The one exception to this satisfactory state of things is our knowledge, or rather want of knowledge, regarding the history of the ancient architecture of the New World, treated of in the last few pages of this work. No important addition has lately been made to the little we knew before, and it is now to be feared that Mr. Squier’s long-expected work on the Antiquities of Peru may never see the light, at least not under the auspices of its author, and the Count de Waldeck’s work adds very little, if anything, to what we knew before. What is really wanted is that some one should make himself personally acquainted with all the various styles existing between the upper waters of the Colorado and the desert of Atacama to such an extent as to be able to establish the relative sequence of their dates and to detect affinities where they exist, or to point out differences that escape the casual observer. Photography may in the next few years do something towards enabling stay-at-home travellers to do a good deal towards this, but photography will never do all, and local knowledge is indispensable for the exact determination of many now obscure questions. The problem is in fact identical with that presented to Indian antiquaries some thirty years ago. At that time we knew less of the history of Indian architecture than we now know of American, but at the present day the date of every building and every cave in India can be determined with almost absolute certainty to within fifty, or at the outside one hundred, years; the sequence is everywhere certain, and all can be referred to the race and religion that practised that peculiar style. In America there are the same strongly marked local peculiarities of style as in India, accompanied by equally easily detected affinities or differences, and what has been done for India could, I am convinced, easily be accomplished for America, and with even more satisfactory and more important results to the history and ethnography of that great country. The subject is well worthy of the attention of any one who may undertake it, as it is the only means we now know of by which the ancient history of the country can be recovered from the darkness that now enshrouds it and the connexion of the Old world with the New—if any existed—can be traced, but it is practically the only chapter in the history of architecture which remains to be written.