This path led us to the hacienda of San Francisco, the property of a gentleman of the village, who had reared the walls of a large building, but had never finished it. There were fine shade trees, and the appearance of the place was rural and picturesque, but it was unhealthy. The deep green foliage was impregnated with the seeds of death. The proprietor never visited it except in the daytime, and the Indians who worked on the milpas returned to the village at night. A short distance in the rear of the hacienda were the ruins of another city, desolate and overgrown, having no name except that of the hacienda on which they stand. At this time a great part of the city was completely hidden by the thick foliage of the trees. Near by, however, several mounds were in full sight, dilapidated, and having fragments of walls on the top. We ascended the highest, which commanded a magnificent view of the great wooded plain, and at a distance the towers of the church of Ticul rising darkly above. The cura told me that in the dry season, when the trees were bare of foliage, he had counted from this point thirty-six mounds, every one of which had once held aloft a building or temple, and not one now remained entire. In the great waste of ruins it was impossible to form any idea of what the place had been, except from its vastness and the specimens of sculptured stone seen in the village, but beyond doubt it was of the same character as Uxmal, and erected by the same people. Its vicinity to the village had made its destruction more complete. For generations it had served as a mere quarry to furnish the inhabitants with building-stone. The present proprietor was then excavating and selling, and he lamented to me that the piedra labrada, or worked stone, was nearly exhausted, and his profit from this source cut off. A few words toward identifying these ruins. The plan for reducing Yucatan was to send a small number of Spaniards, who were called _vecinos_ (the name still used to designate the white population), into the Indian towns and villages where it was thought advisable to make settlements. We have clear and authentic accounts of the existence of a large Indian town called Ticul, certainly in the same neighbourhood where the Spanish village of that name now stands. It must have been either on the site now occupied by the latter, or on that occupied by the ruins of San Francisco. Supposing the first supposition to be correct, not a single vestige of the Indian city remains. Now it is incontestible that the Spaniards found in the Indian towns of Yucatan, mounds, temples, and other large buildings of stone. If those on the hacienda of San Francisco are of older date, and the work of races who have passed away, as vast remains of them still exist, though subject to the same destroying causes, why has every trace of the stone buildings in the Indian city disappeared?