problem? Save here and there a deserted camp, or a burial mound,
containing perhaps articles of use or adornment, all traces have
vanished. Their earth-works and mounds are being rapidly leveled
by the plow of modern times, and the scholar of the future can
only learn from books of their mysterious builders. In Mexico,
and farther south, we find the ruins of great cities. To the
student of antiquity, these far surpass in interest the ruined
cities of the Nile or Euphrates valley. Babylon of old, with its
walls, towers, and pleasure resorts, was indeed wonderful.
In our own land cities, if not as ancient, yet fallen in more
picturesque ruin, reward the labors of the explorer.
Uxmal, Copan, and Palenque, invite our attention. Here are
hieroglyphics in abundance, but no Rosetta Stone supplies the
key by whose aid a Champollion can unravel the mystery.

The luxuriant vegetative growth of the tropics, with its fierce
storms, is every year hastening the obliteration of these ruins,
and we must improve the time well, if we would learn from them
what they have to say of the past.

The isles of the Pacific give evidence that, long before the
dawn of authentic history, man lived there. Indeed, as the
islands which gem that ocean, from their configuration and
position, seem to be but the elevated plateaus and mountain
peaks of a continent that has gone down beneath the blue wave of
the Pacific, so, throughout Polynesia can be traced the
fragmentary remains of a civilization, the greater portion of
which has been completely buried by the waters of oblivion,
leaving only here and there a trace to reconstruct, if we can,
the entire structure.