standing, on the two altars and on the stone shafts or monoliths, are carved in relief ornamental designs which, with the rude tools of the sculptors, must have taken a long time to chisel. Human figures are posed in groups portraying in their attitudes, devotion, joy, or horror. Here, as in all the abandoned cities of Central America, the snake is conspicuously prominent. There are isolated figures of animals, and of almost all those creatures that "swarm in the waters and the creeping and flying species of the land," but the serpent is the dominant and most terrible figure on these monuments. He is represented in repose, feathered, double-headed, and striking. From his loathsome mouth protrudes a woman's head, out of the jaws of some hideous idol he is coming, now he is fashioned with others into a turban covering the head of a priest offering sacrifice, again he is coiled around the body of a writhing victim-some Quiche Laocoon-or woven into the vestment of a famous sculptured warrior. The statuary is most elaborately carved. Some of the persons represented are in an attitude of devotion, with hands crossed, and head uplifted; others hold sceptres of authority, and are gorgeously apparelled, wearing elaborate head-dresses ornamented with the plumes of the quetzal or cacique bird.

All these are of priestly or royal rank, wearing the robes and insignia of their high offices, and hinting that by this perished race the priesthood and royalty were on the same plane of reverential equality as

among the Chaldeans, Egyptians and Jews. "Kings were my ancestors," said Agrippa to Caesar, "and among them were high priests, whom our family considered equal to royalty itself." These priestly and royal personages have cone-shaped heads fashioned by pressure in infancy, the Phoenician or Semitic nose, and full voluptuous lips. These statues, but not all, are scattered on the ground, some entire, eight and ten feet long; others in fragments, and one of them, like Dagon of the Philistines, "was fallen on his face to the earth, the head and both the palms were broken." The two altars, now coated with alga and tropical moss, are panelled and carry abundantly, the Maya hieroglyphics, or, to quote from Las Casas, "writings of certain characters which God only knows." If these mystic writings be ever deciphered something may yet be learned of this ancient race, its inherited civilization, and the devolution which ended in savagery or national extinction.

Standing amid the wreck and ruin of the temples, statuary, and altars of this vanished race, whose language no man may speak, whose faces are unlike those of any people known to us, it is impossible not to credit them with a certain grandeur of thought, high architectural skill, indomitable energy, and a debasement of the moral and religious life supremely sad and pitiful. With infinite loathing, but with commiseration for their mental and spiritual darkness, we recoil with horror from the contemplation of their human sacrifices and hu

man flesh-eating, done to propitiate the wrath or invoke the good-will of some monstrous god. But we must not forget that, before the coming of our divine Lord, these horrible rites were universal, even among the most civilized nations. Hecuba was sacrificed by her own people on the tomb of Achilles, the Greek. Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon, was given up by her father and sacrificed to propitiate the gods of Greece when the nation was threatened with extinction. From the Greeks human sacrifices passed to the Romans, nor does the refined critic Horace object to it, only suggesting that the death of the victim should take place in secret.

In Seneca's play "Medea," the throats of the children were cut by their own mother in full view of the audience. Ennius, the Roman poet, introduces in one of his plays a banquet of human flesh prepared and eaten before the eyes of the people. Human sacrifice was so common in Rome that, according to Pliny, a few years before the Redemption, a law was passed expressly forbidding it. At Carthage, the rival of imperial Rome, children were ruthlessly burned alive in the brazen furnace of Melkarth, the Moloch of the Bible. In more than a dozen places of the Old Testament we find the Hebrews accused of burning their children. There is not in all literature, sacred or profane, anything to be compared to the awful indictment framed by Ezekiel, the prophet of God, in his sixteenth chapter, against the apostate Jews who consorted with