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

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.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE INTELLECTUAL INSTINCT: LETTERS.

IN comparing the very diverse characters of Mexican and Peruvian civilisation, we are equally struck with the parallels and the contrasts which they illustrate in the progress of man from primeval darkness to intellectual life and light. But in one respect the civilisation of the southern continent, as illustrated by its quipus-with all the help of amautas, or chroniclers of history, annalists, and quipucamayus, or accountants and registrars, -must be regarded as immeasurably inferior to that hieroglyphic system which tantalizes the student of American antiquities by its suggestive mysteries, amid the sculptured ruins of the older civilisation of the north. Compared even to the picture-writing of the Aztecs, the Peruvian system of mnemonics exhibits a method of preserving and communicating information singularly devoid of the intellectual characteristics which pertain to every other device of civilisation for a nation's chronicles. It was essentially arbitrary; dependent entirely on the memory of those who employed and transmitted the ideas and images, which of itself it was incapable of embodying; and, above all, it had within itself no germ of higher development, like the picturewriting or sculpturing of the Egyptians, out of which grew, by natural progression, first ideography, and then the symbols of the phonetic analysis of speech: the rudi

ments of all higher knowledge, and the indispensable elements of intellectual progress.

It is consistent with the very nature of a highly developed written language that the origin of its first germs of uttered expression should be lost among the vague shadows of primeval history, or preserved in mythic embodiment in an ideal Thoth, Cadmus, or Mercury. The discovery of letters approaches, indeed, so near to the divine gift of speech that Plutarch tells us in his De Iside et Osiride, when Thoth, the god of letters, first appeared on the earth, the inhabitants of Egypt had no language, but only uttered the cries of animals. They had, at least, no language with which to speak to other generations; and hence Bacon, passing in his reasoning beyond "that wherein man excelleth beasts" to that immortality whereunto man's nature doth aspire, exclaims:-" If the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits: how much more are letters to be magnified, which 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?" But it is not altogether to be ascribed to the forgetfulness by later generations of the benefactor to whom so great a gift as letters was due, that the origin of writing is obscurely symbolized in mythic characters. The Egyptian Thoth was in reality no deified mortal, but the embodiment of an intellectual triumph slowly achieved by the combined labours of many generations, and the successive steps in the progress of which can still be discerned. The origin of the hieroglyphics of Egypt is clearly traceable to the simplest and rudest form of picture-writing, the literal figuring of the objects de

1

1 Advancement of Learning.