760 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



some distance from the original bottom of the pit on a platform of 

 logs, while at his feet lie a number of strange stone and copper imple- 

 ments some thin and sharp like knives and hatchets, others huge and 

 blunt like mauls and hammers all being left in such a manner as though 

 the workman had but just gone to dinner and might be expected back 

 at any moment. Bewildered, he ascends to the surface again and looks 

 about him. He sees mounds that from their positions are evidently 

 formed from the refuse of the pit, but these mounds are covered with 

 gigantic trees, evidently the growth of centuries ; and, looking still 

 closer, he sees that these trees are fed from the decayed ruins of trees 

 still older trees that have sprung up, flourished, grown old, and died 

 since this pit was dug or these mounds were raised. The more he 

 thinks of the vast ages that have elapsed since this pit was dug, that 

 mass of copper quarried and raised, the more confused he becomes : 

 his mind can not grasp this immensity of time. 



" Who were these miners ? When did they live, and where did they 

 come from ? " are the questions he asks himself, but gets no answer. 

 However, one fact is patent to him that, whoever they were, they 

 Avill not now trouble his claim ; and, consoled by this reflection, he 

 goes to work again. 



The traveler in wandering through the dense and almost impenetra- 

 ble forests of Central and South America, suddenly finds himself upon 

 a broad and well-paved road, but a road over which in places there 

 have grown trees centuries old. Curiously following this road, he sees 

 before him, as though brought thither by some Aladdin's lamp, a vast 

 city, a city built of stone buildings that look at a distance like our 

 large New England factories splendid palaces and aqueducts, all con- 

 structed with such massiveness and grandeur as to compel a cry of 

 astonishment from the surprised traveler an immense but deserted 

 city, whose magnificent palaces and beautiful sculpturing are inhabited 

 and viewed only by the iguana and centiped. The roads and paths 

 to the aqueducts, once so much traveled as to have worn hollows in the 

 hard stone, are now trodden only by the ignorant mestizo or simple 

 Indian. Of this deserted home of a lost race, the traveler asks the 

 same question as the miner, and the only answer he gets from the seini- 

 civilized Indian is a laconic " Quien sabe ? " And Avho does know ? 



The curious and scientific world, however, are not so easily answered, 

 and various are the theories and conjectures as to these diggers of 

 mines and builders of mounds and strange cities. One of the most 

 plausible of these one believed by many scientists to be the true 

 theory is this : Ages ago the Americas presented a very different ap- 

 pearance from what they now do. Then an immense peninsula ex- 

 tended itself from Mexico, Central America, and New Granada, so far 

 into the Atlantic that Madeira, the Azores, and the West India Islands 

 are now fragments of it. This peninsula was a fair and fertile coun- 

 try inhabited by rich and civilized nations, a people versed in the arts 



