mote epochs--a fact that I can easily prove.

But, why should we lose ourselves in the mazes of supposition,
where we run a fair chance of wandering astray, when we may recur
to the monuments of Yucatan? These are unimpeachable witnesses that
the Peninsula was inhabited by civilized people many thousand years
ago, even before the time ascribed by the Mosaic records to the
creation.

Among the ruins of Ake, a city unique in Yucatan for its strange
architecture, evidently built by giants, whose bones are now and
then disinterred, a city that was inhabited at the time of the
conquest, and where the Spaniards retreated for safety after the
defeat they suffered at the hands of the dwellers of the country
near the ruins of Chichen-Itza, is to be seen an immense building
composed of three superposed platforms. The upper one forms a
terrace supporting three rows of twelve columns. Each column is
composed of eight large square stones, piled one upon the other,
without cement, to a height of four metres, and indicate a lapse of
160 years in the life of the nation. These stones are, or were,
called _Katun_. Every twenty years, amid the rejoicings of the
people, another stone was added to those already piled up, and a
new era or epoch was recorded in the history and life of the
people. After seven of these stones had thus been placed--that is
to say, after a lapse of 140 years--they began the _Ahau-Katun_, or
King Katun, when a small stone was added every four years on one of
the corners of the uppermost, and at the end of the twenty years of
the _Ahau-Katun_, with great ceremonies and feasting, the crowning
stone was placed upon the supporting small ones. (The photographs
of this monument can be seen at the house of Mr. H. Dixon.) Now, as
I have said, we have thirty-six columns composed of eight stones,
each representing a period of twenty years, which would give us a
total of 5760 years since the first Katun was placed on the terrace
to the time when the city was abandoned, shortly after the Spanish
conquest.

On the northeast of the great pyramid at Chichen-Itza, at a short
distance from this monument, can be seen the graduated pyramid that
once upon a time supported the main temple of the city dedicated to
_Kukulcan_ (the winged serpent), the protec