The New York Tribune published part of my discourse before the Geographical Society of New York, on the “Vestiges of Antiquity,” in its Lecture Sheet No. 8 of 1873. After traversing the Peruvian Andes, the Glaciers of Bolivia, and the Deserts of the North and North-East part of the Mexican Republic, in search of the dwellings of their primitive inhabitants, I resolved to visit Yucatan, in order to examine at leisure the imposing ruins that cover its soil, and whose imperfect descriptions I had read in Stephens, Waldeck, Charnay, Brasseur de Bourbourg, and others. The atmospheric action, the inclemencies of the weather, and more than all, the exuberant vegetation, aided by the impious and destructive hand of ignorant iconoclasts, have destroyed and destroy incessantly these _opera magna_ of an enlightened and civilized generation that passed from the theatre of the world some twelve thousand years ago, if the stones, in their eloquent muteness, do not deceive. And unless the few treasures that yet remain, in a state of more or less perfect preservation, be gathered and saved, they will before long disappear completely, and with them the last traces of the high civilization, the artistic and scientific culture attained by the architects and other artists that worked and raised them, under the protection of enlightened potentates, lovers of all that was grand, and of everything that could glorify their country. The results of my investigations, although made in territories forbidden to the whites, and even to pacific Indians obedient to Mexican authority; surrounded by constant dangers, amid forests, where, besides the wild beasts, the fierce Indians of Chan-Santa-Cruz lay in ambush for me; suffering the pangs of hunger, in company with my young wife Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, have surpassed my most flattering hopes. To-day I can assert, without boasting, that the discoveries of my wife and myself place us in advance of the travellers and archæologists who have occupied themselves with American antiquities. Returning however to civilization with the hope of making known to the scientific world the fruit of our labors, I am sorry to find myself detained by prohibitive laws that I was ignorant of, and which prevent me from presenting the unmistakable proofs of the high civilization and the grandeur, of ancient America; of this old Continent of Professor Agassiz and other modern geologists and archæologists.