LIKE an oasis in a desert, like a moment of silence and a sound of distant bells amid a din of discordant sounds, comes a brief note on prehistoric America in the midst of a monthly review devoted to a rÉsumÉ of the Babel of modern thought. Bewildered with foolish spite of party politics, disgusted with lucubrations on "The Coming Christ," and a new Elixir of Life discovered in Africa, the reader achieves a moment of silence and inward joy inspired by this paragraph on an ancient City of the Sun, with its illustrations of the sublime architecture and sculpture of that epoch. These pictures inspire a reverence, similar in nature, if different in quality, to that which the ancient classical architecture and statues inspire; it is more akin to that inspired by ancient Egypt. It speaks of a spirit, so different from any that pervades our modern life, yet arousing in the soul a response as of something familiar—familiar but very deep and ancient.

We read that in the Bulletin of the Pan-American Union a writer describes ChichÉn ItzÁ. The ItzÁs were a tribe of the Mayas, whose civilization reached a height equaled by no other people of the Western hemisphere. They excelled in architecture, sculpture, printing, and astronomy. The pyramid on which the temple stands is 195 feet long on each side at the base and covers nearly an acre. It is made of nine terraces of faced masonry. Up the center of each of its four sides rises a stairway thirty-seven feet wide. A picture of a temple faÇade, in rectangular massive style like that of Egypt and covered with elaborate symbolic carving, while up from the roof rise tropical plants that have grown there, is labeled, "View of an Ancient Monastery" (so-called). The impression it gives is anything but that given by the idea of a monastery. Its spirit is alien to that of any spirit familiar to the times in which monasteries have prevailed.

It is awe-inspiring to think that this continent of America has behind it such a past, more ancient than Egypt, as great and perhaps greater. The Red Men must, many of them at least, be the remote descendants of this past.

There is something about their physiognomy that reminds us of the faces on the ancient pottery and carving; a broad-featured bronzed type—what one might call a solar type. Peoples like the ZuÑis and Moquis have mysteries, into which but few white men have even partially penetrated; which shows they are the remnants of a once greater race, a part of whose knowledge they preserve in memory.

This subject of ancient America has not yet received from archaeologists the attention it deserves. Nevertheless there are explorers who study in this field, and the results of their researches are frequently written up for the Sunday editions. In this way the public gets acquainted with the subject independently of academical instruction. Such periodicals as the National Geographical Magazine and Records of the Past often give beautiful illustrated accounts of the ruins.

Thus we read that Dr. Max Uhle, director of the University of California's archaeological work in Peru, has discovered that a great civilization flourished at least 2000 years before the Incas, and that a highly cultured race was in existence in Peru before the Trojan war.

In Guerrero, Mexico, in a region south of the Balsas River, over an area of fifty square miles, there are remains of thousands of prehistoric dwellings and scores of pyramids. The sculptured tablets bear the usual mystic geometrical symbols of the ancient Science of Life.

A mining engineer, Mr. A. Lafave, is reported to have discovered in Arizona a prehistoric city older than Babylon or Nineveh, but nevertheless the center of a civilization very highly advanced. Great architectural skill is shown, and the symbol of what is called a sun-god was found.

The British Museum recently acquired the collection of pottery and other relics discovered by Mr. Hubert Myring in the Chimcana Valley of Peru and stated by him to be at the lowest estimate 7000 years old. Yet this pottery shows the highest possible degree of skill, while the subjects represented prove that the artists had the materials of a highly cultured and complex civilization to draw upon.

In Ecuador Dr. Marshall H. Saville of Columbia University discovered many tombs, and the objects collected show that the district was densely populated by a highly civilized people.

Writing from New Orleans, May 13, Charles F. Lummis of Los Angeles records his excavations at QuiriguÁ, Guatemala. A trackless jungle had to be cleared, and numerous monuments of heroic size were found; one was twenty-six feet above ground and sixteen feet below and weighed about 140,000 pounds. The greatest discovery was a palace which must have been magnificent. It was surrounded by columns and the frieze was covered with carved heads.

The ruined temples of Palenque, Uxmal, ChichÉn ItzÁ, etc., have often been described. The mysterious hieroglyphics of the Mayas have yet to be deciphered; and when they are we shall have another epoch-making revelation like that following the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion.

Dr. Heath, a writer on Peruvian Antiquities, gives an account of the incredible size and quantity of the ruins, from which the following is selected. (See Kansas City Review of Science and Industry, Nov. 1878)

The coast of Peru extends from Tumbez to the river Loa, a distance of 1233 miles. Scattered over this whole extent there are thousands of ruins ... while nearly every hill and spire of the mountains have upon them or about them some relic of the past; and in every ravine, from the coast to the central plateau, there are ruins of walls, cities, fortresses, burial vaults, and miles and miles of terraces and water-courses.... Of granite, porphyritic lime and silicated sandstone, these massive colossal cyclopean structures have resisted the disintegration of time, geological transformations, earthquakes, and the sacrilegious destructive hand of the warrior and treasure-seeker. The masonry composing these walls, temples, houses, towers, fortresses, or sepulchres, is uncemented, held in place by the incline of the walls from the perpendicular, and by the adaptation of each stone to the place designed for it, the stones having from six to many sides, each dressed and smoothed to fit another or others with such exactness that the blade of a small penknife cannot be inserted in any of the seams thus formed.... These stones ... vary from one-half cubic foot to 1500 cubic feet of solid contents, and if in the many many millions of stones you could find one that would fit in the place of another, it would be purely accidental.

Speaking of the terraces, he says:

Estimating five hundred ravines in the 1200 miles of Peru, and ten miles of terraces of fifty tiers to each ravine, which would only be five miles of twenty-five tiers to each side, we have 250,000 miles of stone wall, averaging three to four feet high—enough to encircle this globe ten times.

The mention of hieroglyphs yet undeciphered, which may any day prove the key to a new revelation of history, receives apposite illustration in an article in the Los Angeles Times (Sunday magazine edition) for May 14. This describes the discovery of several cylinders, resembling the clay cylinders of Babylonian civilization, which have been deciphered; and it is thought that these may prove the Rosetta stone of American Egypt. They are about three inches long by an inch and a half in diameter, hollow, the walls a quarter of an inch thick. The clay has turned to stone, thus being preserved, and the inscriptions repeat hieroglyphs known to correspond to familiar phrases.

The account in which this occurs is that of a discovery made by Prof. William Niven, a field archaeologist of Mexico City; and his statements as to the age and value of his finds are confirmed by Dr. Edward E. Seler, head of the National School of Archaeology of the Republic of Mexico. The latter authority declares the ruins and relics to be the evidences of a civilization new to archaeology, though bearing some resemblance to the ruins of the Tigris and Euphrates. This center of civilization lies about forty minutes' ride from Mexico City, under the suburb of Azcapotzalco.

It is eighteen feet beneath the surface, and from it have been produced pottery of a type different from any hitherto found in Mexico, an entire goldsmith's outfit with patterns and molds for the making of ornaments of gold and silver, pendants and rings and beads of jade, copper knives which cut like steel, skulls containing teeth whose cavities are filled with cement and turquoise, the cylinders just mentioned, and many other objects.

These things were found in an immense basin containing the ruins of a city some ten miles long by three or four wide. Its houses were of laid stone, cemented with a white cement, unlike the black cement of Mitla or the gray composition of Palenque. The rooms were of uniform height—nine feet; the floors of tile—or, rather, of small squares of cement, colored and traced in beautiful patterns; the walls ornamented with frescoes and friezes showing a remarkable development of the color art. Paints used on these buildings, though evidently of vegetable composition and more than 3000 years old, are fresh and do not fade when exposed to light.

The skulls and arrowheads found in the soil above are similar to those found in other parts, and relate to peoples having no connexion with the occupants of this ancient city. Does not this prove that so-called "primitive man" was merely odd tribes of lowly nomads or settlers, belonging to fallen remnants of earlier civilizations; whereas many anthropologists seem to try to make out that they represent an earlier stage in evolution? This ancient city flourished long before the owners of the skulls and arrow-heads. All through the period of Aztec civilization it lay buried and unsuspected by the Aztecs.

The great age of this civilization is amply proved by the fact that the city was buried under the wash of a great river that came down from the mountains. Geological considerations enable us to fix the date of that river back beyond other changes that have taken place in the ground since. Hence the city must be older still. And even before this flood the city was probably already abandoned—through pestilence, war, or some such cause. It was quite by accident that it was found; the exploring party chanced to step into a cave-in. It lies beneath the thick and long-cultivated residual soil, and consequently there may be an indefinite number of such cities almost anywhere.

Among objects found was a dental cast of a human mouth.

The more we discover, the more do we confirm the teaching that civilization is not of recent growth. The older the civilization, the more advanced—this seems to be the rule everywhere. Clearly the arts of modern civilization have been known before and we are but rediscoverers of them.

We might go on quoting indefinitely, but must pass on to comment. It is very clear that these mighty builders, whose achievements have never since been equaled or even approached by any race in any part of the world were no barbarians or "primitive men." And we have to remember that it is not only from America that such archaeological accounts come, but from Asia, Africa, Europe, New Zealand—practically everywhere. And always one tale is the same—that of ancient civilizations and their prowess. Only recently the discoveries in Crete have altered all our views of Greek history by showing the existence of a great and widespread civilization in the Aegean, far preceding that of Greece.

And side by side with all this we find the extraordinary fact that many anthropologists are still deeply engaged in their attempts to establish a gradual ascent of man from ape ancestors. Ignoring these evidences, they are diligently seeking and collecting the bones of unburied wanderers. But even these bones do not bear out the theory, for the older bones are no more ape-like than the later ones. Men exist on earth today, even among civilized peoples, as backward in type as these bones. What is quite certain is that man degenerates as well as evolves. Culture moves in waves, having ebbs and flows. The so-called aboriginal peoples are the remote and degenerated descendants of civilizations.

But what is the real import of these discoveries? Are they mere subjects of curiosity and wonder? No; the interest lies in what they imply. For if there is to be any coherence in our views, we must make the rest of our ideas agree with our enlarged view of past history. And the conventional views of man and his life do not thus agree; they are too insignificant, and out of tune with increasing knowledge.