Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 20, August 1877Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 20, August 1877
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
conditions and with like internal conceptions, advancing on the same line
from barbarism to culture; they show a struggle and rivalry of races and
tribes, in which one or another shoots forward for a time, and is then
outstripped or pushed aside; they show a gradual sifting, blending and
consolidation, in which primitive and fortuitous forms of association are
superseded by a system presenting the symmetry and composite character of
an artificial structure. Everywhere the process is marked by the final
predominance of two principles, which stimulate, direct and regulate all
the efforts that are made toward artistic expression, industrial science
and social organization. For the human mind at this stage all conceptions
of Nature may be comprised under the name of religion, and all ideas of
order and co-operation under that of monarchical rule. The monuments of
this period that have sprung from the united labor of the community all
attest the control and supervision of one or both of these powers. Not
only do temples and palaces bear this stamp, but all public works of
whatever nature testify, by the gigantic results in comparison with the
deficient means, to such an authority in those who planned them and such a
subordination in those by whom they were executed as cannot be conceived
of either under the looser organizations of barbarism or the more
equitable arrangements of modern life. The cyclopean walls, the imposing
edifices, the subterranean aqueducts, the mountain terraces, of Peru tell
the same tale as pyramids and temples, towers and palaces, in Egypt,
Assyria or India. The critic who can find in the ruins at Gran Chimu and
Pachacamac only "communal houses" inhabited by "groups of families" on the
method of the Iroquois, in the vast isolated structures of Tiahuanuco the
remains of "an Indian pueblo after the ordinary form," and in the enormous
and elaborate fortifications of Cuzco and Ollantay-tambo the works of
village communities and petty tribes, is not only bent on the support of a
theory at whatever cost of truth and sense, but predetermined, one would
say, to hold it as a monopoly. Compared with absurdities of this order,
the wildest imaginings of M. Brasseur de Bourbourg are entitled to be
ranked with the conjectures of a sane philosophy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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