Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/233

Rh of a knowledge once obtained, but so jealously guarded that only a few vague particulars became known.

The fabulous stories which were spread abroad respecting the dangers of the navigation to the British Islands, to deter interlopers from venturing thither to interfere with the traffic of the Phœnicians and Carthaginians, shows what we may look for in other quarters. Nor was this feeling of jealousy merely a state policy on the part of the government, it entered into the every day life of each member of the state, and the account given by Strabo of the Phœnician galley which was run on a shoal to lead a pursuing foreign vessel to destruction, is as instance of the feeling which would exist in the state of society at that time.

A general decline of maritime enterprise marked the period of Roman supremacy, and no information bearing on this subject is afforded by any Roman Authors whose works are extant. Seneca indeed may have had some of the foregoing passages in view when he wrote the well known lines:

Venient annis Secula seris, quibus oceanus Vincula rerum laxet, et ingens Pateat tellus, Tiphysque novos Detegat orbes, nec sit terris Ultima Thule.

which prediction actually came to pass in the Middle Ages.

The ruins which exist in Central America do not appear to have attracted much attention until the year 1786, when Captain Antonio Del Rio was sent by the Spanish Government to examine some ancient buildings which had been recently discovered near Palenque.

It appears from his report that these buildings were ancient at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and that the people who then lived in the neighbourhood could give no account of their origin. A few Spanish travellers had visited some of these remains before Del Rio, and latterly Waldeck, Stephens, Norman and others have published descriptions of some of the ruins in Yucatan; but the account which we possess are far from being perfect. The first consideration which strikes one is the circumstance that these remains of ancient cities are either on or near the Eastern coast, and that they decrease in number and architectural grandeur and excellence towards the interior. There can be no doubt that the population of America came principally from the North west, but although the mounds which are to be found in the Mississippi and the adjoining valleys prove that the people who raised them were not savages, they equally show that they had made but small