r impossibility of ascribing
these ruins to Egyptian builders. The magnificent tombs of the kings at
Thebes rose up before me. It was on their tombs that the Egyptians
lavished their skill, industry, and wealth, and no people, brought up
in Egyptian schools, descended from Egyptians, or deriving their
lessons from them, would ever have constructed in so conspicuous a
place so rude a sepulchre. Besides this, the fact of finding these
bones in so good a state of preservation, at a distance of only three
or four feet from the surface of the earth, completely destroys all
idea of the extreme antiquity of these buildings; and again there was
the universal and unhesitating exclamation of the Indians, "They are
the bones of our kinsman."

But whosesoever they were, little did the pious friends who placed them
there ever imagine the fate to which they were destined. I had them
carried to the convent, thence to Uxmal, and thence I bore them away
forever from the bones of their kindred. In their rough journeys on the
backs of mules and Indians they were so crumbled and broken that in a
court of law their ancient proprietor would not be able to identify
them, and they left me one night in a pocket-handkerchief to be carried
to Doctor S. G. Morton of Philadelphia.

Known by the research he has bestowed upon the physical features of the
aboriginal American races, and particularly by his late work entitled
"Crania Americana," which is acknowledged, in the annual address of the
president of the Royal Geographical Society of London, as "a welcome
offering to the lovers of comparative physiology," this gentleman, in a
communication on that subject, for which I here acknowledge my
obligations, says that this skeleton, dilapidated as it is, has
afforded him some valuable facts, and has been a subject of some
interesting reflections.

The purport of his opinion is as follows: In the first place, the
needle did not deceive the Indian who picked it up in the grave. The
bones are those of a female. Her height did not exceed five feet three
or four inches. The teeth are perfect, and not appreciably worn, while
the _epiphyses_ those infallible indications of the growing state, have
just become consolidated, and mark the completion of adult age.

The bones of the hands and feet are remarkably small and delicately
proportioned, which observation applies also to the entire skeleton.
The skull was crushed into many pieces, but, by a cautious
m