Besides, the want of traditionary knowledge is not peculiar to these American ruins. Two thousand years ago the Pyramids towered on the borders of the African Desert without any certain tradition of the time when they were founded; and so long back as the first century of the Christian era, Pliny cites various older authors who disagreed concerning the persons who built them, and even concerning the use and object for which they were erected. No traditions hang round the ruins of Greece and Rome; the temples of Paestum, lost until within the last half century, have no traditions to identify their builders; the "holy city" has only weak inventions of modern monks. But for written records, Egyptian, Grecian, and Roman remains would be as mysterious as the ruins of America; and to come down to later times and countries comparatively familiar, tradition sheds no light upon the round towers of Ireland, and the ruins of Stonehenge stand on Salisbury plain without a tradition to carry us back to the age or nation of their builders. The second argument I shall notice is, that a people possessing the power, art, and skill to erect such cities, never could have fallen so low as the miserable Indians who now linger about their ruins. To this, too, it might be sufficient to answer that their present condition is the natural and inevitable consequence of the same ruthless policy which laid the axe at the root of all ancient recollections, and cut off forever all traditionary knowledge. But waiving this ground, the pages of written history are burdened with changes in national character quite equal to that here exhibited. And again, leaving entirely out of the question all the analogous examples which might be drawn from those pages, we have close at hand, and under our very eyes, an illustration in point. The Indians who inhabit that country now are not more changed than their Spanish masters. Whether debased, and but little above the grade of brutes, as it was the policy of the Spaniards to represent them, or not, we know that at the time of the conquest they were at least proud, fierce, and warlike, and poured out their blood like water to save their inheritance from the grasp of strangers. Crushed, humbled, and bowed down as they are now by generations of bitter servitude, even yet they are not more changed than the descendants of those terrible Spaniards who invaded and conquered their country. In both, all traces of the daring and warlike character of their ancestors are entirely gone. The change is radical, in feelings and instincts, inborn and transmitted, in a measure, with the blood; and in contemplating this change in the Indian, the loss of mere mechanical skill and art seems comparatively nothing; in fact, these perish of themselves, when, as in the case of the Indians, the school for their exercise is entirely broken up. Degraded as the Indians are now, they are not lower in the scale of intellect than the serfs of