Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/25

Rh and there are scientists who claim that the isthmus was the cradle of the world's civilization. But Sir John Lubbock assures us that there are no physical or scientific tokens of human existence on the continent back of three thousand years. Of course it is not within the limited and appropriate design of these pages to enter into the substance and arguments of archæological science, as it opens its rich and profoundly interesting, though bewildering, discussions of prehistoric times and people on this continent. A half century ago the mounds and other earthworks in the great Western valleys engaged a curious interest, as tokens of the presence of a more advanced and intelligent representation of human beings than were those who were found in occupancy of the soil, and who were wholly ignorant of the builders or purpose of those mysterious works. But within quite recent years a far richer, yet still no less baffling and hardly more communicative, field of inquiry, research, and scientific theorizing has been opened to archæologists, and, strangely enough, on the mainland of the continent nearest to the islands first visited by the Spaniards. The pyramids and tombs of Egypt have found their rivals in the architectural remains of Palenque, in Chiapas, and in all the regions of the Isthmus and of Central America. It is claimed that these, and other tokens and relics associated with them, afford evidences of an ancient prehistoric civilization rivalling that of Europe in the Middle Ages. The assumption falls as yet far short of proof. In the interest of historical and archæological science, scholars are left only to the expression of their murmurs and regrets that the first representatives of European civilization and intelligence, when opening a new world and an unknown stock of their own race to intercourse and inquiry, should have manifested not even an ordinary curiosity about those questions concerning the American aborigines which modern inquirers pursue with such diligence. Some of these questions, we naturally infer, might have been relieved of a part of the mystery and