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Show 96 STEPPES AND DESERTS. Can it really have contained alphabetical writing? or is it not far more probably a pictorial history, like the supposed Phrenician inscription on the banks of the Taunton River? I consider it, however, very probable that these plains were once traversed by civilized nations: pyramidal sepulchral mounds, and entrenchments of extraordinary length, found in various places between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies, and on which Squier and Davis (in the "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley") are now throwing a new light, appear to confu·m this supposition. (Relation Hist., t. iii. p. 155.) Verandrier had been sent on his expedition by the Chevalier de Beauharnois, the French Governor-general of Canada, in 1746. Several Jesuits in the city of Quebec assured Kalm that they had themselves had the supposed inscription in their hands: it was engraved upon a small tablet which had been let into a pillar of cut stone, in which position it was found. I have asked several of my friends in France to search out this monument, in case it should really be in existence in the collection of Count Maurepas, but without suceess. I find older, but equally doubtful, statements as to the existence of alphabetical inscriptions belonging to the primitive nations of America, in Pedro de Ciega de Leon, Chronica del Peru, p. i. cap. 87 (losa con letras en loss edificios de Vinaque); in Garcia, Origen de los Indios, 1607, lib. iii. cap. 5, p. 258; and in Columbus's Journal of his first voyage, in Navarrete, Viages de los Espanoles, t. i. p. 67. l\f. de Verandrier moreover affirmed (and earlier travellers had also thought they had observed the same thing), that in the prairies of Western Canada, throughout entire days' journeys, traces of the ploughshare were discoverable; but the total ignorance of the primitive nations of America with regard to this agricultural implement, the want of draft cattle, and the great extent of ground over which the supposed furrows are found-all lead me to conjecture that this singular appearance of a ploughed field has been produced by so~e effect of water on the surface of the earth. ( 13) p. 29.-11 .lil7ce an arm of the Sea." The great Steppe, which extends from east to west from the mouth of tho Orinoco to the snowy mountains of Merida, turns to |