Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/509

AMERICAN.] ARCHITECTURE Pelasgic and Celtic monuments of the Old World, and x" . .- *.- - . ." ~^x ~ ~ FIG. 57. Elevation and Plan, from Palenque. FIG. 58. Bas-relief, Palenque. From Stephens and Catherwood. take the general character of the stoneworks of Egypt and India; but like those works, they exhibit the vaulted form by gathering over and , . r 1 1 --t-^^^^^^.A |y>, not by arching. ~ -> ._^^^dn.*^ Mr Catherwood states that he and Mr Stephens concur in the opinion ex pressed by Mr Pres- cott, in his History of the Conquest of Mexico, " that though the coinci dences are suffici ently strong to authorise a belief that the civilisation of Anahuac (Ancient Fro. 50.- Horizontally-Coursed Arcli. Mexico) was in some degree influenced by Eastern Asia, ytt the discrepancies are so great as to carry back the communi cation to a very remote period, so remote that this foreign influence has been too feeble to interfere materially with the growth of what may be regarded, in its essential features, as a peculiar and indigenous civilisation ; " and this opinion the monuments, as presented by Mr Catherwood, would seem fully to justify. But Mr Catherwood adds to this, as the ground, it would appear, for coinciding with Mr Prescott s opinion, that the results arrived at by Mr Stephens and himself " are briefly, that they (the American monu ments) are not of immemorial antiquity, the work of un known men ; but that, as we now see them, they were occupied and probably erected by the Indian tribes in possession of the country at the time of the Spanish con quest, that they are the production of an indigenous school of art, adapted to the natural circumstances of the country, and to the civil and religious polity then prevailing ; and that they present but very slight and accidental analogies with the works of any people or country in the Old World." Less artistic, but more vast and massive, are the struc tures in Peru, which have been as yet imperfectly explored. FIG. 60. Stone Circles (Intihuatanus) at Sillustani. From Squier s Peru. Referred by Mr Prescott to the reigns of the Incas, they are now considered to have been the works of a far earlier race, FIG. 61. Chulpa or Burial Tower, Peru. From Squier. of whom the Incas were the conquerors. The rudest of these early works are sepulchral, and much of the same kind as the cromlechs and stone-circles already referred to (p. 383). One circle at Sillustani is 90 feet diameter, another 150 feet, and they have a massive paved platform all round them outside, which is not found in similar

remains in the Old World. The cromlechs are not covered