Venice, the once proud Queen of the Adriatic, the whilom mart of Europe, with her lofty campanile, her beautiful temples, and her marble palaces, rising vision-like from her watery bed, was in origin but a cluster of fisher huts perched on piles in the shallow lagoons at the mouth of the Po, a site selected by these toilers of the sea for security and refuge from the ravages of the Huns under Attila. In the commencement of the sixteenth century, when the Spaniards marched on Mexico, “they saw, as they passed along, several large towns resting on piles, and reaching far into the water, a kind of architecture which found great favour with the Aztecs.” These first founders of what now is the city of Mexico, after enduring the casualties and hardships of a migratory life, at length resolved to erect a permanent abode; and to protect themselves from their surrounding enemies, laid the foundations of the future city “by sinking piles into the shallows, for the low marshes were half buried under water: on these they erected their light fabrics of reeds and rushes, and sought a precarious subsistence from fishing, and from the wild fowl which frequented the waters, as well as from the cultivation of such simple vegetables as they could raise on their floating gardens.”[24] The Spaniards who first visited the shores of Maracaibo, to the North of the South American Continent, found the natives living in huts on piles in the water. They named the locality Venezuela _i. e._ “Little Venice”: that name now embraces a forest tract as large as France, a mountain tract larger than Switzerland, and steppes like those of Mongolia. Vasco Nunez failed in an attack on a tribe in Dabaybe, who lived in huts stretching from tree trunk to tree trunk growing in a watery swamp. The city of Tchakash is built over the river Don, and it has been suggested that the huts raised on piles by the fishermen of the Bosphorus may represent there the last lingering traces of an ancient custom. Captain Hiram Cox, in his _Journal of a Residence in the Burmhan Empire_, written in the year 1796-7, describes the villages along the banks of the Rangoon river as “built of bamboo and cadjan, raised on piles in the manner of the Malays,” and throughout his diary he makes frequent allusion to this singular custom. Forrest says that in many parts of the coast of New Guinea the people live in huts placed on stages erected on posts, as a means of protection against the attacks of their enemies, the Haraforas, from the interior of the country. On these stages they haul up their proas or canoes. Similar structures have been described by travellers in the Celebes, the Caroline Islands, and elsewhere in Polynesia.