the rooms below answering that purpose. Thus it is that no entire circuit can be made around any one of these stories, the only thing that can be called a terrace being the narrow space left in front of some of the rooms from the roofs of the lower rooms."
Mr. Ward seems to object to the word "terrace" in defining the platform left in front of each story as a means of access to its apartments and to the successive stories. It was used by the early Spanish writers to explain the same peculiarity found in many of the great houses in the pueblo of Mexico and elsewhere over Mexico, the roofs being flat and the stories receding from each other. While this platform is not in strictness a terrace, the term expresses this architectural feature with sufficient clearness. The two structures at Taos are large enough to accommodate five hundred persons in each, the inmates living in the Indian fashion. They were occupied in 1864 by three hundred and sixty-one Taos Indians.
"Each terrace is reached," remarks Mr. Miller before mentioned, speaking of the pueblos in general, "by a wooden ladder, first from the ground and afterward from the one below; and ingress and egress to and from the rooms below is on the inside in the room above through trap-doors and upon ladders. It is wonderful to see with what agility the Indian children and the dogs run up and down these ladders. Nowhere is there any side communication between the rooms in the great building, and but one family occupy each series of rooms situated one above the other." This last statement is too broadly made, as we have seen that Mr. Ward has given the measurements of doors through partition walls. Such doors will also be shown in a subsequent engraving. But there is no doubt of the fact that the number of lateral rooms communicating with each other was small, and that the families or groups, if such existed, united in a communal household, were separated from each other by solid partition walls, a fact which will reappear in the house-architecture of Yucatan.
In 1877, David J. Miller, esq., of Santa Fé, visited the Taos Pueblo at my request, to make some further investigations. He reports to me the following facts: The government is composed of the following persons, all of whom, except the first, are elected annually: 1. A cacique or principal sachem. 2. A governor or alcalde. 3. A lieutenant-governor. 4. A war
