tarted having been exhausted, it either remained stationary, without
further development, or sank into decay, or fell before the hostile
attacks of races that had never yielded to its influence. Now the
civilization which is described as having once existed in America
exhibits these general characteristics, while it has, like each of the
others, its own peculiar traits. If the discoverers had made a different
report, we might have been led to suppose that some such state of things
as we have described had previously existed, but had perished before
their arrival.

Mr. Wilson, however, does not reason in this manner. He has found, from
his own observation,--the only source of knowledge, if such it can
be called, on which he is willing to place much reliance,--that the
Ojibways and Iroquois are savages, and he rightly argues that their
ancestors must have been savages. From these premises, without any
process of reasoning, he leaps at once to the conclusion, that in no
part of America could the aboriginal inhabitants ever have lived in any
other than a savage state. Hence he tells us, that, in all statements
regarding them, everything "must be rejected that is inconsistent
with well-established Indian traits." The ancient Mexican empire was,
according to his showing, nothing more than one of those confederacies
of tribes with which the reader of early New England history is
perfectly familiar. The far-famed city of Mexico was "an Indian village
of the first class,"--such, we may hope, as that which the author saw
on his visit to the Massasaugus, where, to his immense astonishment, he
found the people "clothed, and in their right minds." The Aztecs, he
argues, could not have built temples, for the Iroquois do not build
temples. The Aztecs could not have been idolaters or offered up human
sacrifices, for the Iroquois are not idolaters and do not offer up human
sacrifices. The Aztecs could not have been addicted to cannibalism, for
the Iroquois never eat human flesh, unless driven to it by hunger. This
is what Mr. Wilson means by the "American standpoint"; and those who
adopt his views may consider the whole question settled without any
debate.

But there are some slight difficulties to be overcome, before we can
embrace these views. Putting human testimony aside, there are witnesses
of the past that still give their evidence to the fact, that parts of
this continent were once inhabited by races who had other pursuits
besi