Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/582

546 talent now invading Asia and Africa. The Indian race, on the contrary, has arrived at a decrepit old age; it has passed through the stages of youth, manhood, and even decay. The new governments of late Spanish America incorporate the Indians into their political associations, and endeavour to make them participate in the benefits of civilization; but this policy, however honorable to its authors, is fruitless; the Indian race is in the last centuries of its existence, and must soon disappear from the earth.

Power and civilization travelling westward, China, the most eastern and most ancient nation of the Transpacific hemisphere, is about to expire. The Indian race, predecessor in civilization of the Chinese, is even more than they in an old age incapable of regeneration; nowhere is this more palpable than in Central America. The Mosquito shore, though inhabited by Indians free from any foreign yoke, and surrounded by civilized commonwealths and colonies, while the neighbouring British authorities have constantly provided for the education of their principal men, still remains in a degrading state of barbarity.

To the primeval civilization of America, we must assign a great and indefinite antiquity; of course, no palpable remains or monuments of that epoch now exist. Its destruction may be ascribed to some convulsion of the earth, to plague, to famine, to an invasion of barbarians, or perhaps to an insurrection of slaves; the colonies or remnants of these anciently enlightened people, passing to the eastern coasts of Asia, commenced the civilization of Japan and China.

Savage darkness spread over America, till about a century after the destruction of the western Roman empire by northern barbarians; the Tultecos appear coming from our northern regions, bringing a certain degree of civilization, probably deduced from the traces left by the primitive Americans in their emigration to the northwest. The Tultecos found an empire in Mexico, and advance their colonies to the more contiguous parts of Central America; while the Incas in Peru endeavour likewise to revive the ancient civilization of this hemisphere.

Copan was a colony of Tultecos; its king held dominion over the country extending to the eastward from that of the Mayas or Yucatan, and reaching from the Bay of Honduras nearly to the Pacific, containing on an average ten thousand