to instruction, we would deprecate authoritative instruction in our higher institutions as any remedy for existing or approaching atheism.

The evil is intellectual, and admits only of an intellectual remedy. It is a weakness of philosophy, and the breach in the dike must be repaired where it exists. Truth is just as capable of eliciting enthusiasm among young men to-day as ever before, but it must be simple truth, that is offered in its own light. The captivating force of the empirical speculations of existing philosophy is due to the apparent proffer of fresh and aggressive truths.

If we cannot waive free discussion, much less can we expect to huddle young men into sheep-folds, and to make no provision for higher education except in institutions of definite and pronounced faith.

Churches of all sorts will do well to remember, constantly, that they cannot maintain their own life except in open, breezy conflict, nor can they maintain the spiritual life of their own young men on easier terms. Veterans are made only for the open field. The notion that the Christian Church is to monopolize and manipulate education is antique for our time and for all time. This principle is most unfortunate for the churches themselves; we are not to draw back from inquiry, simply because we cannot control it, simply because it is inquiry. A confidence in truth, and a free and quick exposure of it to all the hazards of war, are the only available and the only sound policy.

We are also not to strive to identify morality with religious belief. While within our own circle we may constantly support action by the whole scope of reason, it is folly to deny or to pull down any of the more narrow foundations of society. Indeed, these foundations are in part what the rational edifice of enlarged spiritual life is, in a truly spiritual evolution, being built upon. When we cannot work with men by virtue of later and larger convictions, it is well to get back to the primary and rudimentary -rudimentary in human history-principles at which many ways meet. We should be glad that the social world does not collapse while our special theory of it is under discussion.

We are to defend ourselves in this conflict with unbelief by precipitating it rather than by postponing it. We shall do this best in our colleges by providing professors able and active to the pitch of our times in their own departments, and men who are large minded and earnest.

Timid or illogical leadership will not long defend our young men from unbelief, and will make the danger extreme when it comes. Herein is included the fundamental principle, that the vigorous mind is not to be hoodwinked or narrowed in any way, and that we are not to have any undue anxiety to lead it to any one conclusion. Our safety will be found in many leaders and much discussion.

Every able instructor inevitably pushes hard enough the minds he encounters. We should be jealous of the integrity of the mental processes of the student, for we wish him to show this integrity in the actual encounters of the world.

Above all, it is in order to recognize the trend of our times, the immense reaction that is on us, and not be driven by it. Mind, as a power of thought, and philosophy as a means to the deepest insight, have suffered and are suffering every form of disparagement. A current philosophy calls itself positive which is primarily made up of negations; and a faith of agnosticism is struggling into being which implies a penetration into the very substance of things, and the innermost laws of progress.

It is time that we should call things by their right names once more, and should be able to see that those who laugh at metaphysics do it only as a means of introducing it in its most unverified conclusions.

So far as we have supreme confidence in any remedy of unbelief, it is found in a bold, patient, extended discussion of the grounds of belief, where they alone are found, in the nature of mind. No matter what have been our failures, we have still to encounter the untiring waves, strong in the faith that we are approaching undiscovered lands hidden below the horizon.

JOHN BASCOM.

THE RUINS OF CENTRAL AMERICA.

PART V.

AGAIN I am at Teotihuacan, my purpose being to explore the place thoroughly and bring to light the resemblances and analogies between it and Tula.

On the first day of October, I had four ditches opened on the four sides of the common of San Juan de Teotihuacan, intending that they should meet in the middle. The two ditches on the east and south yielded only a few fragments, and I soon abandoned them, employing the men elsewhere; but those in the north and the west gave satisfactory results: in them we found twelve graves of children and five or six of adults, as I suppose, for I judge by the vases, urns, etc., and not from the human remains, as the bones were reduced to dust.

The vases are very different from those of Tenenepanco and Tula. They are few in number, are made of a black clay, and in some of them the designs are in intaglio. They are large, measuring from six to eight inches in diameter at the base, and are but little more than three to four inches in height. The rim is flaring. Usually these vases occur in pairs, but unfortunately they are so old, and the earth around them is so hard and adheres to them so firmly, that, despite all our precautions in detaching the adherent clay, they fall to pieces. Out of twenty of these vases I have been able to save only one entire. Four others are in three or four pieces; these I preserve.

The human remains were in such a state that it was impossible to determine in what position the body was laid. The children were buried in a sort of urns with perpendicular rims. The head rested on the bottom of the urn. I have found two skulls almost entire, but they crumbled to dust on the touch of a finger. I have been unable to preserve any of these mortuary urns whole, but I keep one, which is in three pieces, as a specimen.

I also found a great number of little clay figures: a very handsome and very artistic mask, admirably modeled; a hatchet; a lot of small round stones-a sort of marbles; and several knives of obsidian-the finest, the neatest, and the lightest I have ever seen. I found also two round pieces of slate which passed as money, and a number of arrow-heads.

But these finds are only incidental. I did not revisit this place merely to discover specimens of pottery, but to unearth some habitations comparable to those of Tula.

October 2d. This morning I went about among the ruins, looking for indications which should decide where the principal excavations were to be made. What I wanted to find was a Toltec house, for to my mind Teotihuacan is Toltec. This city is much larger than Tula. It is, indeed, of vast extent; and, without indulging in any stereotyped reflections on the vanity of human greatness, I will say that a more complete effacement is nowhere else to be seen. The whole ground over a space five or six miles in diameter is covered with heaps of ruins-ruins which at first view make no impression, so complete is their dilapidation. It is an ocean of ruins, and I shall be singularly fortunate if I succeed in the object of my quest, and discover an ancient habitation. This habitation will, in my opinion, settle a question warmly debated among Americanists, some holding that Teotihuacan is much more ancient than Tula, that indeed it was anterior to the Toltecs. Now I mean to prove that Teotihuacan is a city of the Toltecs.

On carefully examining its ruins, one is amazed at their extent and their grandeur. But this is accounted for by the multiplication of the Toltec race, which, during the four centuries of its sojourn on the plateau of Anahuac, spread out to the shore of the Gulf of Mexico and the coast of the Pacific. Tula, the ancient capital, continued to be their holy city, but they founded other cities, other centers, like Teotihuacan and Cholula.

If these cities are larger and grander, if the pyramids are loftier and more imposing, the reason is that the people who built them were richer, stronger in numbers, and more highly civilized than were their ancestors when they first arrived on this plateau. But cities, pyramids, and dwellings all alike have their originals at Tula.

I willingly accept the opinion of those writers who assign to Teotihuacan a very high antiquity. But the ground on which I

agree with them is not the ruinous aspect of the edifices, but an actual examination of the strata of cement forming the public highways. These strata consist of sand, lime, and broken tetzontli, with an admixture of fragments of pottery, belonging evidently to a prior civilization. Of course the makers of the roads did not make articles of pottery and then break them up and use the pieces; they took such materials as were at hand— the soil itself, which was here in a great measure made up of the rubbish left by earlier populations. Thus we are again confronted by the vestiges of more ancient civilizations. It was Humboldt that said, in his "Vues des Cordillères," that the American civilizations constitute not an historical question, not even a question for philosophy. He was right. This continent is the land of mysteries; we here enter an infinity whose limits we cannot estimate.

I have collected from these layers of cement pieces of pottery, some coarse and common, others of very fine quality, and I intend to make as large a collection of these objects as possible.

We have done a very good day's work. In the morning I found a number of interesting objects,-a hatchet of transparent quartz, a metate for sharpening tools, several small vases, two more funereal urns (one of them resembling that which held the remains of an infant), a number of malacates (an instrument for spinning thread), a quantity of necklace beads, and a large alabaster stone shaped like a boundary stone. Above all, I discovered, as I suppose, my house.

On Monday I shall have twenty-five laborers, and the work will then proceed rapidly. I will from day to day employ more men, as circumstances may require.

October 3d.-I spent the whole day in making excursions among the ruins and in the vicinage. My guide led me into the vast underground chambers near the village of San Juan de Teotihuacan. These are the quarries whence the former inhabitants of Teotihuacan derived their building materials; afterward they buried their dead in these catacombs. One of the catacombs consists of a large circular chamber, from which three galleries or tunnels branch out in different directions. The first explorers found a great quantity of human bones; also bones of ruminants of the same species as those found at Tula. We visited another of these catacombs, and penetrated some three hundred feet into one of the galleries.