Nothing marks more strikingly the vast advance which these people had made from the condition of their savage neighbors than their evident efforts not only for household comfort, but even for the beautifying of their homes. I have referred to the rush-carpeted floor of the "House of the Sixteen Windows" and the decorated walls of the two-story house on the Mancos; but they, like other semicivilized peoples, found the first expression for their love of the beautiful in the ceramic art. The variety of graceful forms and decorations found in their pottery is endless. In some regions the country for miles is strewn with the fragments of their earthenware. The ware is usually pale gray shading to white: the decoration is in black or red, often in the angular designs commonly called "Greek patterns." The Moquis of our time produce a handsome ware closely resembling that of the ancient people. But the old cliff-painters and the modern potters often sacrificed beauty to a passion for producing the most wildly-grotesque forms. There is a certain general resemblance, which often strikes me forcibly, but which is almost indefinable, between the ceramic and sculptured forms of the Mississippi Mound-builders, the Pueblo tribes and the ancient Mexicans. The resemblance seems to lie partly in a certain capacity which those peoples possessed in common of producing the most frightfully-grotesque forms ever evolved by the human imagination--forms plainly intended to suggest living beings, yet not at all transgressing the injunction against "anything that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters under the earth." The resemblance seems to me very significant. At the time of the Spanish conquest the Pueblo tribes were worshippers of the sun and fire, like all the races of this continent which were above barbarism. To-day, even in those pueblos where a corrupted form of the Roman faith is accepted, there are traces of the old sun-worship mingled with it, and in all pueblos there are large circular rooms called estufas reserved for councils and for worship. The invariable appearance of estufas among the ruined towns, and even on the ledges of the cliffs, shows what sacredness was attached to the circular room, which perhaps was symbolic of the sun's orb: it indicates a unity of religious faith between the ancients and moderns. The priest who chronicled the events of the first expedition to New Mexico was impressed with the great ruined towns which they saw even before crossing the desert of Arizona. There is good reason to believe that the cliff-dwellings, the last retreats of a persecuted people, were abandoned before that time. But how could a people so numerous, intelligent and civilized fall a prey to stupid, roving savages? The wild tribes never could have won the fight against their more quick-witted neighbors if the ancients had not begun their own destruction.