which we are now to occupy ourselves comprises the space bounded on the South by the Isthmus of Panama, washed East and West by the oceans, and determined, roughly speaking, towards the North by a line starting from the head of the Gulf of California, and sweeping round to the mouths of the Mississippi with a curve that takes in Arizona and Southern Texas. In our day, this southern portion of North America is broken into two great divisions, the first and most southern of which is known collectively as Central America, and embraces the republics of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, San Salvador and Panama. The great peninsula of Yucatan, which is now Mexican, formerly belonged to this group of Central American peoples. The second portion of the territory we are to study corresponds to the present republic of Mexico. I shall presently explain the sense in which it might be called the Mexican empire in the time of Fernando Cortes. For the present, let me ask you to remember that we are now about to speak, in a general and preliminary manner, of the region which pretty closely corresponds to the present Central America and Mexico.

To begin with, we treat these two districts as a single whole, because the Europeans found them inhabited by a race which was divided, it is true, into several varieties, but was distinguished clearly from the Red-skins on the North, and still more from the Eskimos, and alone of the native races of North America had proved itself capable of rising by its own strength to a veritable civilization. The general physical type of the race is marked by a very brown skin, a medium stature, low brow, black coarse hair, prominent jaw, heavy lips, thick eyebrows, and a nose generally large and often hooked. The noble families as a rule had a clearer complexion. The women are thick-set and squab, but not without grace in their movements. In their youth they are sometimes very pretty, but they fade early. We must leave it to ethnological specialists to decide whether this type is not the result of previous crossings.

So much is certain, that at an epoch the date of which it is impossible to fix, but which must have been remote, this race, cut off from all the world by the sea and the profoundest savagery, developed a civilization sui generis, to which the traditional reminiscences of the natives and a series of most remarkable ruins, discovered especially in Central America, bear witness. For it is in this southern district that we find the monumental ruins of Palenque, of Chiapa, of Uxmal, of Utatlan, and of other places, the list of which has again begun to receive additions in recent years. When the Spaniards conquered the New World, the centre of this civilization had shifted further north, to Mexico proper, to the city of Mexico, to Tezcuco and to Cholula. But the consciousness that the Mexican civilization was affiliated to that of the isthmic region had by no means been lost. It was a nation or race called Maya, the name of which seems to indicate that it considered itself indigenous, and the proper centre of which lay in Yucatan, that produced this American civilization—capable of organizing states and priesthoods, of rearing immense palaces, of carving stone in great perfection and with a true artistic sense, and of realizing a high degree of physical well-being. There is reason to believe, however, that this civilization, resembling in some respects that of ancient Canaan, had more refinement in its pursuit of material comfort than vigour in its morality. A certain effeminacy, and even the endemic practice of odious vices, appears to have early enervated it. When the Spaniards arrived in America, wars and devastating invasions had shattered the old and powerful monarchies of the central region and reduced the great monuments of antiquity to ruins, and that too so long ago that the natives themselves, while retaining a certain civilization, had lost all memory of the ancient cities and the ancient palaces that the Europeans rescued from oblivion. We may still see figured amongst the monuments of Mexico those beautiful ruins of Palenque, where stretches a superb gallery, vaulted with the broad ogives that recal the Moorish architecture of the Alhambra; while at Tehuantepec an immense temple has been discovered, hollowed out of a huge rock, like certain temples in India. The cultivation of maize was to this region what that of wheat was to Egypt and Mesopotamia, or of rice to India and China, the material condition, namely, of a precocious civilization. For, as has been remarked, the primitive civilizations could not be developed except where an abundant cereal raised man above immediate anxiety for his subsistence, and rescued him from the all-engrossing fatigues and the dangerous uncertainties of the hunter's life.

This Maya race, having adopted the agricultural and sedentary life, multiplied so greatly as to send out many swarms of colonists towards the North, where the Nahuas, that is to say, "the skilled ones" or "experts" (for so the emigrants from the Maya land were called), found men of the same race as themselves, to whom they imparted their superior knowledge. They kept on pushing northwards, established themselves on the great plateau of Anahuac, or "lake country," where the city of Mexico is situated, and advanced up to the somewhat indefinite limit opposed to their progress by the Red-skins. This migratory movement towards the North was evidently not the affair of a day. It must have continued for centuries; and during its process the Maya civilization may have experienced great developments and undergone numerous modifications; so that, without venturing to pronounce categorically upon a problem yet unsolved, I should myself be inclined to ascribe to a population, which either consisted of bands of emigrant Mayas or was affected by this Nahua movement, those "Mounds" which still throw their galling defiance at the modern methods of research, powerless to explain their origin in regions which have since been under the reign of the most absolute savagery.

However this may be, the movement by which in a remote antiquity the peoples of Central America ascended towards the North, carrying with them their relative civilization to Mexico and even beyond, was reversed at the epoch of our Middle Ages by a migration in the opposite direction. In this case it was the peoples of the northern regions that tended to beat back upon the South. They invaded, conquered and brought into subjection the peoples who had established themselves along the path followed by the previous migrations; and it is probably to invasions of this description that we must ascribe the fall of the ancient Maya society of the isthmic region. But the civilization of which it had sown the germs was not dead. Nay, the peoples who descended upon the South had in great measure themselves adopted it; and in the invaded districts there remained groups and nuclei of Nahua populations who maintained its principles, its arts and its spirit, to which their conquerors readily conformed. The last conquerors had been established as masters in the Mexican district for more than a century when the Spaniards arrived there. They were the Aztecs. They had conquered or shattered what was called the Chichimec empire, which in its turn had destroyed, some centuries earlier, the Toltec empire. But it would be a mistake to think of three successive empires, Toltec, Chichimec and Aztec, one supplanting the other in the same way as the Frankish empire, for example, took the place of that of Rome, which in its turn had replaced divers others more ancient yet. What really took place was what