Biologia Centrali-Americana, or, Contributions to the knowledge of the fauna and flora of Mexico and Central America . an ruins. Partly owing to the small depth of the sail and partly tothe clearings made for food-plantations, there was an absence of forest-trees, and thewood resembled overgrown copse-wood in England rather than a tropical forest, with,however, this difference—that the saplings grew very close together and the numbersof lianas and climbers sometimes formed it into a dense jungle, and clearing wasmade the more difficult owing to the thorny stems both of trees and creepers. A po
Biologia Centrali-Americana, or, Contributions to the knowledge of the fauna and flora of Mexico and Central America . an ruins. Partly owing to the small depth of the sail and partly tothe clearings made for food-plantations, there was an absence of forest-trees, and thewood resembled overgrown copse-wood in England rather than a tropical forest, with,however, this difference—that the saplings grew very close together and the numbersof lianas and climbers sometimes formed it into a dense jungle, and clearing wasmade the more difficult owing to the thorny stems both of trees and creepers. A portion of the site we cleared entirely of all vegetation by burning the felled treesand shrubs ; in other parts we found it to be an economy both of time and labourmerely to clear away the undergrowth thoroughly and heap it together and burn itwhen dry. As the dry season progressed, the clearing and burning of bush by the people ofPiste, in preparing their corn-plantations, enabled me to note some of the smaller andmore distant mounds, and to form a better idea of the extent of the ancient city. CEICHEN ITZA. 13. Piste. Detailed Description of the Ruins. jYo. 1.—The building known as the Casa de Monjas, or Nunnery (Plate II., No. 1),is the best preserved of the larger buildings at Chichen. (Plan and Section onPlate III.; Views and Drawings, Plates ) It consists of a solid mass of masonry, which I shall call the basement (colouredblue in the Plan), supporting a range of buildings on which another single-chamberedbuilding is superimposed. On the eastern side of the basement is a wing, with roomsopening on the level of the ground (coloured red in Plate III.), the main portion ofwhich measures 61 feet by 45 feet, and is 25 feet high. Three other buildings(a, b, & c, Plate III.), two of them (b & c) in complete ruin, formed three sides of acourtyard to the south of the wing, and two detached structures (d & e, Plate III.)complete the group of buildings. The basement is a
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