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564 ANCIENT AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE. Part 111. between the styles of the Old and the New World, or whether the latter be really original. Whenever a sufficient number of photo- graphs reach Europe, the investigation may be undertaken here, but it will be very much easier on the spot. Hitherto the great difficulty has been that the drawings of American monuments — especially those published by Humboldt and Lord Kingsborough — cannot be depended upon. The one bright exception to this censure are those of F. Catherwood,! both those which he published separately, and those with which he illustrated the works of Mr. Stephens. ^ Had that artist undertaken to classify his work in a chronological series, he doubtless could have done it ; but as the arrangement of the plates is purely topographical, and they are so far reduced to a common denominator by the process of engraving, the classification can hardly now be attempted by one not familiar with the buildings themselves. In the meanwhile there seems no good reason for doubting the con- clusion which he and Mr. Stephens arrived at, that the cities which they rediscovered were those which were inhabited and which were in the full tide of their prosperity at the time of the Spanish Con- quest. The buildings which we now see in ruins were probably then all in use, and many may have been in progress and unfinished at the time of that great disaster. On the other hand, it is extremely doubt- ful if any building in Central America can date from five centuries before that event : in Mexico some may be oldei*, but their title to greater antiquity has not yet been satisfactorily made out. Whatever uncertainty may exist with regard to Mexican history, there is nothing in it that can strictly be stigmatized as fabulous. The Mexicans do not pretend to any very remote antiquity or divine descent. There are no heroes who live tliousands or tens of thousands of years ; nor any of the other extravagances that usually mark the dawn of history in the Old World. On the contrary, the Mexican annals modestly commence with the arrival of the Toltecs in Anahuac in the 5th or 6th century, and with the beneficent teaching of a stranger, Quetzalcoatl, who lived among them, taught them archi- tecture and the agricultural arts, instructerl them in their religious duties, and then, like Lycurgus fifteen centuries earlier, left them by sea, promising to return. For 300 or 400 years from this time the Toltecs lived in peace and prosperity, covering the table-land, it is said, with their monuments. But evil times came ; famine, internecine wars, and disasters — inter- preted as evidences of the wrath of the gods — drove them from 1 "Views of Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan." 25 plates, folio. London, 1844. 2 "Incidents of Travel in Central America and Yucatan," by J. L. Steph- ens. 1st and 2d series, 4 vols. 8vo. Murray, 1841, 1843.