The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1907-03-02
(To be Continued.
ANTIQUARIAN'S NEWSY LETTER.
Continued from Page ~


race. The face of these lands dotted with
buildings five and six stories high held in com
mon by many families. and in many instances the
houses and villages superior to the now ex-
listing pueblo towns They were built for defense
the walls of great thickness and the approaches in
many cases difficult At least century perhaps
MANY centuries, before the coming of the Span
iards, the decline began and continued with the
certainty of decree of fate until but a mere rem
nant of the town builders and their singular struc
lures now remains in the valley of the Rio Grande
and the land of the Moqu Bartlett and Herbert
Bancroft, the historians are of the opinion that at
time. in the Salt River country there was a
population of 100000 Indians-Pmas. Marcopas
and Papagos-of whom but pitiful remnant now
remains. Of a certainty, tribal wars and. it NAV
ar famine and pestilence down the race and
III few years the white mans vices and the white
mans diseases viii finish them. Whether they
would ever have advanced beyond their rude archi-
lecture and simple hoe culture is very doubtful |
of the opinion from study of and experience
with the Brazilian tribes, that when the Europeans
came to the southwest the indigenous people were
descending from barbarism to savagery. and like
the Aztec tribes of Mexico, would, with the march
of time become cannibals Savage man cannot of
himself move upward The negro of equatorial
Africa q savage long before the time of He
rodotus: for four, thousand years he took not one
single step towards civilization, and Livingstone
and Stanley found him the same brutalized man
that he was in the days of the first Rameses. st.
Paul, two thousand years ago III language that adj
mits of equivocation said that it was impossible
for man to attain to knowledge of the higher
truths without teacher. The low state of some of
the American tribes, the South Sea islander, and
the African savage, when first encountered by civ
iliZed man would seem to prove that, unasssted by
a higher type of the human the savage can
not rise out of his degradation. And if even man.
when having gone down to savagery, could never
ascend the steep decline he had once trodden how
for t,a hnlf ,o1f ,ofr Ia,
Agnostc to lift himself to Il higher plane! can
not resist the malicious suspicion that all these
puerile and violent attempts to account for the
origin of man intended to destroy the credi-
biity of revelation and belief in the divinity and
perpetuity of Christianity.
The "Gila Monster"
Here near the Casa Grande | saw for the first
time the alligator lizard or "Gila monster" i'm
prisoned in a wire enclosure on the ranch of a
Mexican vaquero. Full grown, this repulsive rep
tile is three feet long. of back-brownish color,
with the snout of a crocodile and the eve of a
snake The hideous and venomous thing bore an
evil reputation three thousand years ago He is
the only surviving reptile that answers to the Bib
lical description of the cockatrice basilisk In
those early days it inspired oathing and was shun-
ned for its subtlety and dreaded bite. 1t was Sc
lected, with the asp and other poisonous creatures,
by Isaiah to illustrate the benign influence of our
Divine Lord in subdung the fierce passions of men
which he compared to ravenous beasts and poison
Gus reptiles. In prophetic alegory the inspired
Judean foretells the time when the sucking child
shall play on the hole of the asp and the weaned
child shall put his hand on the den of the basilisk"
Is the bite of this repusive creature fatal When
the ella monster attains It's growth and is not in a
torpid or semitorpid condition its bite is as SER
ious as that of the rattlesnake. When young or in
a torpid state. often for four months of the year
the 'hila' does not secrete poison. Ignorance of
the habits of the reptile have led to interminable
disputes and discussions making an agreement of
opinion impossible, When | was in Yuma I met
a surgeon who, last year, treated two men who had