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- a few more years and the bones intombed in these hills of clay will have returned to their mother dust - in which case the story will be lost forever, unless the present generation be industrious.
I have noticed, with some amnisty anxiety?, for wounds on the crania I have disintered and in one instance only did I discover any mark of the sort. This is almost a circular cicatrix considerably indented, and situated on the superior aspect of the frontal bone. It affords me no clue to the weapons with which these people fought or defended themselves. Its is amusing however to contemplate the tissue of circumstances which has been developed in relation to this Indian head, If an Indian one it be. The mind is irrisistably forced into association with his family and friends who surrounded him, in his day, and marked with painful solicitude the angry threatnings of this dangerous wound. A thousand years may have intervened and the head of this premeval man is again exposed to the light of Human? and the accident so indelibly registered on his skull, is once more a subject of interest.
The female crania in both the Va. Ohio & Miss Mounds very much resemble the Mummy skulls I have seen from Egypt and from the uncommon care resorted to for the preservation of their mortal remains, it would seem fair to infer that something like Egyptian opinions were held by these people relative to the connexion between the soul and body. To attach insight to such an idea as this would be giving a high antiquity to the N. American mounds. The superstitions attended? to prevailed on the Nile three thousand years ago and not since. Dr. Robertson, it will be recollected advanced the idea that a land communication once existed between Africa & America which has been destroyed by the attrition of the waters.....as I am now notising are something in .....theory, which no doubt is entirely his own.
In Dr. Mitchel's Medical Repository vol. 11 is an exh....history of Canada "by George Heriot Esq." in which......practically beautiful and marvellously change things, he informs us that the Natchez Indians built Mounds, not for the purposes or war or defence but to build the houses of their chiefs on as a mark of distinction, the voluntary offering of Reverance. From this writer's accuunt of them they were highly agricultural, superstitious, idolitious, and (like the natives of Hispaniola) so reverntial that it would be esteemed impiaus not to dash, clash, aush? out their brains should their chief require it. These were the only inhabitants of America which they avarice and cupidity of the spaniards could subject to slavery and these like the Hispaniolians or Snowauks of the West Indies, through Spanish cruelty are no more!
It is a common remark that the bones in these mounds are too well preserved to indicate a very great age to the mounds; hence a few remarks from me on this point will be interesting to you. The monumental Indians buried their dead in the best possible manner to preserve their remains; while we bury our dead in such a manner as to secure a very spedy destruction of the bones. They preserved their dead from the hurried action of chemical agents by surrounding them body immediately with clay - we place our dead in a box and this we put in a cavity made in the earth, neither of which is filled, and water finds its way in, and in a few years,