Arctic Emigration
surface at a short distance from the land, while the way through the interior is obstructed by almost impassible thickets, or is made rough and impracticable by volcanic rocks, which the savages have no means of leveling or removing.
It results from this state or things that these islanders all acquire a great degree of skill in navigating the seas around them. The children take to the water at the earliest age. They find it always warm, and, as they wear no clothing, it is difficult to say which they love best - playing in the surf upon the water, or in the sun upon the shore.
The children begin their attempts at navigation by means of any floating substance that they can lay their hands upon, almost as soon as they can walk. Shipmasters, who touch at these islands to get fresh provisions for their crews, say that they have known children not more than three years old to swim out to the ship anchored in the offing, having only a cocoa nut, with the husk left on, to buoy themselves up with in the water.
In some of the islands the native build canoes of great size and of very complicated construction, and capable, some of them, of conveying a considerable supply of provisions. With these they undertake quite extended expeditions, either of war, of commerce, or of migration. Such boats as these must often be driven away from their course, and carried by winds and currents to distant lands. It is undoubtedly in this way that the innumerable islands of the Pacific Ocean have become stocked, and it is not at all improbable that similar migrations may have taken place in former ages to the American shores.
Currents of the Ocean
This supposition is rendered still more probable from the fact that it is now ascertained that the ocean is subject to the flow of certain great permanent currents, which have the velocity and the force and the steady continuance of the currents of rivers, only on a much grander scale than any rivers in the world. A large canoe driven out of its course, and containing a good supply of provisions, might be carried a very long distance on one of these ocean streams, even without any assistance from the wind.
Antiquity of the Aboriginal Population of America,
The remoteness of the period in which the progenitors of the Indian tribes came to America is shown by the number of distinct Indian language which have been formed, and by the great dissimilarity which exists between these languages and any now known in other parts of the world.
A language once formed, even though unwritten, is extremely permanent. It is subject to slight modifications and changes, it is true, such as those by which different dialects are formed in different provinces of the same country; but to make a radical change in the form and structure of a language requires a very long course of time. Now, the languages of America are essentially different, not only in the words but in the whole system on which they are founded, from any languages of the old world, and they are also divided into several distinct classes, which are almost totally different from each other.
This shows that the process of bringing the American languages to their present state has been going on for a very long time and, consequently, that the separation of the races speaking them from the original stock in the old world must have taken place at a very remote period.
Ancient Nations of North America
At the time when America was discovered nations were found in the central and southern part of the continent that had attained to quite a high degree of civilization, and many ruins of ancient temples and cities are now from time to time discovered in those countries overgrown with enormous trees, the roots of which are intertwined with the remains of other enormous trees, which show that the structures that they cover must have been in ruins for a great many centuries.
There are no such ruins of ancient cities in the territory now belonging to the United States, but there are remains of ancient fortifications and mounds, of an extremely curious character, scattered through very extensive regions of the western country, which indicate the existence there in former times of a higher civilization and different modes of life from those manifested by the present race of Indians.
Durability of Earthworks
It is a very singular fact that works formed of earth and grassed over are among the most permanent and lasting of all the constructions made by man. The grassy mounds in the country of Nineveh and Babylon have remained without the least apparent change for many centuries. There are also in England old druidical mounds, and rings in the grass called fairy rings, which have been known and described in books from the earliest periods of English history, and they remain now, from century to century, apparently without any change, while hundreds of massive buildings of stone have gone entirely to decay, and the ruins of those that still remain are found to change rapidly, if neglected, from year to year. In the first settled portions of the United States, too, it is not improbable that the oldest structures of which any traces now remain are the beaver dams.
In fact, any artificial conformation of the surface of the ground, once well covered with greensward, and left undisturbed by the plough, seems to be more enduring than any other work of man.
The remains of ancient fortifications in the upper part of the valley of the Mississippi are very numerous, and they are on a very extended scale. They are laid out regularly, and denote the existence of considerable towns, or of places of encampments for large bodies of men. In some of them spaces of fifty and a hundred acres are inclosed.
Ancient Fields
There are also in certain parts of the prairies marks of ancient corn fields, of every great size, and extending over the country for a hundred and fifty miles. The land in these fields lies in ridges, like those always seen in a corn field that is left, after the corn is harvested, to grass itself over, without being leveled by the plough and harrow. These ridges are so regular, and they are confined so strictly to circumscribed and well defined fields - fields, too, occupying situations exactly suitable for the cultivation of corn - as to leave no room for doubt in respect to the nature of them.
They are very ancient too, as is proved by the trees often found standing upon them. Some persons, in examining these fields, once caused an oak tree to be cut down which was growing in one of them, and on counting the layers of wood they found that the tree was three hundred and twenty-five years old. This carries the time when the fields were cultivated far beyond the settlement of the country by Europeans; and inasmuch as no Indian tribes have been known, since the coming of Europeans; to cultivate the ground so extensively, it is supposed that these fields denote that in ancient times there existed a more numerous and civilized population over all this region than exists at the present day.
The Copper Mines
This opinion is confirmed by certain indications that are observed in the Lake Superior copper region. Ancient mines are found here with traces of former workings that are on a scale fare beyond the capacity of the Indians of the present day.
Copper is a metal that comes into use in the history of civilization much earlier than iron, for copper is often found in a metallic and malleable condition, in its native state, while iron, being so easily oxidizable, almost always exists in the form of an ore, which it is necessary to reduce by a highly artificial process before the iron can be obtained. To make implements of copper it is only necessary to find masses of native metal of the proper size, such as are often found upon or near the surface of the ground, and then to bring them to the required shape by hammering them with smooth and hard stones, or by grinding them upon rough ones.