Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/646

628 immense blocks of granite or porphyry of cyclopean construction, or of mason-work of stone or brick, cove red with cement. All travelers have remarked the solidity and elegance of the building. The façades were regularly shaped, the joints well pointed, and the edges clean-cut. Generally, they were adorned with a projecting cornice loaded with rich ornaments in stucco. The possibly excessive monotony of the architecture was relieved by square towers several stories high. Such towers may be seen at Copan, Palenque, and Tikal; the Casa de la Culebra at Uxmal was crowned with thirteen turrets. The architects were also careful in placing statues, pilasters, caryatides, and bas-reliefs on the facades; and important mural paintings have been described at Chichen-Itza. They represent processions of men and animals, combats, struggles between man and the tiger or the serpent, trees, and houses. One painting, the only one relating to navigation, represents a boat somewhat like a Chinese junk.

"The sculptures that adorned these buildings," the marquis continues, "present so many differences in style and execution that we can hardly believe them the work of the same race, or that they represent the same civilization. In some cases they depict strange idols in incorrect forms, men wearing tigers' heads, an alligator holding in his jaws a figure with a human head and an animal's extremities, or a gigantic frog with his paws terminating in a cat's claws. Besides such monsters, we recollect at Copan a statue wearing the highest expression of Maya art, in which we know not whether to be most astonished at the oddity of the conception, the richness of the ornamentation, or the fineness of the execution. At Palenque we may see a statue with a placid expression that would not be out of place in the palace of a Pharaoh; and the sepulchral stone of Chac-Mol, recently found at Chichen, the bas-reliefs of Santa Lucia, and other works, are not discordant with modern art. These striking contrasts, while they bring no explanation, add, in the endless problems they raise, a new attraction to American archæology."

 

HE progress of the healing art, as distinguished from certain sterile branches of medical science, can be best measured by the progress of our insight into the causes of special maladies. For the accidental discovery of a "specific" means generally nothing but the discovery of a method for suppressing special symptoms of a disease. Quinine subdues chills, but does not prevent a relapse of febrile 