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."
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."
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
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