ld cared to accept. But this
does not argue that it is not worth while to learn what we can of the
rude civilization of the races whom we have displaced. Their arrowheads
and hatchets are in every little museum. Their mounds, sometimes shaped
like serpents or tortoises or lizards, are scattered over all the
central States, and many of them have been carefully explored with
scanty results. The cliff-dwellers have left somewhat richer remains,
more baskets and parched corn, yet nothing of artistic value. We have to
go to Mexico and Yucatan and further south to Peru, to find the
majestic capitals of the Mayas and Incas, who had really reached a fair
degree of such civilization as stone and copper, without iron, and the
beginnings of picture symbols, without letters, could provide. Humboldt
and Stephens, and Lord Kingsborough, and Squier, and Tchudi, and Charnay
have made explorations and found vast and wonderful cities, some of them
deserted and overgrown before Cortez and Pizarro took possession of the
lands for Spain and enslaved the people. Where the city of Mexico now
stands was a famous capital, from whose ruins were taken the great
Calendar stone and the double statue of the god of war and the god of
death. In Palenque and Uxmal, capitals of Yucatan, were immense palaces
and temples, with the weird ornamentation of Mayan imagination; and
equal wonders exist in the high uplands where the Incas ruled Peru. Even
their barbaric art and their unrecorded history must be recovered, to
satisfy the curiosity of the more fortunate races whose boasted
Christianity visited on them nothing better than cruel slaughter. At
least we can give them museums and publish magnificent pictures of
their ruins.

So we may bless the ashes and sand that seemed to destroy and bury the
monuments of the mighty empires of the ancient world, but which have
kindly covered and preserved them, just as we put our treasures away in
some safety-vault while absent on a long journey. The fire burned the
upper wooden walls of the city, and it fell in ruins, but under those
ruins, covered by that ashes, were preserved for two thousand, three
thousand, five thousand years uninjured, the choicest sculpture and the
most precious records of ancient nations,--retained beyond the reach of
vandal hands, until scholarship had grown wise enough to ask questions
of forgotten history, and had sent Layard and Schliemann and De Sarzec
and Evans and a hundred other men to