Note 12 — ON STEPPES AND DESERTS.

82p. 6—“No hewn stone.”

Representations of the sun and figures of animals have certainly been found graven in rocks on the banks of the Orinoco, near Caicara, where the woody region borders on the plain, but in the Llanos themselves not a trace of these rough memorials of earlier inhabitants has ever been discovered. It is to be regretted that no accurate account has reached us of a monument which was sent to Count Maurepas, in France, and which, according to Kalm, was discovered in the prairies of Canada, 900 French leagues (about 2700 English miles) west of Montreal, by M. de Verandrier, while engaged on an expedition to the coast of the Pacific Ocean.^[CP] This traveller met in the plains with huge masses of stone erected by the hand of man, on one of which there was an inscription believed to be in the Tartar language^[CQ]. How can so important a monument have remained uninvestigated? Can it actually have borne an alphabetical inscription, or are we not rather to believe that it must have been an historical picture, like the so-called Phœnician inscription, which has been discovered on the bank of the Taunton river, and whose authenticity has been questioned by Court de Gebelin? I indeed regard it as highly probable that these plains were once traversed by civilised nations, and it seems to me that this fact is proved by the existence of pyramidal grave-works or burrows and bulwarks of extraordinary length, between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanys, on which Squier and Davis have now thrown new light in their account of the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley.^[CR] M. de Verandrier was despatched, about the year 1746, on this expedition by the Chevalier de Beauharnois, Governor-General of Canada; and several Jesuits in Quebec assured Kalm that they had actually had this so-called inscription in their hands, and that it was graven on a small tablet which was found inlaid in a hewn pillar. I have in vain requested several of my friends in France to make inquiries regarding this monument, in the event of its being in the Collection of Count Maurepas. I have also found equally uncertain accounts 83of the alphabetical writing of the American aboriginal races, in a work of Pedro de Cieça de Leon,^[CS] in Garcia,^[CT] and in Columbus’s^[CU] journal of his first voyage. M. de Verandrier maintained also that traces of the ploughshare were observed for days together in travelling over the grassy plains of Western Canada; a circumstance that other travellers, prior to him, likewise profess to have noticed. But the utter ignorance of the primitive nations of North America regarding this implement of agriculture, the want of beasts of draught, and the vast extent of surface over which these tracks extend through the prairie, tend rather to make me adopt the opinion that this singular appearance of furrows is owing to some movement of water over the earth’s surface.