468 HUNTINGTON— GUATEMALA AND THE [April i8, 



ascertained, except obsidian or flint. A greater achievement than 

 this, however, was the construction of a calendar much more accu- 

 rate than any known even in Europe until the introduction of the 

 Gregorian calendar which we now employ. The construction of 

 such a calendar must have demanded carefully written records for 

 hundreds of years. This brings us to the greatest of the achieve- 

 ments of the Aiayas. They had developed the art of writing in 

 hieroglyphics, and apparently their type of hieroglyphics was higher 

 than that of the Egyptians, for they seem to have been on the point 

 of using specific symbols not to represent words but sounds, a step 

 which even the Chinese have not yet taken. 



From the point of view of the geographer, and perhaps of the 

 historian also, the most remarkable feature of the civilization 

 of the Mayas is that it developed in almost the worst physical 

 environment to be found in any part of America. It might have 

 developed in the healthful plateau of Guatemala where cultivation 

 of the soil is easy, and where the population to-day is dense and 

 relatively efficient, 'but instead of this it developed a hundred miles 

 away in the fever stricken lowlands of Peten, where agriculture is 

 extremely difficult and the population almost negligible. To-day 

 for some unexplained reason the distribution of population and still 

 more of culture in Guatemala is utterly different from what it was 

 in the past. Perhaps nowhere else in the whole world have less than 

 2,000 years produced so profound a change, not only in the state of 

 civilization as compared with other parts of the continent, but in the 

 relative importance of different portions of the same small country 

 no larger than the state of New York. The normal decay of races, 

 the interplay of historic forces, the invasion of barbarians, the 

 decadence due to luxury, vice and irreligion, the change of the 

 center of world-power, or some of the other causes usually appealed 

 to by historians may explain why the Maya civilization arose and 

 why it fell. We may assume that it arose because it is the nature of 

 a young and vigorous race to make progress, and that it fell because 

 it is the nature of an old and exhausted civilization to decay. This, 

 however, does not touch upon the problem which we propose to 

 discuss in this paper. To-day the most progressive and energetic 



