Robertson's account faulty. 



97 



of peopling America. The two continents have been 

 joined together and rent asunder by the shock of an 

 earthquake ; the fabled island of Atlantis has been lift- 

 ed out of the ocean ; and, not to be behindhand, an 

 enterprising American has turned the tables on the Old 

 World, and planted the ark itself within the State of 

 New- York. 



The monuments and architectural remains of the 

 aborigines have heretofore formed but little part of the 

 groundwork for these speculations. Dr. Robertson, in 

 his History of America, lays it down as " a certain prin- 

 ciple, that America was not peopled by any nation of 

 the ancient continent which had made considerable 

 progress in civilization." "The inhabitants of the 

 New World," he says, " were in a state of society so 

 extremely rude as to be unacquainted with those arts 

 which are the first essays of human ingenuity in its ad- 

 vance toward improvement." Discrediting the glow- 

 ing accounts of Cortez and his companions, of soldiers, 

 priests, and civilians, all concurring in representations 

 of the splendour exhibited in the buildings of Mexico, 

 he says that the houses of the people were mere huts, 

 built with turf, or mud, or the branches of trees, like 

 those of the rudest Indians." The temple of Cholula 

 was nothing more than " a mound of earth, without any 

 steps or any facing of stone, covered with grass and 

 shrubs ;" and, on the authority of persons long resident 

 in New Spain, and who professed to have visited every 

 part of it, he says that " there is not, in all the extent of 

 that vast empire, a single monument or vestige of any 

 building more ancient than the conquest." At that 

 time, distrust was perhaps the safer side for the histo- 

 rian ; but since Dr. Robertson wrote a new flood of light 



Vol. I.— N 9 



