What does all this indicate?
That far below the present level of the State of Illinois, in the depths of the glacial clays, about one hundred or one hundred and twenty feet below the present surface of the land, there are found the evidences of a high civilization. For a coin with an inscription upon it implies a high civilization:--it implies an alphabet, a literature, a government, commercial relations, organized society, regulated agriculture, which could alone sustain all these; and some implement like a plow, without which extensive agriculture is not possible; and this in turn implies domesticated animals to draw the plow. The presence of the coin, and of implements of copper and iron, proves that mankind had passed far beyond the Stone Age. And these views are confirmed by the pavements and cisterns of brick found seventy feet below the surface in the lower Mississippi Valley.
There is a Pompeii, a Herculaneum, somewhere, underneath central and northwestern Illinois or Tennessee, of the most marvelous character; not of Egypt, Assyria, or the Roman Empire, things of yesterday, but belonging to an inconceivable antiquity; to pre-glacial times; to a period ages before the flood of Noah;--a civilization which was drowned and deluged out of sight under the immeasurable clay-flood of the comet.
Man crawled timidly backward into the history of the past over his little limit of six thousand years; and at the farther end of his tether he found the perfect civilization of early Egypt. He rises to his feet and looks still backward, and the vista of history spreads and
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spreads to antediluvian times. Here at last he thinks he has reached the beginning of things: here man first domesticated the animals; here he first worked in copper and iron; here he possessed for the first time an alphabet, a government, commerce, and coinage. And, lo! from the bottom of well-holes in Illinois, one hundred and fourteen feet deep, the buckets of the artesian-well auger bring up copper rings and iron hatchets and engraved coins--engraved by a means unknown to historical mankind--and we stand face to face with a civilization so old that man will not willingly dare to put it into figures.
Here we are in the presence of that great, but possibly brutal and sensual development of man's powers, "the sword-ages, the axe-ages, the murder-ages of the Goths," of which God cleared the earth when he buried the mastodon under the Drift for ever.
How petty, how almost insignificant, how school-boy-like are our historians, with their little rolls of parchment under their arms, containing their lists of English, Roman, Egyptian, and Assyrian kings and queens, in the presence of such stupendous facts as these!
Good reader, your mind shrinks back from such conceptions, of course. But can you escape the facts by shrinking back? Are they not there? Are they not all of a piece--Job, Ovid, Rama, Ragnarok, Genesis, the Aztec legends; the engraved ivory tablets of the caves, the pottery, the carved figures of pre-glacial Europe; the pottery-strata of Louisiana under the Drift; the copper and iron implements, the brick pavements and cisterns, and this coin, dragged up from well-holes in Illinois?
And what do they affirm?