which supplies such valuable illustrations of the generations of an ancient and unknown past. One of those Peruvian drinking-vessels, of unusual beauty, from the Beckford Collection (Fig. 41), is placed by Mr. Marryat alongside of a beautiful Greek vessel of similar design, from the Museo Borbonico, Naples, without its greatly suffering by the comparison. In this Peruvian vessel, there is an individuality of character in the head at once suggestive of portraiture; and of the perfection to which the imitative arts had been carried by the ancient workmen, in the modelling perchance of some favourite inca, prince, or noble. A selection of portrait-vases is grouped together in Fig. 42, derived from various sources,

but all illustrating a diversity of physiognomy in which we look in vain for the familiar characteristics of the Indian countenance, with its high cheek-bones, its peculiar form of mouth, and strongly-marked salient nose. The group, ranging from left to right, includes a small Mexican vase of unglazed red ware, in the collection of the American Philosophical Society, at Philadelphia; an ancient portrait vase of the Quichuas of Bolivia, from D'Orbigny's L'Homme Américain; another of inferior workmanship, in the cabinet of the Historical Society of New York. This was brought from Berue, and re

vis the igas dëseriously and and the best er noctly a portrait, solemn, 2. In this as in

Lines moflly drawn by
Azema and Tan, we look

La prens vi seconding to the

y, soovid American ethnologists,

dent portraits,

was affirmed

But

by Morton to be disclosed by every open grave. by whatever race such ancient sculptures were wrought, they place certain truths of the past beyond doubt or cavil. "The sight of this unexpected monument put at rest at once and for ever, in our minds, all uncertainty in regard to the character of American antiquities; and gave us the assurance that the objects we were in search of were interesting, not only as the remains of an unknown people, but as works of art, proving, like newly discovered historical records, that the people who once occupied the continent of America were not savages. Searching amid the forest-glades, other sculptured statues lay broken or half-buried in the luxurious vegetation ; and "one standing, with its altar before it, in a grove of trees, which grew around seemingly to shade and shroud it as a sacred thing. In the solemn stillness of the woods, it seemed a divinity mourning over a fallen people. The only sounds that disturbed the quiet of this buried city, were the noise of monkeys moving among the tops of the trees, and the cracking of dry branches broken by their weight. They moved over our heads in long and swift processions, forty or fifty at a time, some with little ones wound in their long arms, walking out to the end of boughs; and, holding on with their hind-feet or a curl of the tail, sprang to a branch of the next tree, and, with a noise like a current of wind, passed on into the depths of the forest. It was the first time we had seen those mockeries of humanity, and, with the strange monuments around us, they seemed like wandering spirits of the departed race guarding the ruins of their former habitations."

Such is a slight glimpse of the teachings embodied in the ancient ceramic art of the New World. It reveals a very striking diversity among the art-products of differ

1 Stephens' Travels in Central America, vol. i. ch. v.

ent localities and widely-separated areas; discloses to us some of the customs, the personal characteristics, and even the intellectual attributes of long-extinct generations; and furnishes an important gauge of native American civilisation. We have known of Mexican and Peruvian arts chiefly from the glowing pages of Spanish chroniclers; and among these their pottery is frequently described as equal to the best of Spanish manufacture. But the finest examples of Spanish fictile ware of the date of the Conquest were of Moorish workmanship; and though the lost ceramic art of Europe first reappeared in Spain under its Mahometan conquerors, it may be that the conquistadors were chiefly familiar with the commoner pottery of an inferior quality: even if we acquit them of all exaggeration in their descriptions of Mexican or Peruvian manufactures. Whether among either people any approximation to the potter's wheel had been made is generally questioned. The more elaborate and complicated designs rather indeed illustrate the modeller's than the potter's dexterity and skill; and scarcely admitted of the useful application of the lathe or wheel. But their ingenious devices, and endless varieties of form, were well calculated to impress the conquerors with the evidence they afforded of native culture and inventive power, while the quality of the ware would appear of. secondary significance. In examining broken specimens of their pottery, it is seen that the more complicated designs were formed in pieces and wrought in moulds. In general it is imperfectly baked, and inferior in strength either to the ancient or modern pottery of Europe. A semi-barbarous element is also apparent in the frequent sacrifice of convenience and utility to grotesqueness of form, or ingenious trifling with the simplest

1 Relation Sig. de Cortez ap. Lorenzana, c. 58.

laws of acoustics. Such characteristics confirm the doubts already suggested by other evidence as to the literal accuracy of early Spanish writers in their glowing pictures of native industrial and ornate arts. Nevertheless, the contrast between the rude pottery made by the Mandans of the North-west, or turned up on the sites of northern Indian villages, and that which is found in the ancient sepulchres of Mexico, Central America, and Peru, truly illustrates the wide difference between the nomades of the northern forest and those nations which partook of the influences of a native-born civilisation under Aztec and Inca rule, notwithstanding the partial development of that civilisation, which Cortes and Pizarro rudely trod out under the heels of conquerors more barbarous than the barbarians they

dethroned.