There
have also been found numerous musical pipes, with mouth-pieces and
stops; lovers' pipes, curiously and delicately carved, reminding us of
Bryant's lines--
"Till twilight came, and lovers walked and wooed
In a forgotten language; and old tunes,
From instruments of unremembered forms,
Gave the soft winds a voice."
There is evidence which goes to prove that the Mound Builders had
relations with the people of a semi-tropical region in the direction of
Atlantis. Among their sculptures, in Ohio, we find accurate
representations of the lamantine, manatee, or sea-cow--found to-day on
the shores of Florida, Brazil, and Central America--and of the toucan, a
tropical and almost exclusively South American bird. Sea-shells from the
Gulf, pearls from the Atlantic, and obsidian from Mexico, have also been
found side by side in their mounds.
The antiquity of their works is now generally conceded. "From the ruins
of Nineveh and Babylon," says Mr. Gliddon, "we have bones of at least
two thousand five hundred years old; from the pyramids and the catacombs
of Egypt both mummied and unmummied crania have been taken, of still
higher antiquity, in perfect preservation; nevertheless, the skeletons
deposited in our Indian mounds, from the Lakes to the Gulf, are
crumbling into dust through age alone.
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