into it. The larger and more ornamented ones have received the name of calumet-pipes, and were probably employed on solemn occasions and in great religious ceremonies. Lastly, there are the portrait pipes (fig. 61), or

FIG. 61. SPECIMEN OF PORTRAIT PIPE FROM THE MOUNDS.

what are supposed to be such; for we may assume that the fidelity and even the talent with which the artists of prehistoric times have reproduced the animals they saw around them, are a guarantee for the accuracy of the

representation of the features of their contemporaries, when they did not wish, as is often the case, to make grotesque caricatures, placing human heads upon the bodies of animals.

RACIAL ORIGIN OF MOUND BUILDERS.

173

Thus, by a strange chance, the pipes found in the mounds and upon the sacrificial altars give us at once an idea of the fauna known to the mound builders,' numerous specimens of an art since practised upon a smaller scale and perhaps with less originality (fig. 62), and lastly a probably faithful representation of their racial type.

But the pipe-portraits, and even the two or three skulls found in the mounds, do not furnish sufficient data

FIGS. 63, 64. SKULL TAKEN FROM A MOUND IN THE SCIOTO VALLEY. PROFILE AND BIRD'S-EYE VIEWS.

to enable us to determine the race of the mound builders. The nearly perfect skull of the valley of Scioto (figs. 63

1 Among the animals which the pipes represent. the following are the most common:-The sea cow, the wolf, the bear, the otter, the panther, the wild cat, the racoon, the beaver, the squirrel, the eagle, the owl, the falcon, the heron, the parrot, the crow, the duck, the rattlesnake, the frog, the toad, the tortoise, and the alligator. All these animals, with the exception of the sea cow, belong to the fauna of North America, and it is very probable that the carved pipes of which we are speaking were manufactured in the State of Ohio, and especially in the district called Mound City, because of the great number of tombs which occur there. (See Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. i.; and Rau, The Archaeological Collection of the United States National Museum. Washington, 1876.)

and 64) offers the following characters. The vertical height is considerable; diameter from the forehead to the back is small; great width between the parietal bones, considerable depression of the occiput, forehead high and arched; prominent cheekbones, wide face, prominent nose, and heavy and powerfully developed jaws. It must remain doubtful whether this almost unique skull is, as Morton affirms, the perfect type of the conformation of the cranium common to all the tribes, ancient or modern, which have dwelt or still dwell upon American soil. As the native savages answer when the Anglo-American archæologists question them upon the history of the remote past, Quien sabé, 'who knows'? However, Schoolcraft assures us that the mound builders were no other than the Alleghanians, that is, the Indian tribe earliest established in the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. But it is certain that previous to their coming other populations had lived in America, that here, as in Europe, man was the contemporary of species long since extinct, and therefore that here also his existence dates from geological epochs.

CHAPTER VIII.

MAN OF THE TERTIARY EPOCH.

The Human Bones of the Volcano of la Denise.-The Striated Bones of the Elephant of Saint Prest.-The Meiocene Flints of Thenay.

WE have hitherto concerned ourselves solely with the quaternary strata in our search for proofs of the great antiquity of the human race. The tertiary rocks will in their turn show unmistakeable traces of the appearance of man upon the earth as early as the meiocene and pleiocene epochs, indications which although vague are nevertheless worthy of the most serious consideration.

In 1844, M. Aymard, a distinguished naturalist of Auvergne, announced the discovery of some human remains in a volcanic breccia of the mountain of la Denise ; on the other slope of the mountain, in a breccia very similar to the preceding, M. Aymard found bones of the great mammalia—the elephant, rhinoceros, stag, horse, &c., of extinct species, and even of one extinct genus, the mastodon. Hence he concludes that man was their contemporary. This conclusion was rejected by the geologists of that epoch, notably by M. Pomel, who becaine afterwards convinced of the co-existence of our race in Auvergne, not with the mastodons whose remains are here found for the first time in company with those of animals of the quaternary epoch, but only with the reindeer and Elephas primigenius. He believes, moreover, that the man of la Denise witnessed the latest cataclysm which modified the surface of the globe.

The authenticity of the human bones found near la Puy was at first contested; but it has been established, since 1859, by Ed. Lartet, Albert Gaudry, and Lyell, and previously, by the members of the scientific congress assembled at Puy in 1856.

The age alone, whether pleiocene or only quaternary, of the volcanic tuff whence the bones of the man, or rather of the two men (the one a youth, the other an adult), of la Denise were taken, has given rise to differences of opinion among geologists, some of whom maintain that these bones were contemporary with the Elephas meridionalis, and even with the mastodon ; while others attribute them to the epoch of the reindeer and mammoth.

Many people still remember the great sensation created in the scientific world by M. Desnoyers, when, on June 8, 1-63, he made known to the Institute of France his discovery of traces in the undisturbed pleiocene sands of Saint Prest, near Chartres, proving the co-existence of man and the Elephas meridionalis, the Rhinoceros leptorhinus, and other extinct mammalia of the upper tertiary strata. These traces were incisions and scratches varying in form and length, which M. Desnoyers had seen upon the bones of these animals, and which he attributed to the action of a race of men still more ancient than those of the caves inhabited by the bear, and who, like the latter, possessed only rudely carved flints for weapons and tools.

The author of this communication believed he might conclude, from the facts he had observed, if not with certainty, at least with a great appearance of probability, that' man lived upon the soil of France at the same time as the Elephas meridionalis and the other pleiocene species which characterise the valley of the Arno in Tuscany; that he strove for existence with those great

'Palæontologists distinguish three principal species of elephants: 1st, the Elephas meridionalis, which has been found at Chartres, and is therefore in no sense southern; 2nd, the Elephas antiquus, which, in spite of the name it bears, is less ancient than the preceding; 3rd, the Elephas primigenius, the most recent of the three. We have here a striking example of the inconvenience of too significant names in natural history.