Some of the earthworks met with to the south of Lake Erie show proofs of greater constructive labour than anything found in Canada. Still more interesting are the primitive hieroglyphics of an inscription on Cunningham’s Island, ascribed to the Eries, and which Schoolcraft describes as by far the most elaborate work of its class hitherto found on the continent.[137] But the rock inscription, though highly interesting as an example of native symbolism and pictographic writing, throws no light on the history of its carvers; and of their language no memorial is recoverable, for they had ceased to exist before the great lake which perpetuates their name was known to the French.
More accurate information has been preserved in reference to the Hurons, among whom the Jesuit Fathers laboured with self-denying zeal, from time to time reporting the results in their _Relations_ to the Provincial of the Order at Paris. One of the most characteristic religious ceremonies of the Hurons was the great “Feast of the Dead,” celebrated apparently at intervals of twelve years, when the remains of their dead were gathered from scaffolded biers, or remote graves, and deposited amid general mourning in the great cemetery of the tribe. Valuable robes and furs, pottery, copper kettles and others of their choicest possessions, including the pyrulæ, or large tropical shells brought from the Gulf of Mexico, with wampum, prized implements, and personal ornaments, were all thrown into the great trench, which was then solemnly covered over. By the exploration of those Huron ossuaries, the sites of the palisaded villages of the Hurons of the seventeenth century have been identified in recent years; and there are now preserved in the Laval University at Quebec upwards of eighty skulls recovered from cemeteries at St. Ignace, St. Joachin, Ste. Marie, St. Michael, and other villages, the scenes of self-denying labour, and in some cases of the cruel torturings, of the French missionaries by whom they were thus designated. Other examples of skulls from the same ossuaries, I may add, are now in the Museums of the University of Toronto, the London Anthropological Society, and the Jardin des Plantes at Paris. The skulls recovered from those ossuaries have a special value from the fact that the last survivors were driven out of the country by their Iroquois foes in 1649; and hence the crania recovered from them may be relied upon as fairly illustrating the physical characteristics of the race before they had been affected by intercourse with Europeans. The Huron skull is of a well-defined dolichocephalic type, with, in many cases, an unusual prominence of the occipital region; the parietal bones meet more or less at an angle at the sagittal suture; the forehead is flat and receding; the superciliary ridges in the male skulls are strongly developed; the malar bones are broad and flat, and the profile is orthognathic. Careful measurements of thirty-nine male skulls yield a mean longitudinal diameter of 7.39 to a parietal diameter of 5.50; and of eighteen female skulls, a longitudinal diameter of 7.07 to a parietal diameter of 5.22.[138]