AMERICA’S ANCIENT CIVILISATION.

Patea Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 1002, 26 February 1883, Page 3

AMERICA’S ANCIENT CIVILISATION.

-Wlien the white men first landed on these shores, Professor Newberry said in a recent lecture before the students of Colombia- College, they found them covered with dense forests and inhabited by. the Red Indians. For many years it was believed that,, America was what it was called/ a hew world, atid J that the Indians’were the..-:original inhabitants. But the white men pressed forward, turning up and planting that which seemed to be virgin soil, leaving bamlets and towns and cities in- their wake, until they crossed the barriers of the Alleghanies 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 years before. Long before this the Spaniards had penetrated into Mexico and found there cities which were lighted at night, protected by police, built up of palaces, having schools 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 invaders. Of the monuments left by the mound-builders, Professor Newberry' said that it had been estimated that: there were not less than 10,000 in Ohio alone. They were most common whereever the land was best, adapted to agriculture. They were evidently a peaceful,, agricultural people, familiar with pottery, ignorant of the use of iron, but ac-! quainted with copper, which they mined on the shore of Lake Superior, as was shown by the 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 nsed 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 tree? over the trenches 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 the salts of copper, and showed that the people wore acquainted with , weaving., As to their extertnihati'bn, it was evident that they.htul, gone down before an invasion of northern barbarians such as had also taken place in Europe.