484 HUNTINGTON— GUATEMALA AND THE [April 18. 



longed to the main branch. Under such circumstances it hardly 

 seems as if so progressive a civilization could have existed many 

 centuries without extending its influence to the coast in British 

 Honduras, unless there had been some preventive such as fever. 



The assumption that in Central America tropical diseases were 

 formerly less abundant or less baneful than now relieves us of the 

 necessity of supposing that the Mayas, remarkable as they were, 

 possessed a degree of immunity or resistance to disease far in 

 excess of that of other races, but it does not relieve us of other 

 difficulties. Moreover as it now stands it has the weakness of being 

 a pure assumption with no assignable cause and no independent evi- 

 dence. In order fully to explain the location of so high a civiliza- 

 tion in Peten rather than in the highlands of Guatemala it seems 

 necessary to supplement our assumptions as to the character of the 

 Mayas and as to the prevalence of disease by the further assumption 

 of a change of climate. The sort of change which would accom- 

 plish the required result would demand that at the height of Maya 

 civilization climatic conditions should have been such that the forests 

 of Peten would not be so dense as now, and hence that mosquitoes 

 of the anopheles family would not be so abundant. In other words 

 it w^ould demand conditions like those which prevail to-day two 

 hundred and fifty to three hundred miles north of Guatemala in the 

 northern part of the peninsula of Yucatan. There the climate is 

 to-day such that low jungle takes the place of dense forests. Mos- 

 quitoes of the anopheles species are rare. Malaria is comparatively 

 unimportant. Thanks to these conditions the country is one of the 

 most prosperous and progressive to be found anywhere within the 

 tropics at sea-level. These favorable conditions are due to the 

 fact that although heavy equatorial rains fall in summer and make 

 the country fruitful, there is a long dry season during the winter 

 and spring. If such conditions were to spread two hundred or 

 three hundred miles southward into Peten that region would greatly 

 change its character. Agriculture would still be subject to some 

 handicaps, but would be nothing like so difficult and haphazard as 

 at present. The areas of big jungle where life is excessively easy 

 so long as the population is scanty, but where intensive agriculture 



