Professor Putnam's Lecture.

Professor Putnam who has promoted a great deal of the investigation of the mounds in Ohio, lectured in the Divinity chapel on the Evidence of Religous Rites in the Ohio valley.

The largest collection of mounds is the Turner group which contains the famous Large Mound. This is made very carefully and of many kinds of material, the foundation being a circle of stone one hundred feet in diameter, firled in with burnt clay, over which is a layer of mixed iron and gravel packed into a solid mass like concrete. This gravel made a floor for the support of two altars. That the mound was used exclusively for religious rites is certain from the fact that after some great religious festival in which thousands of treasures of all kinds were heaped on the fire, layers of clay and sand were laid over the whole mound and its use forever destroyed. Another of the Turner mounds is on a higher level than the rest and is built so as to face the East, thus showing indisputably that the sun was worstripped by these people.

Of all the earth works in the valley none is so famous or so interesting in its religious signification as the Great Serpent Mound. The mouth is wide open and is evidently just about to swallow the oval shaped figure which is almost between the jaws. In this oval is a heap of stones, the altar on which the sacrifices were made to the rising sun, towards which the whole oval points. Here, in the altar, the oval and the serpent, are the three symbols of Asiatic religious rites, and that these mound builders crossed the Pacific ocean from Asia is a fact that has already been proved almost beyond a doubt. The serpent's body is twelve hundred and fifty-four feet long, following all the curves, five feet high and about twenty feet broad. Near all of the larger mounds are numerous graves from which have been taken quantities of ornaments which have thrown almost as much light on the life and religious belief of these ancient people as the mounds themselves.