Note 12 — STEPPES AND DESERTS.

p. 7.—“No carved Stone.”

On the banks of the Orinoco near Caicara where the forest region joins the plain, we have indeed found representations of the sun, and figures of animals, cut on the rocks: but in the Llanos themselves no traces of these rude memorials of earlier inhabitants have been discovered. It is to be regretted that we have not received any more complete and certain information respecting a monument which was sent to France to Count Maurepas, and which, according to Kalm, had been found by M. de Verandrier in the Prairies of Canada 900 miles west of Montreal, in the course of an expedition intended to reach the Pacific. (Kalm’s Reise, Th. iii. S. 416.) This traveller found in the middle of the plain enormous masses of stone, placed in an upright position by the hand of man, and on one of them was something which was taken to be a Tartar inscription. (Archæologia: or Miscellaneous Tracts, published by the Society of Antiquaries of London, vol. viii., 1787, p. 304.) How is it that so important a monument has remained unexamined? Can it really have contained alphabetical writing? or is it not far more probably a pictorial history, like the supposed Phœnician inscription on the bank of the Taunton River? I consider it, however, very probable that these plains were once traversed by civilised 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 Mississipi Valley”) are now throwing a new light, appear to confirm 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 success. I find older, but equally doubtful, statements as to the existence of alphabetical inscriptions belonging to the primitive nations of America, in Pedro de Cieça de Leon, Chronica del Peru, P. i. cap. 87 (losa con letras en los 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. M. 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 some effect of water on the surface of the earth.