In America, the use of wells as a means of water supply is of great antiquity, dating back to pre-historic races. In the United States, along the valley of the Mississippi, artificially walled wells have been found that are believed to have been built by a race of people who preceded the Indians. Primitive tribes that lived in the hills sometimes had their ingenuity taxed to provide a water supply. In the hills or mountains of Yucatan, at Santa Ana, in the Sierra de Yucatan, there exists a well of great antiquity that shows the difficulty under which the aborigines labored in their search for water. The well is located on the Rancho Chack. It is not known whether this well was constructed by hand labor or is one of the numerous caverns in the rock, fashioned by the boundless forces of nature, and with which the hills abound. Water is reached after descending by ladder a distance of over 100 feet and traversing a passage 2,700 feet long or about half a mile in length. The rocky sides of the tunnel are worn smooth by the friction of clothes or bodies brushing against the surface, and the roof of the tunnel is black from soot and smoke from countless torches that have lighted water bearers to the spot where a pool of clear, lukewarm water bars the passage. How many centuries this little subterranean pool has supplied water to the natives of this region there is no means of ascertaining. The well is used at the present time, and perhaps when Carthage was a village, Rome a wilderness, and Christianity unthought of, this little pool of water hidden in the bowels of the earth and accessible only after traversing a dark, slippery, perilous passage, was to the Indians of that locality what the old oaken bucket was to the New England villagers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [Illustration] [Illustration: ANCIENT ROMAN FOVNTAIN AT CORINTH GREEK PEASANTS WASHING CLOTHES From Stereograph, copyright 1908 by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y. (See page iv)] [Illustration: CHAPTER II] SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER. Cisterns—Early Mention of Cisterns—Cisterns of Carthage—Early Methods of Raising Water—Water Carriers—Pool of Siloam—Pool of Solomon—Aqueducts—Carthagenian Aqueduct—Aqueducts of Rome—Aqueducts of Segovia, Spain—Trophies of Marius.