pyramid of earth still standing, 177 feet in height, measuring 1445 feet on either side, and ascended by 120 steps.

There are two other pyramids at Otumba, seven leagues north-east of the City of Mexico, and in the language of the aboriginal inhabitants, called, one “The House of the Sun,” and the other, “The House of the Moon.” The House of the Sun is 680 feet square at the base, and 221 feet high.

On the top of this there was originally erected a great statue of the sun. The other pyramid is much smaller but rises to the height of 144 feet, and on its top was a statue of the moon. Upon the plain about these structures are a number of smaller pyramids not necessary to be described.—The sides of all the pyramids here constructed correspond with the cardinal points of the compas. The pyramids that we have referred to are all patterned after those constructed upon the banks of the Nile, and are all found about the west border of Yucatan, about the north border of Guatamala and south of the centre of the great Republic of Mexico.

It will be well to remember that the mountains and plains of North America cover millions of square miles north and east of the country where these pyramids have been constructed, and that those mountains and plains are covered in many places with earth mounds of an almost inconceivable variety of forms, and yet the form of the pyramid seems to be utterly unknown on the Western Continent, except in the narrow region that we have delineated. We might, perhaps, be justified in asking: From what people on earth could this building of pyramids be copied except from those dwelling upon the banks of the Nile?

THE RELIGIOUS BELIEF OF THE PEOPLES WHO CONSTRUCTED THE WONDERFUL PREHISTORIC TOWERS AND TEMPLES UPON THE CONTINENT OF AMERICA.

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 children of Israel, he was the most cruel, stern, relentless monster that the imagination of man ever depicted, and his votaries everywhere sought to conciliate him by presenting him with the most horrid scenes of human agony. Attempts were everywhere made to conciliate him by laying human captives upon his altar, and for want of captives taken in war, such peaceful citizens as the priests saw fit to select.

Human victims were constantly dying upon a thousand altars not only in Phœnicia, but in all western and north-western Europe.

It was firmly believed by the votaries of Moloch that he could be most readily conciliated by the offering of children upon the altars, that he most especially delighted in the sacrifice of the first born of every family. Men thus offering “the fruit of their bodies for the sin of their souls.” Early in the history of this worship it was deemed sufficient if children passed through the fires without the destruction of their lives, but down the ages it came to be believed, that if a family would secure the favor of this deity, the oldest child of each union must be actually roasted to conciliate favor. Even good old Abraham who had been called from upper Chaldea to receive all the land of Israel for him and his seed forever, conceived the idea that God required the roasting of the son of Sarah upon the hill of Zion, and never relented until a ray of common sense enlightened his intellectual vision, after he had actually bound Isaac to the altar.

We have referred to the beautiful monuments that still exist at Uxmal, Palenque, Occasingo, Queche and Otumba, and to the temples and monuments still standing there. Upon all these beautiful structures are engraved in the living stone, or wrought in stucco, most striking representations of the sun with a huge priest on either side, standing with arms outstretched each holding in his hands a naked child offering it to the relentless deity. The practice of burning human beings as offerings to the sun existed very extensively down to the date of the Spanish conquest. Showing that the same so-called religion which prevailed in western Europe before the Roman conquest, was still paramount and terribly enforced among these settlers in America, though so far removed from the parent stock. We have spoken thus far of American remains which are found north of the Isthmus of Panama, but there are still existing, in the old land of Peru, structures which for thousands of years have been telling the story of their origin.

There are all over this land of Peru remains not of palaces and temples, but of roads and water-courses showing a mechanical skill such as perhaps cannot be found in any part of the earth elsewhere as existing as early as these must have been constructed.

The people who did this work are absolutely extinct. Many have supposed that in the population of Central America there is still a remainder of the blood of the people who once dwelt there, thus rendering the local inhabitants in some degree superior to the aboriginal Indians of that country. Not so in Peru. It is only from the structures which we find and the conditions which attend them that, any evidence is found that there ever was in Peru, any people superior to the dull Indians of the mountains.

The traditions of the country speak of one Manco Capac appearing in the country at some indefinite period, and that he and his family descendants were rulers for a long course of time, ruling and controling the business and social life of the population of Peru. That blood had been long extinct before the Spanish conquest.

Let us see for a moment whether anything remains to show what were the religious ideas of Manco Capac, and those coming with and descended from him. We find abundant remains of structures and carved columns in the almost desert regions of Atacama, in the high lands of what is now Bolivia, between Peru and Chili, between twelve and thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. These structures and carved monuments are largely gathered about the lake of Titicaca. At Sillustani on a promontory extending into that lake, is constructed a stone circle as an outdoor temple, standing more perfect to-day than Stonehenge or Stennes, or the structures at Carnac in Bretagne. It is undoubtedly an outdoor temple for the worship of the sun. See Squires’ Travels in the Lands of Incas, page 384, &c.

This, taken by itself, might not prove to a certainty that this outdoor temple was for the worship of the sun, but at Tiahuanuco, in the same work, at page 288 to 292 inclusive, we have the whole story told as plainly as it could be in a thousand printed volumes. Over the entrance to a cemetery is a carved monolith, or single stone, on which is the following described carving: Centrally over the gateway upon this monolith is a well carved figure of the sun, and upon the right hand and the left hand and below, are sculptured some fifty figures of beings with human bodies, and the wings of angels as imagined and represented in western Asia and in Europe. Half of the angels have human bodies, angel wings and the heads of hawks. The Romans and the Greeks held Mercury to be the god of eloquence and of wisdom.

Instead of furnishing him with