Excerpt from History of Sangamon County, Illinois: Together With Sketches of Its Cities, Villages and Townships, Educational, Religious, Civil, Military, and Political History; Portraits of Prominent Persons, and Biographies of Representative Citizens Mr. Breckenridge, who examined the antiqui ties of the \vestern country in 1817, speaking of the mounds in the American Bottom, says: The great number and extremely large size of some of them may be regarded as furnishing, with other circumstances, evidences of their antiquity. I have sometimes been induced to think that at the period when they were con structed there was a population here as numer ous as that which once animated the borders of the Nile or Euphrates, or of Mexico. The most numerous, as well as considerable, of these remains are found in precisely those parts of the country where the traces of a numerous population might be looked for, namely, from the mouth of the Onto on the east side of the Mississippi, to the Illinois river, and on the w est from the St. Francis to the Missouri. 1 am perfectly satisfied that cities similar to those of ancient Mexico, of several hundred thousand souls, have existed in this country. Following the mound-builders as inhabitants of North America. Were as it is supposed, the people who reared the magnificent cities the ruins of which are found in Central America. This people was far more civilized and advanced in the arts than were the mound-builders. The cities built by them, judging from the ruins of broken columns, fallen arches and crumbling walls of temples, palaces and pyramids, which in some places for miles bestrew the ground, must have been of great extent, magnificent and very populous. When we consider the vast period of time necessary to erect such colossal structures, and, again, the time required to reduce them to their present ruined state, we can conceive something of their antiquity. These cities must have been old when many of the ancient cities of the Orient were being built. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.