The ancient Mexican pyramids, teocallis, or temples of the sun, were still more remarkable. Two of the most ancient of these, near the city of Mexico, were each nearly two hundred feet high, and the larger of these two covers an area of eleven acres, which is nearly equal to that of the Pyramid of Cheops, in Egypt. The ancient city of Mexico contained nearly two thousand temples and structures, and it is believed that there were some forty thousand in the whole empire.

Who built these mounds in the Mississippi Valley, and these pyramids in Mexico? Not the Indians who were found in America when the country was discovered. They are the productions of greater skill and culture than these tribes possessed. They are doubtless the monuments of a vanished people, whose coming and going and splendid history must ever remain to a great extent a mystery.

Antiquaries have furnished many theories to answer this question which arises in the mind of every student of history. Some have maintained that the Mound-builders and the mysterious people who preceded the Aztecs in Mexico were the descendants of crews from Japan, whose ships had been accidentally driven across the Pacific.

A more reasonable solution is that these people migrated from Asia.

Take your map: look at the Isthmus of Suez; cross Central Asia to Siberia; carefully examine Behring Strait; run your eye down the western coast and the Mississippi Valley, thence to Mexico, thence across the Isthmus of Panama to Peru. You have now passed over the supposed track of an Asiatic race, possibly the Shepherd Kings.

Who were the Shepherd Kings?

They came down to Egypt from Central India, driving their flocks before them, about the time of the building of the Tower of Babel. They conquered Egypt, built the pyramids, but were at last overcome by the ancient inhabitants, and

The Mound-Builders.

23

driven away from the Nile. They wandered back into Central Asia. In Siberia, it would seem, they erected mounds like those in the Mississippi Valley. They are then supposed to have journeyed north, crossed Behring Strait, which was then very narrow, passed through Alaska to the temperate zone, and pushed south to Mexico, Central America, and Peru.

THE SIBERIAN ELEPHANT AND MASTODON RESTORED.

We do not say that this theory is proven to be true: it has many things to support it. It is so interesting and it makes the ancient Egyptians seem so neighborly, we could wish it to be true.

That access from Asia to America was easy centuries ago, possibly by land connection, is evident from the discovery in Siberia and on the Pacific coast, in Alaska, of the remains of the Siberian elephant.

THE INDIANS.

The Indians do not seem to have sprung from the Moundbuilders or the founders of the ancient Mexican Empire. They may have been the descendants of Mongolian emigrants who crossed at different times the Strait of Behring.

Nearly all the Indian tribes that inhabited the continent at the time of its discovery are gone. They have vanished, like the forests they inhabited, and the beasts of prey they hunted. New England was once the home of the Narragansetts, the Pequots, the Mohegans, but nothing but the names of these tribes remain; the Iroquois dwelt by the great lakes of Erie and Huron, and the Algonquin nations inhabited the centre of the continent. Beyond the Algonquin territory lived the Dacotahs, on the prairies of the west, while on the south were the Tuscaroras, the Catawbas, the Creeks, and the Seminoles. With the exception of the Seminoles and the Dacotahs, hardly a remnant of these tribes remains; the church-spires rise and the school-bells ring where their wigwams clustered, and the locomotives roll through the fair valleys where they once smoked the pipe of peace, and under the pine-plumed hills against which their war-cry was raised.

copper-colored,

They were a race of tall, powerful men with hazel eye, high cheek-bone, and coarse black hair. In manner they were grave, and not without a measure of dignity. They had courage, but it was of that kind which is greater in suffering than in doing. They were true to their friends, but to their enemies they were cunning, treacherous, and cruel. Civilization could lay no hold upon them. They quickly learned to use the white man's musket. They never learned to use the tools of the white man's industry. They developed a love for intoxicating drink, passionate and irresistible beyond all example. The first settlers of New Eng