What is the antiquity of these ruined cities? The first tendency was to carry them back into some very remote period, far beyond the memory or knowledge of the Mexicans and Peruvians. This was the first impression of Mr Stephens; afterwards he was disposed to bring them nearer the epoch of the Spanish conquest. He had lent a credulous ear to the story of some good _padre_, who had assured him that a native Indian city, greater than Copan could have ever been, still existed in a flourishing and populous condition, in some district untrodden by the European traveller. And this faith, that a Copan still existed, naturally induced him to believe that the ruined Copan, not belonging to an extinct civilisation, might not be so old as he first presumed it to be. He seems to have thought it possible that some of these cities might have been inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest, and that others at that period were already a heap of ruins. War appears to have been incessant amongst almost all the tribes of the native Americans. On this account it appears to us very probable that many cities may have been built and destroyed, and a partial civilisation won and lost in them, prior to the epoch of the Spanish conquest. Such _oscillations_, very likely, occurred in the progress of American civilisation. And in some of these oscillatory movements a nearer approach might have been made to the art of writing than in that one phase of this civilisation in which the European discovered and destroyed it for ever. But our impression is, that, viewing the history of this continent as a whole, there has been a slow irregular progress, which had reached its highest point in the epoch of Montezuma and the Incas of Peru.