Before, however, this conclusion can be accepted, it is indispensable that we test, by existing evidence, the descriptions of Mexican art and architecture handed down to us by chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A peculiar style is recognised as pertaining to the native architecture of America, which it has been the favourite fancy of American antiquaries to trace to an Egyptian or Phœnician source. Alike in general character and mode of construction, in the style of sculpture, and the hieroglyphic decorations which enrich their walls: the ruined palaces and temples of Mexico, as well as of Yucatan and Central America, have been supposed to reproduce striking characteristics of the Nile valley. But the experienced eye of Stephens saw only elements of contrast instead of comparison; and while Prescott sums up his history of Mexican conquest with this conclusion, “that the coincidences are sufficiently strong to authorise a belief that the civilisation of Anahuac was, in some degree, influenced by that of eastern Asia,” he adds, that the discrepancies are such as to carry back the communication to a period so remote as to leave its civilisation, in all its essential features, peculiar and indigenous. It is not always easy to determine the characteristics of some of the most famous monuments of Mexican art. The ruined city of Aztalan, on the western prairies: after filling the imagination with glowing fancies of a Baalbek or Palmyra of the New World, from whence the Aztecs had transplanted the arts of an obliterated civilisation to the Mexican plateau, shrunk before the gaze of a truthful surveyor into a mere group of mounds and earthworks, presenting no other analogies than those which class them with the works of the American Mound-Builders. It may be, however, that a critical survey will reveal traits in the later Aztecs of Anahuac, rendering such an ancestral birth-land not wholly inconsistent with their actual condition when brought into contact with the civilisation of Europe. Such at least seems to be the tendency of modern disclosures; if, indeed, they do not point to the possibility that much even of the latest phase of Mexican civilisation may present closer analogies to the actual Aztalan of the Wisconsin prairies than to the fancied mother-city of the Aztecs.