THE RUINS OF CENTRAL AMERICA.

PART VI.

THE village of Comalcalco, the next scene of our labors, is in the State of Tabasco, lying thirty-five or forty miles to the northwest of San Juan Bautista, the State capital. We reached this place on the 12th of November, and that same day, in the company of the Gefe Politico and a few of his friends, I paid a visit to the neighboring ruins. Here we found no longer simple pyramids but veritable mountains (cordilleras) of ruins, overgrown with a luxuriant vegetation, through which it is impossible to make your way except with the aid of the machete.

The only one of the pyramids which I climbed, for the purpose of making a rapid survey of the ground, is situate about two miles to the east of the village, on the right bank of the Rio Seco. The first ruin that attracted my notice was a square tower, surmounted by a gigantic tree, like the famous tower of Palenque. To the north of this is a great edifice, consisting of two parallel halls. Here again we are reminded of Palenque, but this building is much larger than any in that place; besides, it has three square windows, whereas the buildings at Palenque have none. Farther on we see the remains of some enormously massive walls, consisting of very thin red bricks, with a layer of mortar more than twice their thickness between the courses. So much I was able to note in one half-hour: we were then compelled to return to the village, as it was night-fall. I have received information of other ruins to the west of the village, where are to be seen large sculptured stones. The abundance of ruins is no surprise to me, for I was already aware that the whole State of Tabasco and a part of Chiapas are covered with ruins; and I brought upon myself no little ridicule by asserting as much after my first expedition. I maintained then that Palenque was no such vast city as it was commonly supposed to have been, but rather a VOL. CXXXII.-NO. 291.

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great religious center. I had at hand the proofs of this assertion, but I discreetly withheld them at that time. To-day, facts are confirming me, and I am in hopes of yet finding something more notable even than Comalcalco, which itself was a more considerable place than Palenque, albeit the ruined condition of its structures will prevent it from attracting so much attention as the latter place.

November 15th.-During the past night the wind was from the north, and, as usual in this latitude, brought in its train a heavy rain-fall. No work can be done for the three days that the storm is expected to continue. I was misinformed before I came here about the dry and wet seasons of Tabasco. The rainy season proper extends only from June to the end of October, but then come the northers, lasting for one, or three, sometimes for fifteen days, and invariably attended by heavy rains. I spend this time of enforced inaction in conversing with the natives and learning their traditions. One landed proprietor informed me that on his estate he had counted more than three hundred pyramids, all of them covered with ruins! This region must at one time have contained a very large population. At Blasillo, fifty or sixty miles to the west, are some architectural remains in a better state of preservation than those of Comalcalco.

When the Spaniards skirted the coast of Tabasco on their first expedition to Yucatan, they saw on the shore and far in the interior a multitude of structures whose white and polished walls glittered in the sun: their crumbling remains are to-day found everywhere throughout this region, from the coast up to the mountains of the interior. In architecture and in decoration they are allied to the edifices of Yucatan, or, rather, the latter are allied to them, for I hold the Tabasco monuments to be the older of the two. The materials employed are different,—here bricks, there stone, but we recognize in both regions the same civilizing force, the same directing genius, acting upon distinct races, amid different environments. Now this civilizing force, this directing genius, must have come from the Toltecs. If this is so, then we have a date fixed in the history of these Tabasco monuments. It is certain that the Toltecs quit the elevated plains of Mexico in the eleventh century-in 1032 according to Clavigero, a little later according to Veytia. They migrated southward by two routes, one on the Pacific side, the other along the shore of the Gulf. The Pacific division reached Guatemala by the way of Oaxaca

and Tehuantepec; the Gulf division occupied Yucatan, passing through Tabasco. The envoys of Xolotl, king of the Chichimecs, who were the successors of the Toltecs on the Mexican plateau, found them settled and prosperous in Guatemala and Yucatan in 1120. That pacific race which, according to Landa and Cogolludo, invaded Yucatan from the north and the west, civilizing without arms, and persuading without terror, can have been no other than the Toltec; in Java we see a like pacific conquest achieved by the Buddhists. It was with the assistance of the conquered populations,-populations that must have numbered many millions,-that they erected the monuments which are now engaging our attention.

But whence came those earlier populations? Had not America its genesis like the Old World, and the same genesis, too? And are there not theories in abundance to account for this multitudinous population? Besides the autochthonic race, there may have been accessions from other races, emigrations from the north, vessels carried hither by storms, shipwrecks, etc. I hope yet to be able to prove that in Central America various influences have met, especially those of Japanese and Polynesian origin, for we find here the architectural styles and the decorative motifs of both. The Toltec knew how to group all these elements,―here adopting the language of the country, there modifying his own architecture, but everywhere leaving his literature, his religion, his astronomy, and many of his customs.

To sum up, we assert that these monuments are Toltec, that they are modern, and that the most ancient of them are not more than eight centuries old. We might add-though this is not history, but simply hypothesis-that the Toltecs may have been preceded here by the Olmecs and the Otomies, other branches of the same family; in that case, the Toltecs would find the field ready for them.

But, aside from this not improbable hypothesis, it is no matter of astonishment that a people possessed of such gifts should have succeeded in establishing in Guatemala, Yucatan, and Tabasco the civilization of which we are now discovering the remains. Had they not in the space of three centuries covered the whole plateau of Anahuac with their cities and their monuments? Was it not easy for them, then, with more abundant means and with a more numerous population, to erect like monuments and to establish a higher grade of civilization in a new country which