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Show ! AN ARCHBISHOP AND. HIS DEAD CITY. Archbishop Gregory Gillow of Oaxaca, Mexico, after touring the United States, sailed from San i i; Francisco for his own home last Thursday. The distinguished prelate, now 6S years of age, was born ; in Puebla, Mexico, and at an early age was sent by : : ; ; ' his father, an Englishman naturalized in Mexico, to ; "I be educated at the famous Jesuit college of Stony- ' hurst, England. Finishing his classics and philos- ' . ophy at Stonyhurst, he moved to Louvain, Belgium, ' and completed a four years' course in theology and , ' j canon law. He then rounded out his education by I taking a post-theological course at the Accademia 1 ' . i dei Nobili Ecclesiastici, founded in 1701 by Pope I Clement XI to prepare for the diplomatic service I of the Holy See young ecclesiastics trained in the i ' .; juridical sciences and in foreign diplomacy. . j ' j The ecclesiastical province which he spiritually f governs is on the Gulf of Tehuantepec, Pacific I' 1 . ; ocean, imir ?diately to the west of the great Penin- j ' ' ; sula of Yucatan. I The illustrious Archbishop ecclesiastically rules I a region where are to be seen probably the oldest I i ruins on the continent of the two Americas, remains I ; - of a city which are the despair of. antiquarians and jj , , 1 which antedate, in the opinion of Le Pfongeon, the I ; deluge. From the City of Oaxaca, a day's journey I by stage are the ruins of Mitla and not far from '. them, in the churchyard of Santa Maria del Tule, - is one of the biggest, if not the biggest tree, in the , I world, not excepting the giants of Calaveras, Cali- I f ornia. Sometime in the remote past, lightning or I , a fierce hurricane destroyed its height, reducing it to its present standing of one hundred and 6ome . : odd feet. Six feet from the ground this wonderful I I ' cypress is 154 feet in circumference. Twenty-eight I . .. ;! men of average reach, with outstretched arms, I : j touching fingertips, can just circle its giant girth. ' : . j On the east side of the tree, embedded in the bark, ! .'', is a tablet placed there by Von Humboldt, the Ger- i I ' man traveler and antiquarian, when he visited Mitla i in 1804. It is now barely decipherable. ! ' But the remains of the Toltec city of Mitla are . today almost as they were when Cortes visited them 1 in 1530, after he was created Marquis of Oaxaca by ot ; royal order of the Spanish king, Charles V. For 2 - centuries, it may be for thousands of years, through I , i the long ages, the walls of Mitla have defied the I , ; ravages of time, of earthquakes and of tropical j J storms. "What distinguishes the ruins of the Toltec I ' -ity from all other remains of pre-Spanish archill archi-ll lecture are six columns of porphyry eight feet in J ; circumference and fourteen feet high, standing in 1 the center of what was once a great hall. They have neither pedestal, capital nor architrave, but are j I , symmetrically rounded, as if done by a lathe. They j ' are said to be the only examples of the kind found in the ruined cities of Mexico, Yucatan and Central ; America. Of the three great groups of ruins stand- -. ing in the Mitliah waste that of the Kappa is the h most imposing. This is a cyclopean building 284 i j : feet by 108, with walls five or six feet thick. Two : 1 j great stone pillars, twelve feet high, support the j ; lintel of the doorway. A stone- carved passage leads ) ' into the audience chamber, an attractive room, with j its rolls worked in curious mosaics, and showing ; j a netting of tile plates resembling somewhat the J style of the early Greeks. ' , ' Some of tte abandoned houses and temples are in a fairlv Good state of preservation and furnish i j interesting examples of the skillful handiwork of a f i ' race of mn whose history is forgotten and buried for a11 tlrnc v'ith the raee itself. One thing is cer- j T tain the men who hewed from the quarries and the : ! ' mechanics who chizzled and carved these monoliths ' ; and hnee lintels had no tempered tools of either I j iron or copper. We searched in vain, on returning I M from Mitla t0 Mexico City, through the national museum and the school of mines, but found no spec- , imens of iron chisels or tempered copper tools. I ; ! In the newinff of these immense piUars from the J i j I; mountain side, chipping and scraping them into ; their present form, in the lifting and setting them ! ; ln ieir places, and in the discovery and mixing of j ; ; 811 imperishable cement, these ancient builders gave l r,roof of a mechanical and architectural civilization ; ' of a high order. How were these huge shafts cut I ! ' out of and transported from the mountains miles l awa? Today we understand how the Egyptian ? , workmen split from its matrix and freighted to Cairo the great Ptolemaic obelisk, but how did these prehistoric people of Mexico bring to Mitla these enormous stones and columns? They had no water to flood the quarry and raft them, as did the Pharaohs, Pha-raohs, to a deep river. They had no caen, horses or other beasts, of burden, for these were introduced by the Spaniards. Again, from whom did they learn architecture, with its plans, specifications, arabesques, ara-besques, greeques and mosaics ? And once again, from whom did they learn the secret of extracting paints from plants and minerals paints that have survived the gnawing tooth of time and the vicissitudes vicis-situdes of ages? |