Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1887 edition. Excerpt: ...build up a faith which should command their actions? Certainly not; they valued gold and silver only for their beauty, not for intrinsic worth. The national character had adapted itself to local circumstances, not been formed by them. As it is thus evident that the Northern and Southern aborigines were descendants of a widely difierent stock, the question is, on what nation of Asia might the latter, with some degree of credibility, make out a case of afliliation? Am I too fanciful in discovering numerous aflinities between the characteristics, moral and personal, of this race and the Chinese, weakened to their present degree of faintness by time and the distance of their transit, which might have taken place after some rebellion, when a leader and his party were expatriated. The nations have at least these features in common--configuration of countenance, worship of the sun, a love of congregating in cities, and an ingenuity in various arts arising from their social relations. Some of the principal Indian antiquities--with the general character of which most are acquainted--are to be found at Marietta, where a square area of forty acres is enclosed by a firm wall of peculiarly cemented earth, ten feet high, which has three openings at equal distances on each side. Similar constructions are to be seen on the banks of the Muskingum, where the ramparts are upwards of eighteen feet in height, and on a hill near the Tioga River, where the defences are surrounded by an entrenchment and various pits, which had evidently been dug and covered over to receive assailants--all attesting ingenuity and the existence of system---besides the sculpture of human and animal heads, helmets, spears, etc., on rocks in various parts of the country. The...