have once opened our minds to the possibility that world-civilizations
different in their time from ours in ours, may for all we know have
existed and been blotted out ages ago, leaving linguistic traces, and
perhaps perpetuating cultural remnants in a few parts of the earth, it
is impossible not to recognize the breadth of the problem we are
considering. All over the American continent at the time of the
Discovery we see cultures and systems whose time had come. Back of most
of the North and South American tribes we find the remains of mighty and
utterly extinct civilizations--only their dim memory left. In the
centers of higher culture from Mexico to Peru we see the ancient
civilization brought further down to our own times; but there also, in
process, all the incidents of break-up and an expiring greatness.
Internecine strife, invasion from outside, changes of center, are all
going on, and all marked by a _steady decrease_ in everything that means
civilization. Of the ancient mathematical and astronomical knowledge a
corner of which is revealed to us by the Maya glyph remains, only a
distorted fragment appears in the Mexican, where also hieroglyphs have
yielded to a cruder rebus-writing. The stately and incomparable
compositions and architecture of Palenque, Copan and Quirigua have
yielded to the ball courts and local strifes of Chichen Itza--all this
following the very course of changing historical succession preserved in
the Chronicles. The later the date, the lower in every case the culture;
this is impossible not to recognize, nor have we traces of any different
course of events. Of course we see the rise of the Aztec nation, a small
cycle, but like the Gothic upon the Roman, it comes at the end of the
general American break-up--an incursion of barbarians settling on and
preserving for us fragments of the culture that preceded them, just as
has happened over and over again all over the world. And the same with
the Incas in Peru. And yet even the Mexican culture demands our high
respect, comparing favorably with European of the same period. Indeed it
was actually far ahead of the latter in matters of education and many
points of polity.

But in spite of its seeming greatness, its heart and energy were gone,
just as with Peru, and both yielded to what on the face seems a miracle,
but was only the expression of that force which was preparing the
American continent for a new race and civilization, still now only in