traveller. "I assure you, whether you believe it or no, that the most famous monuments ancient or modern which we can boast of are mere sheds compared with what I have seen: our palaces, our basilicas, the Vatican, Colosseum, and the like, are just dog-kennels to it, and nothing more!" {137} If we had never heard of the Indian cities of Central America which the tribes are supposed to have deserted six or seven hundred years ago, when warned by their priests of the coming of the Spaniards, we might feel disposed to reject M. Perrin's account as no less fabulous than the travels of Baron Munchausen. But when we follow the steps of Captain Del Rio and Captain Du Paix, and still more those of Mr. Stephens in Chiapas and Yucatan; when we see them working their way through dense forests in Honduras with fire and axe, and arriving at a wall six hundred feet long and from sixty to ninety in height, forming one side of an oblong enclosure called the Temple, while the other three sides are formed by a succession of pyramids and terraced walls that measure from thirty to a hundred and forty feet in height, we are not easily repelled by any report of ancient cities merely because the measurements in it run very high. There was a phase in the history of civilization when half barbarous races who knew not the use of iron, delighted in constructing lasting monuments, and made up for beauty of detail by huge proportions, and for writing and hieroglyphics by picture-painting. M. Perrin may be guilty of great exaggeration, but we ought not to charge him with it too hastily. Modern research has more than verified all that the Spaniards vaguely reported of the cities of the West, where immense artificial mounds are crowned with stately palaces, and the dauntless industry of former races is proved by the provision they made for water supply in a dry and thirsty land--by the vast reservoirs for water which have been excavated, and are found to be paved and lined with stone--by the pits around the ponds intended to furnish supplies or water when the upper basin was empty in the height of summer--by the wells hidden deep in the rock, and reached by the patient water-carriers by pathways cut in the mountain to a depth or 450 feet, and conducting them to that depth by windings 1400 feet in length--by the long ladders, made of rough rounds of wood and bound together with osiers, up which the Indians carried, and still carry, on their backs from these deep sources the water requisite for the consumption of 7,000 persons or more, according to the size of the villages, during four months of the year--and by the subterranean chambers, which the Indians of old probably used as granaries for maize, and which were made, like the ingenious cisterns just spoken of, by slaves obedient to more intelligent masters. These and similar discoveries in America add a color of probability to the description M. Perrin has given of Ancor-Viat in Asia.