Elsewhere in this work some account is given of the comprehensive treatment of American antiquities. It is the purpose of this note to characterize such other descriptions as have been specially confined to the antiquities of Mexico, Central America, and adjacent parts; together with noting occasionally those more comprehensive works which have sections on these regions. The earliest and most distinguished of all such treatises are the writings of Alexander von Humboldt,[998] to whom may be ascribed the paternity of what the French define as the Science of Americanism, which, however, took more definite shape and invited discipleship when the Société Américaine de France was formed, and Aubin in his _Mémoire sur la peinture didactique et l’écriture figurative des Anciens Méxicains_ furnished a standard of scholarship. How new this science was may be deduced from the fact that Robertson, the most distinguished authority on early American history, who wrote in English, in the last part of the preceding century, had ventured to say that in all New Spain there was not “a single monument or vestige of any building more ancient than the Conquest.” After Humboldt, the most famous of what may be called the pioneers of this art were Kingsborough, Dupaix, and Waldeck, whose publications are sufficiently described elsewhere. The most startling developments came from the expeditions of Stephens and Catherwood, the former mingling both in his _Central America_ and _Yucatan_ the charms of a personal narrative with his archæological studies, while the draughtsman, beside furnishing the sketches for Stephens’s book, embodied his drawings on a larger scale in the publication which passes under his own name.[999] The explorations of Charnay are those which have excited the most interest of late years, though equally significant results have been produced by such special explorers as Squier in Nicaragua, Le Plongeon in Yucatan, and Bandelier in Mexico. The labors of the French archæologist, which began in 1858, resulted in the work _Cités et ruines Américaines: Mitla, Palenqué, Izamal, Chichen-Itza, Uxmal, recueillies et photographiées par Désiré Charnay, avec un Texte par M. Viollet le Duc_. (Paris, 1863.) Charnay contributed to this joint publication, beside the photographs, a paper called “Le Méxique, 1858-61,—souvenirs et impressions de Voyage.” The Architect Viollet le Duc gives us in the same book an essay by an active, well-equipped, and ingenious mind, but his speculations about the origin of this Southern civilization and its remains are rather curious than convincing.[1000] [Illustration: THE PYRAMID OF CHOLULA. After a drawing in Cumplido’s Spanish translation of Prescott’s _Mexico_, vol. iii. (Mexico, 1846.)]