184 THE CLIMATIC FACTOR AS ILLUSTRATED IN ARID AMERICA. 



the lime vnth which an army of masons cemented the hewn stones or filled in the gi'cat 

 spaces of rubble between the arches. Elsewhere men were toiling to build and repair the 

 cisterns or reservoirs which enabled a large population to dwell in this riverless, springless 

 land of underground drainage. Aside from the throngs engaged in work of a semi-public 

 character, still larger bodies of men must have been busily tilling the soil. Each man 

 raised moi'e food than his own family con.sumed. To-day, as we have seen, the Indian 

 farmer rarely raises or harvests more than enough for his immediate needs, and his wife 

 literally can not comprehend the value of grinding to-morrow's corn to-day or yesterday. 

 The hand-to-mouth methods of to-day can scarcely have prevailed in the past, for at that 

 time there must always have been a large surplus supply of food which by barter or taxation 

 was available as a store to support the non-agricultural artisans and laborers. 



At what time these conditions ceased to prevail no man can tell exactly. "Wlien the 

 Spaniards came to Yucatan early in the sixteenth century, the Mayas were much as they 

 are to-day, a slow, mild, and unprogressive people, utterly different from the wideawake, 

 jirogressive race which alone could have built the ruins. Doubtless they had much of the 

 ancient blood in them, but they made no claim to any knowledge or even any tradition of 

 the construction of the wonderful structures among which they dwelt. Even in so vital a 

 matter as the supply of water they had fallen utterly below the state of their predecessors. 

 In a country such as Yucatan, the water supply is one of the most vital problems. The 

 ancient people were so skillful in conserving water in cisterns and other artificial reservoirs 

 that they built their great cities without reference to the "cenotes" or caves, the only 

 natural source of permanent supply. At the time of the Conquest, however, the Spaniards 

 found practically all the Mayas clustered about the "cenotes" and dependent upon them 

 for water. They had utterly degenerated from the vigor and originaHty of their ancestors, 

 and were much more different from them than the modern Greeks are from their ancestors 

 in the days of Plato and Phidias. The modern Yucateco does not begin to have the 

 energy and initiative of the modern Greek, but it is probably no exaggeration to say that 

 his predecessors were the equals of the Greeks or any other race so far as real achievement 

 is concerned. I know that this is a sweeping statement, and I shall return to it later. 

 Here it is enough to point out that the Greeks borrowed much of their culture from their 

 neighbors ; the Mayas had no one from whom to borrow. The Greeks had at their command 

 the accumulated store of knowledge and of tools from half a dozen great nations; the 

 Maj^as had only their own culture and their own crude tools to rely on. Each of these 

 two nations was great because it was full of new ideas. We know the ideas of the Greeks 

 not onlj^ from their ruins, but from their books. Those of the Mayas are known only 

 from their ruins, and j^et those ruins show that in art, architecture, and the allied crafts, 

 brilliant ideas must have been as numerous as among the Greeks. 



The genuine greatness of the ancient Yucatecan civilization deserves as much emphasis 

 as does the degeneration of their successors. The measure of a nation's greatness is 

 found by dividing its achievements by its opportunities. Let us attempt to sum up the 

 achievements of the ancient Mayas. In the first place they developed a system of art 

 and architecture which need not shrink from comparison with that of Egj^pt, Assyi-ia, 

 ("hina, or any other nation prior to the rise of Greece. Secondly, they appear to have 

 developed a system of communications much easier than would exist to-daj^ except for the 

 railroads. Otherwise they could not possibly have maintained so high a state of civilization. 

 Then, again, they had a highly advanced system of water-supply. In the days before 

 the discovery of iron, deep wells could not be dug and primitive people could live nowhere 

 except close to the deep caverns of the cenotes, or beside the temporary "aguadas" or 

 water-holes. Yet the main ruins have nothing to do with cenotes or natural aguadas. 

 They are often miles from them and are located in places where the only modern water- 

 supply comes from wells 150 to 250 feet deep. Apparently cisterns were constructed on a 



