Here is a rectangular area, three hundred yards in breadth by four hundred and fifty in length, which is a fraction over fifty-six rods wide, and eighty-four rods long, being, in the whole circuit, two hundred and eighty rods, which is three-fourths of a mile, and a trifle over. This area presents a plain at the base of the highest mountain forming the ridge. In the centre of this plain is situated the largest of the structures which has been as yet discovered among these ruins. It stands on a mound or pyramid twenty yards high, which is sixty feet, or nearly four rods in perpendicular altitude, which gives it a lofty and beautiful majesty, as if it were a temple suspended in the sky. This is surrounded by other edifices, namely, five to the northward, four to the southward, one to the southwest, and three to the eastward—fourteen in all. In all directions the fragments of other fallen buildings are seen extending along the mountain that stretches east and west either way from these buildings, as if they were the great temple of worship, or their government house, around which they built their city, and where dwelt their kings and officers of state. At this place was found a subterranean stone aqueduct, of great solidity and durability, which in its course passes beneath the largest building. Let it be understood, this city of Otolum, the ruins of which are so immense, is in North, not South America, in the same latitude with the island of Jamaica, which is about eighteen degrees north of the equator, being on the highest ground between the northern end of the Caribbean sea and the Pacific ocean, where the continent narrows towards the isthmus of Darien, and is about eight hundred miles south of New Orleans. The discovery of these ruins, and also of many others, equally wonderful, in the same country, is just commencing to arouse the attention of the schools of Europe, who hitherto have denied that America could boast of her antiquities. But these immense ruins are now being explored under the direction of scientific persons, a history of which, in detail, will be forthcoming doubtless, in due time; two volumes of which, in manuscript, we are informed, have already been written, and cannot but be received with enthusiasm by Americans. By those deeply versed in the antiquities of past ages, it is contended that the first people who settled America came directly from Chaldea, immediately after the confusion of language at Babel.—(_See Description of the Ruins of the American City, published in London_, 1832, p. 33, _by Dr. Paul Felix Cabrera_.) Whoever the authors of the city may have been, we seem to find, in their sculptured deities, the idolatry of even the Phœnicians, a people whose history goes back nearly to the flood, or to within a hundred and fifty years of that period.