It is true that the island of Cuba has never been really thoroughly explored; but enough has been done to show that there are no building "finds" likely there. Señor Andres Poey in a paper on "Cuban Antiquities," read before the American Ethnological Society in 1855, speaks of the great scarcity in the island of relics of stone. Only four statues, very rude representations of anthropoid ape-like animals, had been found. As monkeys were not known to have ever existed in Cuba, it would certainly seem as if these carvings had been brought over from Yucatan, with the Mayan inhabitants of which country it is certain that the Cuban Arawaks traded. The stone implements and earthenware vases found have also, for the most part, been attributed to the same source. Of stone buildings the Arawaks had none. "The villages consisted," says D. G. Brinton, writing in _The American Archæologist_ of October, 1898, "of ten to twelve communal houses, always perishable; none having been heard of as stone." If then the Mayans are akin to the Apalachians, there is no trace among their kindred of such elementary forms of building as would have certainly been found if the architecture which has made them so famous had been naturally developed. Thus we are bound to conclude that it was exotic; that they learnt it from some foreign visitors to their territory long after they had split off and migrated thither from the Apalachian centre. Who those foreign visitors were we will try to prove in the succeeding chapter. Here let us summarise the foregoing pages as follows:-- 1. The Toltec theory is myth, not history. 2. The Toltecs were never an historical nationality. 3. The word "Toltec" was a nickname given by the invading Aztecs to the race inhabiting Mexico on their arrival. 4. The Toltecs were Mayans, the ancestors, with their kinsmen further south, of those Mayan peoples to-day, as at the Spanish Conquest, inhabiting Central America from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Southern Mexico to the frontier of Nicaragua. 5. The Mayans are of the Apalachian stock, and had long been settled in Central America before the invasion of the Aztecs. 6. The architectural skill of the Mayans was not developed by them naturally, but was introduced from a foreign country some centuries before the Aztecs invaded their northernmost possessions. FOOTNOTES: [8] The value of the Tula tradition is best gauged by a comparison of the dates given by authorities. Thus Sahagun (_Historia de la Nueva España_) places its destruction in 319 B.C.; Ixtlilxochitl (_Historia Chichemeca_, iii. cap. 4) brings it down to 969 A.D.; the _Codex Ramirez_ gives it as 1168 A.D.; and so on. There is an equally amazing variation about the date of its founding.