El Paso daily herald. (El Paso, Tex.) 1881-1901, 1897-08-20
IN OLDEST AMERICA.
Mexico as a Field for Antiquarian Re-
search


According to to press dispatch
from the City of Mexico an exploration
society. organized in Philadelphia for
archaeological research, will give
special attention to the Isthmus of Yu-
catan. The Mexican government, it is
added, will give aid to the work, as it
is the policy of the present government
to stimuli ate researches into the early
history of the country. That policy is
the policy of Porfirio Diaz, and is in
line with his many deeds for the benefit
of science and in the cause of humanity.
Those who know him best do rot besi-
tate to say that Diaz is the greatest
man of the last fifty years. Undou otad-
ly he is one of the greatest. or Indian
extraction, he joins to the subtlety and
intellect of the Spaniard the stoicism
and fiXity of purposes OF d race that
knows how to play a waiting game.
What Diaz has sought to accomplish
be has accomplished d, or is accomplish
ing, sometimes by force, sometimes by
stratagem, but most often by persis-
tency. His reformation OF the Mexi an
people is in politics what the dropping
of water upon stone is in physics.
He has worn him hole at last. From
the western edge of SinalOa to the Rio
Grande, and from the gulf to our ter
ritories, he is looked upon as little
less than a god. His aid to any man or
company of men is valuable. The
Philadelphia society could not have
a more potent friend.
That Is a strange land into which
they journey-a land of fable and of
mighty deeds. Portions of it are as
unknown as the widest sections of
South Africa. 1t has not been forgot
ten by achRolOgi-ts, but the di fflculties
of reaching it have been too great
The explorer has been opposed by ma
ture and the jewellers in the vast fast
nesses. Under former regimes in Mex
leo a visitor could not have reached the
point of attack. The natives were hos
tile, being governed by priests who saw
In every stranger an enemy of mother
church. Bandits ruled the land. Muir
der was too common to excite more
than passing comment. There were no
railways southwest of the capital.
Only mule paths traversed the gOrges
Bold would have been the Ameri an
to venture beyond sound of the chal-
lepge of tie Mexican sentries. L.
would have been a novel and extremely
effective mode of suicide.
Yet it was an old lapd-old and boar
how old DO man can say. Among its
people tradition reached back for more
than thousand years. Like all ma
tions, they had giants in tn ir earlier
days and told tales of them. Unlike
other nations, however, they have the
works to prove the existence of their
mighty forefathers. The Mexican In
dian of today, unless he be high
mountain Indian, is mild, shiftless and
INDECENT. He is no trouble except to be
fed. Even the Aztecs whom Cortez
found were unwarlike. His handful of
mail buccaneers moved them down as
if they were grain. Their swords were
of glass and splintered against shield
aud headpiece. They deem d a man
on horseback part of the animal and
fled from him. Possibly they had some
indistinct transmitted recollection of
the Centaur, bequeathed them by the
knows?
But the beings who lived in Mexico
in the anterior days were warriors
and men of might. They built vast
edifices that gaze into the face of Time
with an unyielding frOwn. They Of
fered reeking hOlocausts to their gods
upon tables of stone half an acre in eX
tent. They shed blood in rivers. They
were engineers. They we're architects.
The magnificent flight OF their arches
strikes the modern dumb with envy.
They spring through space massive as
the pyramids, airy in seeming as the.
gossamer fllament which presages the
northern, but they do not fall. They
were seulptors who. left horrid visions
in stone. They pal ted with indelible
pigments whose composition is a..lost
art. They had a pantheic religion.
that was. religion of terror. They
worshiped both static and dynamic
TO, ce. They were a hard and cruel but
grand race. Little is known of them,:
but the world would like to know
more. The ruins of Militia are but pre-
sisge OF discoveries to come. While the
archaeOlogists of the east are unearth-
ing cities whose very nam s are lost in