[cami'bkll] the ancient LITERATURE OF AMERICA 51 



lost their ancient art of writiuii;, which the Creeks at least seem to have 

 retained to the middle of last century. 



One of the latest additions to the London Zoo is the comically 

 solemn, large goatsucker, known as the Podargus, which gobbles up 

 mice as a fowl does grains of wheat, and perches by preference on tomb- 

 stones. I shall not follow his example any further at present, but dis- 

 miss the brief literature of native epitaphs, and the wide field of not 

 unprofitable speculation that even the Yarmouth Rock opens up. I may 

 simply add that some of the Mound Builder stones bear Buddhist dates, 

 and that the oldest of these, the stones found near Davenport in the state 

 of Iowa, belong to the eighth century. The graphic systems of the 

 Mexicans and of the Maya-Quiche peoples of Central America lead us at 

 once into what was originally a very extensive literature. I say, origin- 

 ally very extensive, because so much of it is lost. It is amazing what 

 the world, in spite of all its progress, has lost by natural calamity, by 

 neglect, by criminality. I think it was Archbishop "Whately, in his 

 lectures on Political Economy, who, first among the moderns, drew atten- 

 tion to lost arts, a subject I talked over many years ago with Dr. Edkins, 

 of Pekin, who had noted many traces of such loss in the islands of the 

 Pacific. The late Dr. Francis Parkman, in a similar conversation, 

 indicated that many of our Indian tribes could no longer manufacture 

 the stone pipes and other objects, the fabrication of which had made 

 their ancestors famous. As to lost books, who shall number them ? 

 Where are Solomon's works on natural history of which Euskin writes 

 so tenderly in his Lectures on Architecture and Painting ; and where, 

 the Book of Jasher, the Book of the Wars of the Lord, and St. Paul's 

 Epistle to the Laodiceans ? Men would give a fortune to get back the 

 lost books of Livy and of Diodorus Siculus, of Menander, and of Manetho. 

 We read Josephus, Julius Africanus and Eusebius, only to long after 

 the works of the many ancient authors they quote from, lost works, 

 most of which will never be found. When the persecution of iTiocletian 

 raged in the beginning of the fourth century, the original autographs of 

 the New Testament writings, and thousands of other Christian manu- 

 scripts, went to the flames. So, with the difference of faith and religious 

 value, was it in Mexico. As Dr. Brinton says, " When Bishop Landa in 

 Yucatan and Bishop Zumarraga in Mexico made bonfires in the public 

 squares of Mani and Tlatilulco of the priceless literary treasures of the 

 Mayas and Aztecs, their maps, their parchment rolls, their calendars on 

 wood, their painted paper books, their inscribed histories, it is recorded 

 that the natives bewailed bitterly this obliteration of their sciences and 

 their archives." Landa wrote, " We burned all we could find of them, 

 which pained the natives to an extraordinary degree." Until the millen- 

 nium comes men will be found eager and zealous in burning other 

 people's idols, but very jealous and conservative of their own. The 



