It was not a long period after 1492, when the great Italian navigator with his Spanish crew made their first discoveries upon the central portion of America, that the Europeans, who had followed the footsteps of Christopher Columbus, began to fall in with structures of great magnitude and architectural beauty scattered widely throughout Mexico, Guatemala and Yucatan, &c.; and when the conquest of Peru was achieved, artificial highways and water courses were found there, such as could hav

In the earlier existence of the Greek and Roman peoples, knowledge was extremely limited. These peoples were without any mode of perpetuating or transmitting knowledge until the days, a little more than a thousand years before the Christian Era, when Cadmus brought from Phœnecia the letters which had been invented and adopted there for the representation and expression of articulate sounds; and by the combination of these letters to transmit and perpetuate human ideas. There is scarce a race of

The prophet Isaiah, writing soon after seven hundred and fifty years before Christ, in the twenty-third chapter of his prophecy, gives us a pretty good idea of the unlimited commerce and the unlimited prosperity of the merchants of Tyre. Among other things he says the following, speaking of the City “ Whose antiquity is of ancient days .” He calls the City “The Crowning City,” “whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth.” The wealth and luxury of Tyre was etern

Nineveh and Babylon are never spoken of as having sent even a keel boat out upon the seas. Egypt has been called the “Cradle of The Arts” and the “Birthplace of Science and Civilization,” but Egypt never attained the maritime power or skill to enable her to navigate the waters of the Mediterranean beyond the mouths of her eternal river. Greece, afterwards so celebrated for science, art and philosophy, was at the day of which Homer sung, a mere association of savage groups, engaged in wars instea

The soil, climate and productions of the Peninsula of Yucatan, and that part of Mexico and Guatemala where these prehistoric remains are found, are precisely what are described by the European writers who speak of the beauty, the loveliness and the grandeur of the Hesperides and the homes founded by eastern adventurers beyond the western ocean. The prehistoric structures found in those regions and in neighboring regions are all built on plans and patterns borrowed from lands bordering the Medite

They were the worshipers of Baal, the god worshiped by the Phœnicians, and paid their devotions to him with the same rites that they practiced wherever their influence was effective. It will be remembered that Baal was supposed to exist and was worshiped as a being of biform existence. In his beneficent qualities, as the sun, he was supposed to be the author and sustainer of all life and the fountain of all pleasures. In his sterner character wherein he was known as Moloch or Molech, by the chil