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are not ‘ancient,’ their occurrence at depths of ten, forty, fifty, and one hundred and twenty feet must be explained as I have suggested in reference to the ‘coin.’  An instrument of iron is a strong indication of the civilized origin of all.”

This is indeed an extraordinary revelation.  Here we have a copper medal, very much like a coin, inscribed with alphabetical or hieroglyphical signs, which, when placed under the microscope, in the hands of a skeptical investigator, satisfies him that it is not recent, and that it passed through a rolling-mill and was cut by a machine.

If it is not recent, if the tooth of time is plainly seen on it, it is not a modern fraud; if it is not a modern fraud, then it is really the coin of some pre-Columbian people.  The Indians possessed no currency or alphabet, so that it dates back of the red-men.  Nothing similar has been found in the hundreds of American mounds that have been opened, so that it dates back of the mound-builders.

It comes from a depth of not less than eighty feet in glacial clay, therefore it is profoundly ancient.

It is engraved after a method utterly unknown to any civilized nation on earth, within the range of recorded history.  IT IS ENGRAVED WITH ACID!

It belongs, therefore, to a civilization unlike any we know of.  If it had been derived from any other human civilization, the makers, at the same time they borrowed the round, metallic form of the coin, would have borrowed also the mold or the stamp.  But they did not; and yet they possessed a rolling-mill and a machine to cut out the coin.

What do we infer?  That there is a relationship between our civilization and this, but it is a relationship in which this represents the parent; and the round metallic

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coins of historical antiquity were derived from it, but without the art of engraving by the use of acid.

It does not stand alone, but at great depths in the same clay implements of copper and of IRON are found.

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.