AMERICA'S ANCIENT CIVILISATION.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3632, 3 March 1883, Page 4

AMERICA'S ANCIENT CIVILISATION.

When the white men first landed on these shores, Professor Newbcrry said in a. recent lecture before the students of Columbia College, they found them covered with dense forests and inhabited by the lied Indian*. I'ov many years it was believed that America was what it was called, a new world, and that the Indians were the original inhabitants. But the white men preyed forward, turning , up and planting that which seemed to be virgin soil, leaving hamlets and towns and cities in their wake, until they crossed the burners of the Alleghauies and entered the basin of the Ohio. It was their promised land, rich in everything, and without a rival on the earth's surface, in fitness to become the; home of a great nation. Throughout this country they found the records and monuments of an agricultural people who had certainly lived there hundreds, perhaps thousands, of 3'ears before. Long"before this the Spaniards had penetrated into Mexico and found there cities which were lighted at night, protected by police, built uu of palaces, having - b'jhools of law and medicine and music, and workers in gold and silver and other metals. The representatives of the inhabitants of these cities, and the peaceful cultivators of the fields round about had been all but driven off the face of the earth by the rapacity of the European invader;-. Of the monuments left by the mound-builders, Professor Newberry said that it had beeii estimated that there were not less than 10,01)0 in Ohio alone. They were most coir.mon wherever the land was best adapted to agriculture. They were evidently a peac'-ful people, familiar with pottery, ignorant of the use of iron, but acquainted with eopp..r, which they mined on the shores of Lake Superior, as was shown by tho flecks of silver found in the copper relics of the people. Their ancient excavations excelled in magnitude all the modern mines. They never went down into the earth more than 20 or 30 feet, and tised the trunks of trees with portions of the limbs left protruding as ladders. Though utterly and strangely ignorant of coal and iron they worked mica, mines in North Carolina, soapstone mines in Virginia, lead mines in Kentucky, and they also sunk oil wells in Pennsylvania. The growth of trees over the trenchas dug along the lead veins of Kentucky near Lexington, shows that it must be at least 500 years since they were abandoned, fragments of cloth had been preserved through the action of salts of copper, and .showed*! that the people- were acquainted with weaving. As to their ex termination it was evident that they had gone down before an invasion of northern barbarians such as had also taken place in Europe.