tually living in and occupying those very cities on whose great ruins we now gaze with wonder. A penknife-one of the petty presents distributed by the Spaniards-reached the hands of a cacique, who, far removed from the capital, died in his native town, and was buried with the rites and ceremonies transmitted by his fathers."

The social state, and the peculiar arts of the natives of the New World, furnish very remarkable illustrations of that peculiar transition state through which many nations have passed, in which the people have attained to considerable progress in useful and ornamental arts, while they have obtained only a partial command of those materials which are indispensable to complete civilization and the perfect development of the social arts. The accounts of the Spanish conquerors describe the Indians as opposing them with wooden swords, and the like imperfect and primitive weapons of war. Among them, therefore, the spear and arrow-heads of flint and obsidian are likely to have been in use; but such instruments would be utterly inefficient as tools for sculpturing the temples and palaces of Mexico or Yucatan; and we are therefore tempted either to regard the latter as the works of an older and superior race, or to question the inference which derives from the discovery of the knife, evidence of the tumulus being contemporaneous with the era of the Spanish invasion. But a more intimate familiarity with the arts of races in a similar state, suffices to dispel much of the uncertainty involved in this discovery. With all the skill of the Indian sculptors and temple builders, they were still in the very transition state in which is found those remarkable discrepancies; vast temples and palaces, decorated with lavish and costly treasures, the evidences of barbarous magnificence, and yet the great body of the people destitute of all but the coarse necessaries of a very rude state of society.

The exploration of some of the most remarkable native

sepulchres by the Spanish conquerors is thus described:"The ashes of the kings and lords were, for the most part, deposited in the towers of the temples, especially in those of the greater temple. Close to Teotihuacan, where there were many temples, there were also innumerable sepulchres. The tombs of those whose bodies had been buried entire, agreeably to the testimony of the anonymous conqueror who saw them, were deep ditches, formed with stone and lime, within which they placed the bodies in a sitting posture upon icpalli, or low seats, together with the instruments of their art or profession. If it was the sepulchre of any military person, they laid a shield and sword by him; if of a woman, a spindle, a weaver's shuttle, and a xicalli, which was a certain naturally formed vessel for holding food for the use of the deceased. In the tombs of the rich they put gold and jewels, but all were provided with eatables for the long journey which they had to make. The Spanish conquerors, knowing of the gold which was buried with the Mexican lords in their tombs, dug up several, and found considerable quantities of that precious metal. Cortez says, in his letters, that at one entry which he made into the capital, when it was besieged by his army, his soldiers found fifteen hundred castellanos, that is, two hundred and forty ounces of gold, in one sepulchre, which was in the tower of a temple."

Gold was the great object of every adventurer. Merchants, nobles, soldiers, and priests, all sought the newly discovered regions intent on no other end than the acquirement of the coveted metal, by whatever means it could be procured. The recent discovery of a new gold region at California, on the North American coast of the Pacific Ocean, has sufficed to develop anew the eager thirst of those who hasten to be rich, not by patient industry, but by chance or crime. The impetuous rush of thousands from our own country, and of hundreds of thousands from the United States of America, furnishes no un

meet illustration of the state of things in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries among the Spaniards who sought their fortune in the New World. But there they found the remarkable elements of arts and civilization, and of an abundant population; all of which unhappily only sufficed to furnish fresh incentives to crime. The superstition and barbarous idolatry of the Indians was a convenient pretext for every species of cruelty and extortion by the more barbarous emissaries of the Spanish Inquisition. For others the law of the sword sufficed to sanction every act of robbery and bloodshed. In the new regions of California, ruins of ancient cities are said to exist, indicating a civilization no less remarkable than that of Montezuma's kingdom. But they are deserted and in ruins, so that the gold-seekers of the nineteenth century are happily spared the temptation of staining the history of our age with the repetition of such wrongs as were perpetrated by the first Spanish colonists of America.

Of the equally barbarous destruction of works of art, as of relics of superstition, abundant evidence remains. The history of ancient Mexico has now to be gathered anew from the records of the ruins perpetrated by Spanish vio lence and crime. "The Mexican empire abounded with all kinds of paintings; for their painters were innumerable, and there was hardly any thing left unpainted. If those had been preserved, there would have been nothing wanting to the history of Mexico; but the first preachers of the gospel, suspicious that superstition was mixed with all their paintings, made a furious destruction of them. Of all those which were to be found in Tezcuco, where the chief school of painting was, they collected such a mass, in the square of the market, it appeared like a little mountain; to this they set fire, and buried in the ashes the memory of many most interesting and curious events. The loss of those monuments of antiquity was inexpressibly afflicting to the Indians, and regretted sufficiently

afterwards by the authors of it, when they became sensible of their error; for they were compelled to endeavour to remedy the evil, in the first place, by obtaining information from the mouths of the Indians; secondly, by collecting all the paintings which had escaped their fury, to illustrate the history of the nation; but although they recovered many, these were not sufficient; for, from that time forward, the possessors of paintings became so jealous of their preservation and concealment from the Spaniards, it has proved difficult, if not impossible, to make them part with one of them.

"The cloth on which they painted was made of the thread of the maguey, or aloe, or the palm icxotl, dressed skins, or paper. They made paper of the leaves of a certain species of aloe, steeped together like hemp, and afterwards washed, stretched, and smoothed. They made also of the palm icxotl, and the thin barks of other trees, when united and prepared with a certain gum, both silk and cotton; but we are unable to explain any particulars of this manufacture. In this respect we have also to lament the furious zeal of the first bishop of Mexico, and the first Spanish preachers, who, in order to remove from the sight of their converts all incentives to idolatry, have deprived us of many valuable monuments of the sculpture of the Mexicans. The foundation of the first church which was built in Mexico was laid with idols, and so many thousand statues were then broken in pieces and destroyed, that, although the kingdom was most abounding in works of that kind, at present the most diligent search can hardly find any of them remaining. The conduct of those missionaries," adds the historian, was no doubt laudable, but they should have distinguished between. the innocent statues of those people and their superstitious images; that some of the former might have been kept entire in some place where no evil consequence would have attended their preservation."

Some few of these Mexican idols, however, still remain, notwithstanding the iconoclastic zeal of the Spanish missionaries, and are certainly not calculated to convey a very exalted idea of the refinement or spirituality of their worshippers. Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing brought to our knowledge by the observations of Mr. Bullock, during his sojourn in Mexico in 1823, was the fact, that centuries of degradation and oppression have not totally eradicated the native traditions relative to the remarkable people from whom they are descended. The following account by this traveller, will show how singular has been the hold of tradition on the memory of those descendents of the subjects of Montezuma :-" "The sacrificial stone, or altar, is buried in the square of the cathedral, within a hundred yards of the Calendar stone. The upper surface only is exposed to view, which seems to have been done designedly, to impress upon the populace an abhorrence of the horrible and sanguinary rites that had once been performed on this very altar. It is said by writers that thirty thousand human victims were sacrificed at the coronation of Montezuma. Kirwan, in the preface to his Metaphysics, states the annual number of human victims immolated in Mexico to be two thousand five hundred. I have seen the Indians themselves, as they pass, throw stones at it; and I once saw a boy jump upon it, clench his fist, stamp with his foot, and use other gesticulations of the greatest abhorrence. As I had been informed that the sides were covered with historical sculpture, I applied to the clergy for the further permission of having the earth removed from around it, which they not only granted, but, moreover, had it performed at their own expense. I took casts of the whole. It is twenty-five feet in circumference, and consists of fifteen various groups of figures, representing the conquests of the warriors of Mexico over different cities, the names of which are written over them. More information is to