We must await, then, the intelligent exploration of Central America, before any certain conclusion can be arrived at relative to the story of the New World’s unknown past. On the sculptured tablets of Palenque, Quiriqua, Chichenitza, and Uxmal, and on the colossal statues at Copan and other ancient sites, are numerous inscriptions awaiting the decipherment of the future Young or Champolion of American palæography. The whole region was once in occupation by a lettered race, having the same written characters and a common civilisation. If they owed to some apostle from the Mediterranean the grand invention of letters, which, as Bacon says, “as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations and inventions, the one of the other:” then, we may confidently anticipate the recovery of some graphic memorial of the messenger, confirming the oft-recurring traditions of bearded white men who came from beyond the sea, introduced the arts of civilisation, and were reverenced as divine benefactors. It cannot be that Egyptian, Assyrian, Hittite, Phœnician, and other most ancient races, are still perpetuated by so many traces of their wanderings in the Old World; that the Northmen’s graphic runes have placed beyond all question their pre-Columbian explorations; and yet that not a single trace of Mediterranean wanderers to the lost Atlantis survives. In Humboldt’s _Researches_, a fragment of a reputed Phœnician inscription is engraved. It was copied by Ranson Bueno, a Franciscan monk, from a block of granite which he discovered in a cavern in the mountain chain, between the Orinoco and the Amazon. Humboldt recognised in it some resemblance to the Phœnician alphabet. We must remember, however, what rudely traced Phœnician characters are; and as to their transcriber, it may be presumed that he had no knowledge of Phœnician. Humboldt says of him: “The good monk seemed to be but little interested about this pretended inscription,” though, he adds, he had copied it very carefully. * * * * *