men of our times. All the bodies that have been found in that
high state of preservation, in which they were discovered in nitrous
caves, were considerably smaller than the present ordinary stature of
men. The two bodies that were found in the vast limestone cavern in
Tennessee, one of which I saw at Lexington, were neither of them more than
four feet in height. It seems to me that this must have been nearly the
height of the living person. The teeth and nails did not seem to indicate
the shrinking of the flesh from them in the desiccating process by which
they were preserved. The teeth were separated by considerable intervals;
and were small, long, white, and sharp, reviving the horrible images of
nursery tales of ogres' teeth. The hair seemed to have been sandy, or
inclining to yellow. It is well known that nothing is so uniform in the
present Indian as his lank black hair. From the pains taken to preserve
the bodies, and the great labour of making the funeral robes in which they
were folded, they must have been of the 'blood-royal,' or personages of
great consideration in their day. The person that I saw, had evidently
died by a blow on the skull. The blood had coagulated there into a mass,
of a texture and colour sufficiently marked to shew that it had been
blood. The envelope of the body was double. Two splendid blankets,
completely woven with the most beautiful feathers of the wild turkey,
arranged in regular stripes and compartments, encircled it. The cloth on
which these feathers were woven, was a kind of linen of neat texture, of
the same kind with that which is now woven from the fibres of the nettle.
The body was evidently that of a female of middle age, and I should
suppose that her majesty weighed, when I saw her, six or eight pounds."

The silly attempts that have been made to establish an oriental origin for
the North American Indians, have never produced any other conviction in an
unbiased mind, than that the _facts_ brought forward to support that
theory existed only in the imaginations of those who advanced them. The
colour, the form, the manners, habits, and propensities of the Indians,
all combine to establish that they are a distinct race of human beings,
and could never have emanated from any people of European, Asiatic, or
African origin. The notion that climate would be sufficient to produce an
essential change in the appearance of any number of individuals, cannot
now be maintained; since from the