LETTER XXV.
WHENCE CAME THE ANCIENT POPULATION? WHO BUILT THE ANCIENT CITIES? WHO WORSHIPPED THE IDOLS?
After this somewhat extended inspection of the Monuments of Mexican antiquity, the question naturally proposes itself to our minds:—Who were the builders of these temples, the worshippers of the idols, and whence did they come? Separated now by wide and lonely seas from the Continents of the Old World, was there once a period when the lands were united, and the same race spread over both? Or, are we to doubt the traditional and written histories of ages, and believe that an original race peopled the American wilds, and built and worshipped after the promptings of their own spirits?
These are questions that have puzzled and must continue to puzzle the antiquarians of both hemispheres. They cannot be solved. The traditions—the habits—the languages—the edifices—of all tribes, races, and nations, have been studied and contrasted without result. Separate theories have been earnestly and ingeniously advanced. First, that the inhabitants came by the north and through Behring's Straits. Second, that they came by the islands of the Pacific, or that in times long past, the Pacific was not all sea, but partly filled, perhaps, with a vast Continent—and Third, that they may have arrived from the Old World by the Atlantic. There are long periods of unwritten and even untraditional history of the world, and learned and pious geologists seem now to be agreed in believing that when it is declared: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," it is not affirmed that God created the heaven and the earth on the first day, but that "this beginning may have been an epoch, at an unmeasured distance, followed by periods of undefined duration, during which all the physical operations disclosed by geology were going on."[1]
This is certainly satisfactory as to the formation of the earth—a mere fulcrum for the development and powers of a future human race. But, must not the Bible be considered a full historical account of "all the operations of the Creator in times and places with which that human
- ↑ Buckland, vol.i, p.36
