Mound Builders is the name given to a vanished race by whose labor the remarkable earth mounds found in the United States were raised. These mounds exist in extraordinary numbers over all the country between the Alleghany and Rocky Mountains, but chiefly in Ohio, Illinois, . Indiana, and Missouri; they are abundant in all the Gulf States, and even farther south, and they extend at least as far north as the great lakes. Their usual height is from six to thirty feet, with a diameter of forty to one hundred feet. The majority are simply conical burial mounds, mostly rising from fifteen to twenty-five feet, though one in West Virginia is seventy feet high and over three hundred feet in diameter at the base. But very many others of these mounds are defensive, and others again have a religious origin. The fortifications, usually earthworks raised on heights near some water course, embrace walls, trenches, watch-towers, and are too skill fully constructed to have been temporary defences; many archaeologists believe that there was a connected line of defensive works from New York to Ohio. In the Mississippi Valley, where the largest mounds are, these forts disappear; and it is supposed that the principal enemies of the Mound Builders had their home in the east - perhaps in the Allegha-nies. Some of the Ohio fortresses enclose over one hundred acres, the walls of earth, winding in and out, in each case being several miles long.