ca, the Gothic style has travelled from Arabia to Europe and is not
yet quite out of use. The national altars of the Celestial Empire at
Pekin in China are yet exactly similar to those of earliest times, and
found in America.

Architecture and the various styles it has employed for monuments,
temples, cities &c. have undergone several changes and improvements,
from the rude imitations of a tent, or cottage, or hill, to that of
pyramids, towers, pillars, colonnades, caves, _norajes_, _teocalis_,
&c., from irregular inclosures to square, circular, octagon forms, from
heaps of earth forming ditches, canals, to regular walled excavations.
Styles of building are fluctuating with the Nations and times, taste and
religion: some are occasionally revived or improved; yet they have a
certain duration, location, or age, and origin somewhere. Nevertheless
they may happen to be blended by the same people; our own modern
civilization admits yet of the tents in camps, the loghouse, the shed,
the hut, the cottage, the houses of wood, brick or stone, palaces and
temples, theatres, Capitols, and negro huts! We must not be surprised to
see the same incongruity and admixture in various parts of America in
former times. Many tribes followed 300 years ago the style of 3000 years
before, as yet partly done in China.

Every thing on earth follows the universal law of terrestrial mutations,
monuments and arts, as well as languages and human features! they rise
and fall like the nations, mingle or blend as our modern English nation
and language formed out of many others. What diversity in any one of our
cities in complexions, statures and features of men! there are more
differences between some men of our own race, than between negroes, red
or white men. White, black and bay horses, are not peculiar species, nor
are men of different hues, hairs, eyes, noses, &c.

Inscriptions are monuments also, and of the highest value, even when we
cannot read them. Some of these will be hereafter, since those of Egypt
so long deemed inexplicable, have at last found interpreters. So it will
be at a future day, with those of America. Few have been made known as
yet, but there are many all over the range of the monumental regions.
Those sculptured in the temples and palaces of _Otolum_ near Palenque,
are not the only ones. Several in caves, or upon rocks, involve in rude
painting, a symbolic meaning, to which we are obtaining a clue. Several
nations of North A