SECOND EDITION, Corrected, enlarged and with some additions, BY C. S. RAFINESQUE, A. M.—Ph. D. Professor of Historical and Natural Sciences, Member of many Learned Societies in Philadelphia, New York, Lexington, Cincinnatti, Nashville, Paris, Bordeaux, Brussels, Bonn, Vienna, Zurich, Naples &c., the American Antiquarian Society, the Northern Antiquarian Society of Copenhagen &c. The massive ruins the arts and skill unfold Of busy workers, and their styles reveal, The objects and

This Essay or Introduction to my Researches on the Antiquities and Monuments of North and South America, was printed in September 1838 in the first Number of the American Museum of Baltimore, a literary monthly periodical undertaken by Messrs. Brooks and Snodgrass, as a new series of the North American Quarterly Magazine. Being printed in a hurry and at a distance several material errors occured, which are now rectified, and this second edition will form thereby the Introduction to my long conte

The feelings that lead some men to investigate remains of antiquity and search into their origin, dates and purposes, are similar to those actuating lofty minds, when not satisfied with the surface of things, they inquire into the source and origin of every thing accessible to human ken, and scrutinize or analize every tangible object. Such feelings lead us to trace events and principles, to ascend rivers to their sources, to climb the rugged sides of mountains and reach their lofty summits, to

1. The Mexican Antiquities have lately been illustrated in many splendid works, by Aglio, Kingsborough, Dupaix, Baraden, St. Priest, Nebel, Icaza, Gondra, Waldeck &c. In a clever review of these works (in the foreign review) it is distinctly asserted that the Tul-tecas (people of Tul,) or American Atlantes, were quite a different people from the Later Mexican tribes, that their monuments are equal in interest to those of Egypt and Syria, with colossal and even Cyclopian structures—which