COLUMBIAN HISTORICAL EXPOSITION AT MADRID. 73 



the mysterious ruins at Tiahuanuco, in several respects the most extra 

 ordinary on the American continent. 



In Ancoii the bodies were in the condition of mummies. They were 

 seated wrapped in their clothing, or swathed in mummy cloths, and 

 surrounded in their graves with their household utensils, their jewelry, 

 and those objects which had been most useful or pleasurable to them 

 in their life. Many of them were tied with cords and a false face placed 

 in front of the real one, so as to retain a more natural aspect in death. 

 Articles of food, such as maize and beans, and cups, which had no 

 doubt contained water, were placed by their sides for use in the spirit 

 land. In consequence of these beliefs, the cemetery of Ancon, which is 

 miles in extent and contains the graves of many thousand persons, 

 offers an enormous treasure-house of relics, displaying the mode of life 

 and the manufactures of the race who once inhabited that portion of 

 Peru. 



Among the photographs represented are several of those peculiarly 

 cut stones from Colombia, which have usually passed under the name 

 of the &quot; Calendars of the Chibchas.&quot; They are now, as has already been 

 stated, generally recognized to have been intended for molds on which 

 the ancient goldsmiths hammered out their fragments of the metal into 

 thin leaves of the form of the depression. Plausible proof of this is 

 given by a collection of ornaments made upon these very stones by 

 hammering out gold leaf by a person in Berlin. 



One of the interesting models which was shown for examination is 

 that of the celebrated monolithic door, which is found in the ancient 

 ruins at Tiahuanuco. It is an accurate reproduction, having been 

 made on the exact measurements taken by Dr. Stiibel. 



From the museum at Stuttgartt, in Wurtemberg, were two ancient 

 Mexican shields, such as were carried by the war captains of that 

 nation, and also in their religious dances. They are of cane, woven 

 with strong cord, and ornamented with feather mosaics. They belong 

 to a class of antiquities very beautiful in themselves, and once 

 extremely common, but which have become correspondingly rare 

 through the extinction of this once favored art in Mexico, and the 

 destruction of the older examples of it, through moths and worms. 



DEPARTMENT OF DENMARK. 



The exhibition contributed by Denmark was composed of two parts, 

 the one illustrating the life of the Esquimaux in Greenland, a province 

 subject to Danish rule, and the other exhibiting the grade of civiliza 

 tion reached in the Middle Ages by the inhabitants of Iceland, who 

 were the first explorers of the new continent. 



Under the former heading there were specimens of the costume made 

 of sealskins, now in use by both sexes among the natives of Greenland. 

 Models were also shown of their boats, their tents made of seal skin, 

 their winter houses, and the sledges on which they journey in winter. 



