The writer has met and mingled freely with the leading great men of his time,-at home and abroad, in public halls and private houses, on the platform and at the fireside,-and can remember no instance when among such men has he been made to feel himself an object of aversion. Men who are really great are too great to be small. This was gloriously true of the late Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Henry Wilson, John P. Hale, Lewis Tappan, Edmund Quincy, Joshua R. Giddings, Gerrit Smith, and Charles Sumner, and many others among the dead. Good taste will not permit me now to speak of the living, except to say that the number of those who rise superior to prejudice is great and increasing. Let those who wish to see what is to be the future of America, as relates to races and race relations, attend, as I have attended, during the administration of President Hayes, the grand diplomatic receptions at the executive mansion, and see there, as I have seen, in its splendid east room the wealth, culture, refinement, and beauty of the nation assembled, and with it the eminent representatives of other nations,-the swarthy Turk with his "fez," the Englishman shining with gold, the German, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Japanese, the Chinaman, the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Sandwich Islander, and the negro,all moving about freely, each respecting the rights and dignity of the other, and neither receiving nor giving offense.

"Then let us pray that come it may,

As come it will for a' that,

That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,
May bear the gree, and a' that;

"That man to man, the world o'er,

Shall brothers be, for a' that."

FREDERICK Douglass.

VOL. CXXXII.-NO. 295.

39

THE RUINS OF CENTRAL AMERICA.

PART VIII.

As the work of clearing the palace goes on, we are continually meeting with new surprises. I have Stephens's plan before me, and find that it is altogether incorrect. Stephens had neither the time nor the force of laborers requisite for clearing the edifice, and Catherwood's sketches are correspondingly imperfect. Hence, the inexactness of his restorations. The Palace of Palenque, as it really is, will be reproduced in my plans and photographs.

I have completed my work at the Temple of Inscriptions, having made a cast of the last of the tablets. These casts represent upward of 236 square feet of most interesting bassreliefs. I have also taken casts of bass-reliefs measuring 65 square feet in the so-called Temple of War. In the meantime, my Indian laborers continued the work of clearing the palace— or rather the several structures constituting the palace-of rubbish, and found in the principal court a front-face in high relief and of natural size. Hitherto, only profiles have been found at Palenque. This specimen probably belonged to the frieze of the interior façade of the palace, at the foot of which it was found; it gives proof of a quite unexpected wealth of decoration. I have, furthermore, photographed the lower half of the figure of a man, in high relief, natural size, to be seen in the frieze of the second building. The head is specially interesting, because it differs essentially from the profile heads carved on tablets in the palace, or seen in the friezes of the several buildings: the forehead is far less receding. The face is modeled in cement, or rather in almost pure lime; unfortunately, the Indian that discovered it drove his pick into one of the eyes.

A party of laborers employed by the Mexican Government, under the direction of Señor Rodriguez, an engineer, are making openings in different directions through the woods here, and are finding new buildings from day to day. But these buildings are identical in type with those already known and described. Some of the remains of sculptures, found by Rodriguez's men, I will describe later, when I shall have completed my photographs and casts.

While examining all the bass-reliefs on the columns of the palace and of the temples, I have found one in almost perfect condition that appears to have escaped the notice of Stephens; he does not reproduce one so perfect as this.

Following the lead of Stephens, I have searched for those superposed layers of plaster bearing inscriptions of which he writes, and have found such superposed layers in even greater numbers than he had led me to expect. I have counted as many as fifteen or twenty layers, one overlying another, and of different colors; for in this climate houses and monuments must be repeatedly coated with lime or paint, else they will become black. Still we cannot deduce from these coats of paint, however numerous they may be, any indication as to the age of the buildings, unless we can show that the ancient inhabitants were accustomed to whiten the walls of their palaces and temples at stated intervals, as every five, every ten, or every twenty years. The inscriptions, could we read them, would, perhaps, throw light on this matter. At all events, I will take away a specimen of the plaster with its several layers.

On January 16th, I made a discovery of considerable importance from its bearings on the question of the antiquity of these ruins. We are wont to estimate the age of a tree by the number of concentric rings exhibited by a cross-section of its trunk, and on this basis has been erected a theory to prove the very high antiquity of these Palenque ruins. Waldeck mentions giant trees growing out of the roofs of the temples, and which, according to him, must have stood fifteen hundred, two thousand, or even three thousand years. Señor Larrainzar shares the same opinion: he visited these ruins, and speaks of a mahogany trunk which showed seventeen hundred concentric rings. Now there are some trees of great size on the pyramids, rather than on the temples and palaces, but they are of the family Ceiba, which are of very rapid growth, so that the largest of them, measuring

from 80 inches to 118 inches in diameter, are not more than one hundred to one hundred and fifty years old. Señor Larrainzar, who, like his predecessors, was biased in favor of a remote antiq. uity for Palenque, inferred that, inasmuch as a tree was seventeen hundred years old, the ruins were not less than two thousand years. It was logical enough.

But Stephens upset this theory on finding trees from twentythree to twenty-seven years old, and which, nevertheless, were from fifty-nine inches to ninety-three inches in diameter. The fact I am about to state affords a still more complete refutation of the theory.

Having cut down a sapling about an inch in diameter, I was very much surprised to observe in the cross-section a very great number of concentric rings: of these, I counted forty. Now, in this climate, this sapling, which is very heavy, and which appears to be of hard wood, cannot be more than eighteen months old. The inference would appear to be that in a region where there is no winter, and where, owing to the heat and moisture of the climate, Nature never rests, a concentric ring might be formed each month, each moon, or even oftener. I have laid aside two pieces of this sapling, to be submitted to the inspection of specialists. To-morrow I will cut down a number of saplings of different kinds, to satisfy myself that the fact I have observed is not anomalous.

January 17th.-We are still without laborers. This morning I cut down several young trees, from one to four inches in diameter, and found in all the same conditions I noted yesterday. I counted seventy concentric rings in one that was 1.77 inches in diameter, and upward of three hundred in a branch of a tree not over twenty years old. Hence, this "conclusive" evidence of the antiquity of the buildings at Palenque proves nothing. The observation I have made will probably be of great interest to naturalists. While waiting for a new force of laborers, I have again gone over the palace, and have discovered other inaccuracies in Stephens, which I will point out later.

I have studied the different pieces of ornamentation, some of which is very rich, as will appear from the sketches I send. The taste is thoroughly rococo, nor would it be disowned by the age of Louis XV. It is surprising that this exuberance should have made its appearance so early, for the taste for exaggerated ornamentation manifests itself only among nations that are effete and

in process of decay. As time went on this love of ornamentation grew steadily, till it reached its climax in Yucatan, the grave of the Toltecs. But so rapid is the march of events here that within the term of eleven centuries the Toltec nation passed through all those stages through which European nations have been passing for two thousand years or more.

We have found a very interesting fragment of a fallen cornice in the great court of the western palace. The outermost ornamentation of this piece of cornice is gone, yet the present surface is stamped with several hieroglyphics. Plainly either this people had an insane passion for inscribing their annals everywhere, or they must have employed old materials in the construction of their edifices, as did the builders of Babylon.

On the 18th of January, a force of fifteen laborers was sent to our assistance from the village of Palenque. I at once set them to work on the eastern façade of the palace, for hitherto that has been considered to be its front side. All previous writers have agreed in stating that a stair-way surrounded the edifice on every side; but when I was here in 1859, I photographed the eastern side, and showed that there a perpendicular wall took the place of the steps. The critics ridiculed me and my photograph-a very imperfect one, I must admit. But now that I am clearing away all the rubbish from this façade of the palace, I find this wall, and in a better state of preservation than I expected. It extends along the entire façade. It is more than probable that the main entrance was on the north side, notwithstanding the position of the interior stair-way.

I have made casts of bass-reliefs, measuring in all eight hundred and sixty-one square feet. On the completion of this part of my labors, I made an excursion to the north of the palace, along a path cleared by our workmen. At the little rivulet I found a bridge in fair condition. As soon as the weather permits I will make a photograph of this interesting monument. In another excursion through the woods to the north-east of the palace, I everywhere found ruins and remains of buildings, all standing on pyramids. The number of these structures is enormous. Most of them present the same architectural arrangements we have found everywhere throughout Mexico, but generally they are smaller, their walls less thick, the arches of less elevation, and the compartments are all of small size. On this occasion I discovered two other bridges, one of