moreover, Iberian, Hittite, Egyptian, Phœnician, or other of the world’s gray fathers, transplanted to America the germs of its long indigenous stock, we look in vain for any traces of their Old World civilisation north of the Mexican Gulf. Nor is it by any means an established truth that the arts of Central America or Peru are of any very great antiquity. Their metallurgy was at a crude, yet suggestive, stage at which it was not likely to be long arrested. The same may be said of their hieroglyphic records; though they certainly present some highly significant analogies to the Chinese phase of word-writing, calculated, along with other aspects of resemblance to that stage of partial, yet long-enduring, civilisation of which China is the Asiatic exemplar, to modify our estimate of the possible duration of Central and Southern American civilisation. Nevertheless the assumption of an antiquity in any degree approximating to that of Egypt seems wholly irreconcilable with the evidence. Their architecture was barbaric, though imposing from the scale on which their great temples and palaces were built. In Central America especially, the aggregation of numerous ill-lighted little chambers, like honey-comb cells excavated out of the huge pile, is strongly suggestive of affinity to the Casas Grandes, and the Pueblos of the Zuñi; and this is confirmed by the correspondence traceable between many of their architectural details and the ornamentation of the Pueblo pottery. The astronomy and the calendars, both of Mexico and Peru, with their detailed methods of recording their divisions of time, are all suggestive of an immature phase of civilisation in the very stage of its emergence from barbarism, modified, in some cases, by the recent acquisition of certain arts. As to the peculiar phase of Mexican art, and whatever other evidence of progress Mexico supplies, they appear to me no more than natural products of the first successful intrusion of the barbarians of the northern continent on the seats of tropical civilisation. Certain it seems, at least, that if an earlier civilisation had ever existed in the north, or if the representatives of any Old World type were present there in numbers for any length of time, some traces of their lost arts must long since have come to light.