nced that they were all erected and occupied
by the same people; and if not a single corroborating circumstance
existed besides, they afford in themselves abundant and conclusive
proof that the ruined cities on the continent, the building of which
has been ascribed to races lost, perished, and unknown, were inhabited
by the very same Indians who occupied the country at the time of the
conquest.

At the rear of the last building, buried in the woods, so that we
should never have found it but for our patron, is another memorial,
perhaps equal in interest to any now existing on the island of Cozumel.
It is the ruins of a Spanish church, sixty or seventy feet front and
two hundred deep. The front wall has almost wholly fallen, but the side
walls are standing to the height of about twenty feet. The plastering
remains, and along the base is a line of painted ornaments. The
interior is encumbered with the ruins of the fallen roof, overgrown
with bushes; a tree is growing out of the great altar, and the whole is
a scene of irrecoverable destruction. The history of this church is as
obscure as that of the ruined temples whose worship it supplanted. When
it was built or why it was abandoned, and, indeed, its very existence,
are utterly unknown to the inhabitants of New Spain. There is no record
or tradition in regard to it, and, doubtless, any attempt at this day
to investigate its history would be fruitless. In the obscurity that
now envelops it we read a lesson upon the vanity of human expectations,
showing the ignorance of the conquerors in regard to the value of the
newly-discovered countries in America. Benito Perez, a priest who
accompanied the expedition of Grijalva, solicited from the king the
bishopric of this island. At the same time, a more distinguished
ecclesiastic was asking for that of the island of Cuba. The king
advanced the latter to the higher honour of the bishopric of Cozumel,
and put off Benito Perez with what was considered the comparatively
insignificant see of Culhua. Cozumel is now a desert, and Culhua, or
Mexico, is the richest bishopric in New Spain.

But I have a particular reason for presenting to the reader this ruined
church. It is a notion, or, rather, a principle, pervading all the old
Spanish writers, that at some early day Christianity had been preached
to the Indians, and connected with this is the belief that the cross
was found by the first conquerors in the province of Yucatan as a
symbol