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Excerpt from Rhode Island Historical Society Collections, Vol. 16: January, 1923 It requires error outgrown as well as truth comprehended to make a universe. Consequently, it will not be a waste of effort for us to examine what this locality has to offer. If there had been any genuine foundation for the rumors alluded to, it seems likely that Dr. Stiles must have heard of them, for he sought-indefatigably for inscriptions on rocks. His notes, we may be sure, record every instance which was brought to his attention, and he would certainly have visited every one that he could discover and would have made draw ings of it. In fact, he wrote in 1790: I have made great in quiry these 20 years past for similar inscriptions to those of the Dighton Rock.l Yet although he resided in Newport for twenty-one years, he gives no hint of there being any ancient records of the sort nearer than Portsmouth. He does, how ever, mention two that were made in 1728. Our own interest is principally in the older and more mysterious rock-carvings, rather than in these. Yet the fact that at least one white man followed the impulse to write upon such surfaces at so early a date is not without its bearing upon our interpretation of the more puzzling cases. 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.