first lands peopled by the Conquistadores, have retrograted into barbarism.* (* In carefully collating the testimonies of the historians of the Conquest, some contradictions are observed in the periods assigned to the foundation of the towns of Darien. Pedro de Cieca, who had been on the spot, affirms that, under the government of Alonzo de Ojeda and Nicuessa, the town of Nuestra Senora Santa Maria el Antigua del Darien was founded on the western coast of the Gulf or Culata de Uraba, in 1509; and that later (despues desto passado) Ojeda passed to the eastern coast of the Culata to construct the town of San Sebastian de Uraba. The former, called by abbreviation Ciudad del Antigua, had soon a population of 2000 Spaniards; while the latter, the Ciudad del Uraba, remained uninhabited, because Francisco Pizarro, since known as the conqueror of Peru, was forced to abandon it, having vainly demanded succour from St. Domingo. The historian Herrera, after having said that the foundation of Antigua had preceded by one year that of Uraba or San Sebastian, affirms the contrary in the following chapter and in the Chronicle itself. It was, according to the Chronicle, in 1501 that Ojeda, accompanied by Vespucci, and penetrating for the first time the Gulf of Uraba or Darien, resolved to construct, with wood and unbaked bricks, a fort at the entrance of Culata. It appears, however, that this enterprise was not executed; for, in 1508, in the convention made by Ojeda and Nicuessa, they each promised to build two fortresses on the limits of New Andalusia and of Castillo del Oro. Herrera, in the 7th and 8th books of the first Decade, fixes the foundation of San Sebastian de Uraba at the beginning of 1510, and mentions it as the most ancient town of the continent of America, after that of Ceragua, founded by Columbus in 1503, on the Rio Belen. He relates how Francisco Pizarro abandoned that town, and how the foundation of the Ciudad del Antigua by Entiso, towards the end of the year 1510, was the consequence of that event. Leo X made Antigua a bishopric in 1514; and this was the first episcopal church of the continent. In 1519 Pedrarius Davila persuaded the court of Madrid, by false reports, that the site of the new town of Panama was more healthful than that of Antigua, the inhabitants were compelled to abandon the latter town, and the bishopric was transferred to Panama. The Gulf of Uraba was deserted during thirteen years, till the founder of the town of Carthagena, Pedro de Heredia, after having dug up the graves, or huacas, of the Rio Sinu, to collect gold, sent his brother Alonzo, in 1532, to repeople Uraba, and reconstruct on that spot a town under the name of San Sebastian de Buenavista.) Other countries, discovered later, attract the attention of the colonists: such is the natural progress of things in peopling a vast continent. It may be hoped that on several points the people will return to the places that were first chosen. It is difficult to