Note V-72 — Chapter V · ANTIQUITIES OF YUCATAN. (continued 2)

Plan from Stephens. The only other plan is that given by Norman, which, in distances and the arrangement of the buildings with respect to each other, presents not the slightest similarity with the probably accurate drawings of Stephens and Catherwood. 'The ruins of Chichen lie on a hacienda, called by the name of the ancient city.' 'The first stranger who ever visited them was a native of New-York,' Mr John Burke. First brought to the notice of the world by Friederichsthal. 'The plan is made from bearings taken with the compass, and the distances were all measured with a line. The buildings are laid down on the plan according to their exterior form. All now standing are comprehended, and the whole circumference occupied by them is about two miles ... though ruined buildings appear beyond these limits.' 'In all the buildings, from some cause not easily accounted for, while one varies ten degrees one way, that immediately adjoining varies twelve or thirteen degrees in another;' still the plan shows no such arrangement. Stephens' Yucatan, vol. ii., pp. 282-3, 290, 312. The modern church 'entièrement composée de pierres enlevées aux temples et aux palais dont j'allais étudier les ruines.' The proprietor 'me proposa la cession de sa propriété et des ruines pour la somme de deux mille piastres.' Charnay, Ruines Amér., pp. 336, 344-5. 'A city which, I hazard little in saying, must have been one of the largest the world has ever seen. I beheld before me, for a circuit of many miles in diameter, the walls of palaces and temples and pyramids, more or less dilapidated.' 'No marks of human footsteps, no signs of previous visitors, were discernible; nor is there good reason to believe that any person, whose testimony of the fact has been given to the world, had ever before broken the silence which reigns over these sacred tombs of a departed civilization.' Norman's Rambles in Yuc., pp. 108-9. Thirty-three leagues from Valladolid, and twenty-five from Mérida. 'Une grotte offre, à une profondeur de 52 pieds, un petit étang d'eau douce, auquel on descend par des degrés taillés dans le roc, et se prolongeant au-dessous de la surface de l'eau.' Friederichsthal, in Nouvelles Annales des Voy., 1841, tom. xcii., pp. 304-6.