Ohio History Journal

The Wisconsin Archaeological Society.          341

 

about Madison, describing the locations of the camps, trail and

fur-trade stations, as described by early travelers. He was fol-

lowed by Mr. Emilius O. Randall, secretary of the Ohio State

Archaeological and Historical Society, who protested that he

was not a professional archaeologist, history being his bent, if

he had any bent at all, and regretted that his place on the pro-

gram was not filled by Prof. W. C. Mills, the successful and well-

known curator of the Ohio Society. Nevertheless Mr. Randall

succeeded in greatly interesting his audience with his scholarly

address, "The Preservation of Prehistoric Remains in Ohio,"' in

which he described the work of the Ohio Society in exploring

and preserving its archaeological wealth. He told of the preserva-

tion in state park reservations of the widely celebrated Great

Serpent Mound, and of Fort Ancient. He also gave an account

of the recent productive explorations of the Adena mound, the

Baum village site and of other noted remains and sites, under

state auspices. A state archaeological atlas is now in prepara-

tion. The archaeological collections in the society's museum at

Columbus are very extensive and valuable, and its publications

widely read.

Prof. William Ellery Leonard, Assistant Professor of Eng-

lish in the University of Wisconsin, followed with the reading

of a poem prepared especially for the Assembly. This is printed

here with his kind permission.

 

 

PROFESSOR LEONARD'S POEM.

The white man came and builded in these parts

His house for government, his hall for arts,

His market-place, his chimneys, and his roads,

And garden plots before his new abodes,

With fields of grain behind them planted new,

Then, turned topographer, a map he drew;

And, turned historian, a book did frame;

And gave his high achievement unto fame.

Saying: "To these four ancient lakes I came,

And saw, and conquered, and with me was born,

Amid these prairies, and these woods forlorn,

A corporate life, a commonweal, a place

By me first founded for the human race."

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342        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

We con his map, his book; for they have worth

Not less than many a civic tale of earth

Of cities builded in the long ago

Where still forever other waters flow.

Yet, if we read the life of states aright,

Man never yet has built upon a site

Unknown to man before him: ancient Rome,

Long ere 'twas founded, was for man a home;

The Caesars, landing in the utmost isles

Of Briton, paved the long imperial miles

Between their military towns, among

An earlier folk whom time has left unsung.

And in still earlier days the Grecian stock,

(Their gods as yet uncarven in the rock,

Their lyres as yet dumb wood within the trees

Among the mountains o'er AEgean seas),

Settled to southward in a land even then

Alive with hardihood of sons of men

The rude Pelasgians, rearers of the stone-

In after eras to be overgrown

With weed and ivy-like at last the throne

Of marble Zeus himself. Again, they say

That fathoms deep in Egypt's oldest clay--

Fathoms beneath the sphinx and pyramid

Lie hid-or rather now no longer hid-

Proofs of man's home beside the reeds of Nile,

Ere ever those Dynasties whose numbered file

Of uncouth names we learn by rote had come,

With Isis and Osiris. Hold the thumb

Upon the map of Egypt, and then trace

With the forefinger how another race,

Making its way between the rivers twain -

Down the low Tigris and Euphrates plain-

Builds that Assyrian kingdom to the sea

Where the mysterious Sumerians be.

In short, wherever a mightier people go

To lands of promise, there's a Jericho

Before whose elder walls their trumpets first must blow.

So here: our sires who felled the forest trees

Received from dark-skinned aborigines

The lamp of life. And though we well may say,

"That lamp burns brighter in our hands today,"

We well may add, in reverence for the great

Primordial law that binds all life to fate,

"That lamp of life, though wild and wan its flame,

Still burned in other hands before we came."

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The Wisconsin Archaeological Society.            343

 

Here was a desert only in the name-

And from the view-point of that narrow pride

Which names a strange thing chiefly to deride.

Here was no desert: every hill and vale,

Each lake and watercourse, each grove and trail,

Was know to thousands who, like me and you,

Watched the great cloud-drifts in the central blue

And sun and moon and stars; like you and me,

Laughed, wept and danced and planned the thing to be.

The whole wide landscape, rock, and spring, and plain,

Lay long since chartered in the human brain,

And had its names, its legendary lore,

Which countless children from their fathers bore

Down to their children's children.

 

So man's mind

Even then was more than nature, brute and blind,

By virtue of that element of thought

Through which our own devices have been wrought.

Here in the villages by wood and shore,

With infants toddling through the wigwam door,

Were arts and crafts, in simpler form, but still

The same we practice in the shop and mill--

Here bowl and pitcher, moccasin and belt,

Mattock and spade and club and pipe and celt,

Fashioned not only for the work to do,

But often with many a tracery and hue,

To please that sense of something in the eye

We now call beauty-though we know not why.

And here was seed-time in the self-same loam

We plow today; here too was harvest home.

Here were assemblies of the counsellors;

Here unsung heroes led the hosts to wars.

Here gathered at seasons family and clan

To serve the god from whence its line began,

Or bury its chieftains; for the Gods, the dead,

Were unto them, as us, yet more than bread,

Yet more than drink and raiment, as it seems,

And they, as we do, lived in part by dreams.

And the high places round these lakes attest

The age-old mysteries of the human breast.

Thus, if you'll fill the picture out I've drawn,

Touch it with color and atmosphere of dawn,

You'll see an immemorial world of man,

Perhaps but portion of a larger plan

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344        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

Of which we too may but a portion be

In that sum-total solidarity

Of human beings spread across the earth

In generations, birth succeeding birth-

The living who raise the citadels we know,

The dead whose bones earth bosomed long ago.

 

And this good company that meets today

Proves the large truth of what I've sought to say;

For why should we, whose daily tasks alone

So press upon us that we scarcely own

The present hour, still take on us to gaze

Back on the parted, the forgotten days;

Why should we leave the quest for daily bread,

To quest for relics of the savage dead;

Why should we leave our figuring for gold

To figure out a vanished world of old?-

Except that thus in human nature lurks,

Except that thus in human nature works

Some sense of common comradry and kin

With human life, wherever it has been,

And in the use of such a sense we find

Enlargement for our human heart and mind.

 

Dr. Carl Russell Fish, professor of American history in the

University of Wisconsin, furnished the final number on the pro-

gram. His very instructive address entitled, "The Relation of

Archaeology to History, is here presented.

 

 

ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR FISH.

 

The derivation of the word archaeology gives little idea of its

present use. "The study of antiquity" is at once too broad in scope

and too limited in time, for the followers of a dozen other "ologies" are

studying antiquity, while the archaeologist does not confine himself to

that period. The definition of the word in the new English dictionary

corrects the first of these errors, but emphasizes the second, for it

describes it as: "The scientific study of remains and monuments of the

prehistoric period." This obviously will not bear examination, as the

bulk of archeological endeavor falls within the period which is considered

historical, and I cannot conceive any period prehistoric, about which

archeology, or any other science, can give us information. Actually, time

has nothing whatever to do with the limitations of archaeology, and to

think of it as leaving off where history begins, is to misconceive them

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