with these representations. They were people with rounded, short, and sometimes high heads and features, which while American, were less marked and softer than those of the more barbarous tribes. The same cast of countenance appears, according to Wilson, on pottery, attributable to the Toltecans, or primitive Mexicans, and the Central Americans, while the features of the intrusive Aztecs were more of the ordinary Indian type. To illustrate this I give a few profiles-that of a mound people of truly American physiognomy and of savage instincts, had conquered Mexico, while the teeming western plains, the meeting-place of the three great waves of immigration and the Scythia of North America, rearing a numerous and bold population of buffalo-hunters, had overwhelmed with its swarms the northern mound-builders. These, when cut off from the copper mines of the north and the fisheries of the great lakes, probably decayed rapidly, and the old trees growing on their earthworks when the first European explorers visited their country, testify to the lapse of centuries since their destruction or expatriation. Originally these Alleghans were bounded on the north by the Algonquins, but the earlier waves of conquest from the north and west severed this connection. These earlier migrations, however, in time became partially absorbed and civilised, and formed a belt of semi-Alleghan and semi-Algonquin territory along the great lakes and the St. Lawrence, the people inhabiting which had borrowed some of the arts and modes of life of the Alleghans. To this probably belonged such nations of agricultural and village-dwelling Indians as the Eries, the Neutrals, the Hurons, and the Hochelagans, which eventually cultivated friendly relations with their neighbours on the south, and with the Algonquins on the north, and carried on to some extent the copper-mining and agriculture of their civilised predecessors. But other waves of migration from the west followed, and at the time of the early French discoveries the لالسنا similar but somewhat different style of refinement in the American countenance appears in the Inca race of Peru. It is remarkable in connection with this that the Alleghans and Toltecans are the oldest North American aborigines of whom we have any record. Whatever age may be assigned to the buildings of Central America, Yucatan, and Mexico, there seems the best reason to believe that some of the Mississippi mounds are very ancient. Very old trees were found growing on them, and there were indications of previous generations of trees. The "garden-beds" of extinct and forgotten tribes are found to have extended themselves over the earthworks of earlier people. Professor Swallow, of Missouri, informs me that he opened two ancient burial mounds in that State, on which vegetable soil two feet thick had accumulated, and around which six feet of alluvial silt had been deposited, apparently in consequence of a subsidence of the soil on which the mound had been built, in some prehistoric earthquake similar, perhaps, to those which in modern times produced the sunk country of New Madrid in the same region. In the alluvium which had accumulated was found the tooth of a mastodon. Fig. 11.-MODERN MANDAN, AND ANCIENT AZTEC HEADS. (After Catlin and Wilson.) Perhaps no American interment can lay claim to greater antiquity, and the bones of buried corpses had been resolved almost entirely into dust. Yet earthen vessels found with them showed the high Alleghan type of features, and the only skull secured was of the same type. In North America, therefore, a comparatively civilised and well-developed race would seem to have had precedence of all others, a statement which we shall find may apply to Europe also, notwithstanding the mythical notions of a palæolithic age of barbarism. It is remarkable, however, that two types of head are represented in these old monuments, one short and high, with a respectable frontal development; another low-browed, and retreating in the frontal aspect. According to Foster both these types appear in the burial mounds of the Alleghans. This may indicate different castes or tribes, or conquering and subject or servile races. It is certain, however, that (After Squier.) similar differences exist among the modern Indians, Fig. 13.-COPPER BRACELET, DISC, BEAD, AND BUTTONS OF ALLEGHANS. and that those with low foreheads, even when not artificially compressed, are not deficient in intelligence. For instance, Catlin has remarked and figured in his sketches the peculiar Toltecan face in the Upsarokas or Crows, a small tribe inhabiting the Upper Missouri. He notices its resemblance to the Yucatan figures, a migratory people, though the allied Minatarees are more stationary, and are cultivators. He further remarks, however, that the Mandans, who have salient features like those of the Aztecs, represent the Toltecan features on their drawings on buffalo- | masses and strings above the enclosing trap. Folskins. May this not be a conventional style of art handed down from an earlier period? lowing these indications, the ancient miners had traced the veins along the hills, and had not only broken off the projecting masses with stone mauls which were found in their trenches, but had, perhaps with the aid of fire, followed the larger masses downward for several feet, throwing out the broken quartz in heaps at the sides. That these mines were not worked by the present Indian tribes of the country is evident, that some of them are of great antiquity is proved by the silt and vegetable soil with which they are filled, the former sometimes fallen into these old excavations, and the latter being overgrown with the ancient trees of a primeval forest. Further, the deposits of manufactured implements indicate that they were made on the spot, and their style, especially that of some knives inlaid and ornamented with native silver, shows that the artists were the same with those who made the im plements of the Mississippi mounds. These people had, in short, explored all the rich localities of native copper only recently rediscovered by Europeans. To some extent, however, the tribes that expelled the primitive miners preserved their arts, for the copper of Lake Superior was known to the Hochelagans and Stadaconians of the time of Cartier, though possessed by these people in much less abundance than by the old Alleghans. The traditions of the Delawares and Iroquois concur in testifying to their former wars against a great people, the Allegwi or Alleghans, dwelling to the south-west, and who were finally expelled from their territories; and in accordance with this the researches of Squier and Davies have shown that the earthworks of the ancient mound-builders extend up the Ohio valley towards western New York, so that these people were once conterminous with the Iroquois and allied tribes. Still more remark-containing skeletons of wild animals which have able evidences exist that the power of the Alleghans extended as far north as Lake Superior and the St. Lawrence valley. I may take two illustrations from Wilson. One is an ancient burial-place discovered by Dr. Reynolds near Brockville. Here were buried, about fourteen feet below the surface, twenty skeletons arranged in a circle with their feet towards the centre. Some of the skeletons were of gigantic proportions, but their bones had well-nigh crumbled into dust. With them were found well-made spears and chisels of native copper, stone chisels, gouges and arrow-heads, and a curious terra-cotta mask which Wilson has figured, and which he remarks is Toltecan rather than Indian in its features, and which resembles the heads on earthen vessels of the mound-builders, while he evidently regards the interment as not corresponding with those of the Canadian tribes. It does, however, correspond with old Alleghan interments already mentioned as discovered by Professor Swallow. In one of the mounds explored by him the bodies whose bones were in the last stage of decay, lay in the same position as in the Brockville grave, and each had an earthen vessel at its head with a representation of a human face. This mode of burial, the warriors lying in death as they would lie with their feet to the watch-fire, and each with his vessel of water or food at his head like Saul, King of Israel, of old, seems to have been peculiar to the Alleghans, and has been recognised in several localities. War parties at least of this people, and possibly also permanent settlements, must have extended themselves to the St. Lawrence river. The evidence of copper mining on Lake Superior in prehistoric times is equally conclusive." In the Ontanogan district, where extensive mines of native copper are now worked, ancient excavations long since deserted and overgrown with the aboriginal forest are found on the outcrops of the veins. Some of these are twenty-five to thirty feet deep, and in the bottom of them are found the stone mauls and picks and decayed wooden shovels of the ancient miners. In one place a mass of native copper, weighing six tons, had been dislodged from its matrix and mounted on a wooden frame, but afterwards abandoned, either because of its great weight or because the miners had been driven away by some hostile invasion. These ancient works are said to be found over an extent of nearly 150 miles on the south side of Lake Superior, and on the north side of the lake they also occur, though on a smaller scale. I have myself explored some of them at Maimanse. Here they are confined to the outcrop of the veins in which the native copper, associated with quartz and other minerals, projects in irregular * 2 Samuel xxvi. 11. There is also evidence that the original supplanters of the Alleghans were themselves in process of being supplanted at the period of the French discovery. The strange story of the Eries and Neutrals, as it has been preserved by Schoolcraft, belongs to this category. This people, who have given a name to one of the great American lakes, held a political position at the time of the French discovery which entitled them to the name of the neutral nation. Occupying a fertile territory south of Lake Erie, and inhabiting walled villages, they were distinct from the Iroquois on the one hand and the Algonquins on the other, just as the Wyandots or Hurons were on the north of Lake Ontario and the Hochelagans in their island on the St. Lawrence. Further, in language they were allied to the Iroquois and Hurons, being called by them Attiwendaronks, or people differing little in language or speaking a cognate dialect, as distinguished from the Algonquins, who were to them barbarians. This was also the linguistic position of the Hochelagans relatively to the Iroquois Cartier says that the Hochelagans enjoyed some sort of hegemony over the St. Lawrence tribes. In like manner these people were recognised not only as neutrals, but as pacificators. Their political ruler was a queen, and her council fire was recognised as a sacred place of refuge and of arbitration of differences. This female rule was also, as we shall find, in all probability an institution borrowed from the Alleghans. The more bitter animosities consequent on the European invasion led to events which plunged the Eries into war with the Iroquois, and after a severe struggle they were driven from their homes, and obliged to retreat to the southward, where, according to information collected by Schoolcraft, they became identified with the Katawbas of Virginia and Carolina, one of the noblest and most amenable to culture of the native tribes of the Southern States of the American Union. Hurons were also in like manner dislodged by the Iroquois, and this extermination of large and The populous nations after the discovery of America seems but the completion of a great intrusive movement breaking up the tribes which had previously replaced and mixed with the Alleghans, or which had perhaps been allies of theirs on the north, partially impregnated with their culture and pursuing their industries long after they were cut off. It accords with this that there is a very strong resemblance of detail between the arts and implements of the Eries, Hurons, and Hochelagans, indicating a close connection at that traditional time when their towns and villages occupied the wide regions afterwards seized by their enemies the Iroquois. Many hundred years ago,” said an aged Iroquois chief, in accounting to an American antiquarian for the many ancient forts scattered over western New York, "a long war occurred between the Iroquois and other powerful nations, during which many fortifications, often stockaded and enclosing villages, were built throughout all this region, but their enemies were finally repulsed, and passed far to the south-west." Whether this legend refers to the expulsion of the Eries and their allies which happened as late as 1655, or to the far earlier expulsion of the Alleghans, or whether it includes a mixture of both, it would perhaps be impossible to say. "The traditions of the Delawares," says Dr. Wilson, "hold that the Alleghans were a strong and mighty nation, reaching to the eastern shores of the Mississippi, when in remote times they came into the great valley from the west. But the Iroquois, who had established themselves on the head-waters of the chief rivers which have their rise to the south of the great lakes, combined with the Delaware or Lenapé nation to crush the power of that ancient people of the valley, and the surviving remnant of the decimated Alleghans were driven down the Mississippi, and their name blotted out from the roll of nations. The very name of the Ohio is of Iroquois origin, and given to the river of the Alleghans by their ruthless conquerors. The Susquehannocks, who are believed to be of the same ancient lineage, excited the ire of the dominant nation, and were in like manner extirpated. At a later date the Delawares fell under their ban, and the remnant of that proud nation, quitting for ever the shores of the noble river which perpetuates their name, retraced their steps into the unknown west." Three hundred years of European colonisation and warfare have brought the same fate on the conquering Iroquois themselves, whose small remnants exist in a few scattered settlements, fading away and mingling with the pale faces, and of no political importance among the strange people who have usurped that heritage which they had wrested from others. Cheney, Report on Monuments of New York. Thus we find in America the Europeans displacing in historic times Indians who had themselves not long before displaced others, and these last retaining the clear tradition of those they had displaced at a still earlier time. The Alleghans are represented only by remains of unknown date, and the Eries, Hurons, and Hochelagans would have been in the same position but for the arrival of the French in time to witness their decadence. Let us observe also that such a history implies primitive civilisation fading into barbarism until it shall be replaced by some new culture. The Alleghans of the Ohio and Mississippi had their council fires quenched by barbarians long before Cortez attacked the new Mexican empire of the Aztecs. Our poor Hochelagans, within less than a century of Cartier's time, had been destroyed or reduced to the condition of wandering hunters. The pre-Columbian America seemed hastening to return to barbarism. We shall also find that the aboriginal Americans, though probably reaching the continent by three distinct lines of migration, had brought with them essentially the same beliefs and customs, and not very dissimilar physical characteristics; so that they naturally and readily blended into a more or less homogeneous American type, with local modifications. of physical aspect, customs, and arts; and that these had again and again replaced each other over wide regions, so that the same varieties of Dolichocephalic and Brachycephalic races, and the same ages of Stone and Bronze, with the addition of an intermediate age of native Copper, could have been made up by the antiquary, did we not know that they were contemporary, and that over wide areas, almost equalling the whole of Europe, the age of Copper and of civilisation preceded that of barbarism. May this not, then, be an American epitome of prehistoric Europe? Simple and industrious colonists spreading themselves over new lands: barbarous and migratory tribes and families wandering from the centres of civilisation over the untilled wastes, and then recoiling in successive waves on the more cultivated tribes with rude and desolating violence So the struggle of opposing races would go on from century to century, strewing the land with strange and unaccountable traces of semi-civilisation and barbarism-the forests growing over them and river floods sweeping them away and depositing them in unlikely places, until Rome did for Europe what Europe has been doing for America; and then in both cases the prehistoric ages recede into dim obscurity, and under the manipulation of the archaologist may be stretched indefinitely into the past, and arranged according to his fancy in successive periods of barbarism and semi-civilisation. WE IZAAK WALTON. II. WE will say a few words concerning the river Izaak Walton's rambles, and the scene of his associations which belong to Walton. The river "Angler," lie on the banks of the river between that was most convenient for our angler, and to which Tottenham and Ware. Various new cuts have been he probably resorted more than to any other, was the made for the sake of the convenience of traffic, reLea. This river rises near the ancient town of Dun-gular and unpicturesque enough, but the old course stable, famous for its larks and its old priory church. of the river is left to its own wayward will, and it Dove. It is very remarkable that Izaak Walton does not give the slightest mention of this scenery; so slow and comparatively modern has been the taste for natural beauty of scenery. Poor Cotton, amid whatever trouble or shortcoming-and, as we have seen, he touchingly urges that a friend of Izaak Walton's cannot really be otherwise than a good man in main-shows a keen sense of the striking features of Dove Dale. He thinks of his beloved rocks, the cloud-piercing tors, the hills and vales, the caves that sheltered from the heat of the dogstar, and his fair Dove, the princess of rivers, whom he exalts far above the winding Seine or rapid Garonne. rambles between its flowery banks just as it did in the days of old Walton, and is still a favourite resort for the angler. At Hoddesdon is the "Thacht House," where Venator proposed to "drink his morning's draught." A cottage at the northern end of the town prefers a doubtful claim to be the original place, but a writer in "Notes and Queries" (1865) identifies the place as being in the middle of the town. We afterwards come near Edmonton, where Cowper says John Gilpin ought to have dined; and about a mile from the town, at a place called Cook's Ferry, stands Bleak Hall, where Piscator took his scholars. It was then "an honest alehouse, where might be found a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the walls; with a hostess both cleanly and handsome and civil." Tottenham is the place where the different characters in the work first meet at the High Cross, and where the old man invites them to repose in 66 a sweet shady arbour." All the character of the suburban Lea, and the scenery of the High Cross of Tottenham, are strangely changed since the days of Izaak Walton. There is no locality which is more associated with Izaak Walton than Dove Dale. Smit with the love of honest Izaak, we visited one autumn the lonely and sequestered spot. We had heard much of its charms, and those charms would with difficulty be overrated. We sojourned at a hostel called the Izaak Walton, and part of the building was pointed out to us where in all human probability Walton had partaken of the trout he had caught in the stream. The more popular editions of the " Complete Angler" have drawings of the banks of the Dove, which have sufficiently familiarised most readers with its unique scenery. The Dove, so to speak, has its wings, for it hurries onward with swift, clear current, from which it is supposed to derive its name. Cotton says that it is a "black water at first, because, like all Derbyshire streams, it springs from the mosses, but is in a few miles' travel so clarified, by the addition of several clear and very great springs, bigger than itself, which gush out of the limestone rocks, that before it comes to my house, which is but six or seven miles from its source, you will find it one of the purest crystal-like streams you have seen." It is with Cotton's house, especially with Beresford Hall, that Walton is associated. It is on the Staffordshire side of the river, for the Dove for many miles is the boundary between the two counties of Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Here Cotton built a summerhouse, which is frequently mentioned in relation to him and Walton, and moreover wrote a poem on it, called "The Retirement," which, though justly described by the author as “irregular stanzas," shows much poetical power. Cotton was an unfortunate man, and is believed to have often been in lurking from his creditors when he sought the seclusion of his native rocks. Over the door of the fishing-house was the motto, "Piscatoribus sacrum," with the initials of Walton and Cotton interwoven in a cypher upon the keystone of the building. The fishinghouse is situated on a small peninsula, almost encircled by the Dove, and is nearly shrouded by trees. At one time it contained the portraits of Walton and Cotton, attended by a boy, and also delineations of trout and grayling. The room is paved with white and black marble, with a square marble table in the centre. This fishing-house is situated several miles from the grand scenery of the The Thames also has its associations with Walton, more especially in the little ait or island called Black Pots, near Eton. Here used to be the fishing-house which Sir Henry Wotton built for himself; most probably, it has been supposed, a light summer-house, with at most two rooms, whither he would retire from the heat of the sun, or take there his humble refreshment. Perhaps Sir Henry was an enthusiastic fisherman, and fished winter as well as summer; and many fishers maintain that winter fishing is, on the whole, to be preferred. In this case Sir Henry Wotton's edifice would have been of a more substantial kind than we have supposed. I should like to know on what evidence the editor of Mr. Murray's Handbook asserts that Charles the Second had a fishing-place on this site ornamented by Verrio. It seems to me much more probable that any such fishing-place would have been on the opposite side of the river, within the demesne of the Home Park. Until a very few years ago the Home Park came down to the water's edge, but its seclusion was disturbed by a public footway which passed underneath the castle below the slopes. This footpath, in the present reign, has been done away, and a new and good road is brought nearer the river, which it spans by the Victoria and Albert bridges. The noble meadows or portion of park between the river and the new road have virtually become the property of the town of Windsor; the Crown has lost in territory what it has gained in retirement. Charles the Second's fishing-lodge would not then, I think, have been on the site of Black Pots. Hither every year, while Wotton was provost, came Izaak Walton for a few days' fishing, forsaking for the nonce the familiar Lea or the beloved Dove. In the Reliquiæ Wottoniana we have one of Wotton's invitations to Walton. Most probably it was not till a later time that Black Pots was so designated The name seems to point to the supposition that a public-house occupied the site. This might have been the case before Wotton's time, and certainly was so afterwards. At present Black Pots is as secluded as it could have been in the days of Izaak Walton. It has narrowly escaped a very different fate. The year 1845, which witnessed so much diseased railway activity, was constantly threatening Windsor. The evil hour was long staved off by those unambitious of change. At last the South-Western Railway obtained an Act, and their Windsor terminus was to have been at Black Pots. Later, the Great Western obtained their Act, and their terminus in the heart of the town. It was felt that not to allow the SouthWestern to come nearer was virtually to give a monopoly to the other line, and therefore the SouthWestern line was also carried into the town. railway companies were made to pay very hand The |