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Their system of arithmetical notation was very simple, yet, perhaps, better adapted to the purpose than any other arrangement in use before the introduction of the Arabic cyphers. "The whole eastern world, "to use the words of Niebuhr, "has followed the moon in its calendar, the free scientific divisions of a large portion of time is peculiar to the west." Such a division was that employed in the Mexican calendar, which so exactly adjusted civil to solar time, that five centuries would elapse, according to Mr. Prescott's showing, before there would be the loss of a single day. "Such," he adds, "was the astonishing precision displayed by the Aztecs, or perhaps by their more polished Toltec predecessors, in these computations so difficult as to have baffled, till a comparatively recent period, the most enlightened nations of Christendom."* Besides the solar calendar, the priests constructed another for themselves, not less ingenious, which they used in the arrangement of their festivals, and in their astrological and astronomical pursuits. Of their proficiency in these studies we know little more than that they knew the causes of eclipses, and were able to settle the hours of the day, the periods of the solstices, and of the equinoxes, and that of the transit of the sun across the zenith of Mexico, with precision.†

Mexican Indian, from
Catlin.

THE Mexicans paid much attention to agriculture and botany, and their collections probably suggested the formation of the gardens of plants which began to appear in Europe soon after the time of the conquest. The mineral kingdom also excited their attention, and they worked mines with a considerable degree of skill. Iron, however, was unknown to them, and their tools were made of an alloy of tin and copper, and of a mineral substance called itztli. With implements of this latter material they wrought the stones employed in constructing their public works and dwellings, and the sculptures so frequently dug up in Mexico. The most remarkable of these is the great calendar stone dug up in 1790, and now walled against the base of one of the towers of the cathedral, where it passes by the name of Montezuma's watch. It is eleven feet eight inches in diameter, and the figures are raised seven and a half inches above the broken square of rock out of which the whole was originally carved. It is computed to have weighed nearly fifty tons. They had carried

* Prescott, vol. i. p. 113.

† Humboldt; Gallatin, in the first volume of the Philosophical Transaction of American Ethnological Society.

to great perfection the art of working in gold and silver, and were well skilled in other mechanical arts. Every fifth day fairs were held in the market-places of the principal cities, where the people from the neighbourhood met to sell and buy. They traded partly by barter and partly by means of a rude but regulated currency. Trade was greatly respected as a means of livelihood, but the mechanical arts were held in esteem, and, as there were no castes, the nobles were expected to have a useful calling as well as the lowly born. The merchants who went trading into other countries, went with large bodies of servants well armed, and they acted as spies for the government, and any indignity offered them would easily furnish a pretext to the Aztec rulers for a war, when the stock of victims for sacrifice was low. In their domestic life, women mingled unreservedly among the men in social festivities and entertainments, and were always tenderly treated. They were somewhat fastidious in their cooking, and when the body of a sacrificed victim was given to the warrior who had captured him, to be eaten, the repast was served up with many beverages and viands of delicacy, and the feast was conducted with all the decorum of civilized life.

Such was the strangely compounded character of the people whose

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arms were to be vainly dashed against the mail-clad adventurers under Cortes, who now came to overturn their whole social system, and replace it with another, which, though it was almost equally crushing from the weight of its own superstition on one hand, still held to the Bible on the other, the sublime truths of which, the reign of fanaticism ended, could not fail to expel the many forms of evil which had infested the fair plain of Anahuac.

B

it, however summary.

EFORE proceeding to our account of the conquest of Mexico, by Cortes, we will notice some of the remarkable remains of antiquity with which this country abounds. Our limits are narrow, and our notice of these remains must necessarily be slight and general; but the ancient ruins present altogether too remarkable a feature in the aspect of the country to be passed over in any account of

We have already observed that Mexico is a country of which comparative little is known. The jealous policy of the Spaniards rendered its geography and history almost a sealed book, during their domination; and perpetual disturbances, since the revolution, have rendered explorations, by foreign travellers, almost impracticable. Until Baron Humboldt visited the country very little was

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known of the antiquities which are so numerous in Mexico proper, while the wonderful treasures of art, which lie mouldering in Centra. America and Yucatan, were not fully revealed to us until our owr countrymen, Stephens and Norman, explored, delineated, and described them.

These remains, as well as many of those in Mexico proper, are generally referred to a people more ancient than any of those which are known even to the earliest historians of Anahuac. They cannot be the work of the Aztecs, who founded the city of Mexico, in 1325, nor is there much better ground for referring their origin to the earlier visiters from the north, the Acolhuans, Chichemecs, Toltecs, or their predecessors, the Ulmecs. They are apparently the work of a people whose existence is not recorded in any history, the cotemporaries, perhaps, of those giant architects, the shepherd kings of Egypt, the founders of those massy monuments which astonish the traveller in Memphis and Thebes.

Of the origin of the pyramid of Cholula, which we have already noticed, the Aztec chroniclers give a circumstantial account; but their date of its origin is at that remote period when the Mexicans, like the Greeks, Egyptians, and all other ancient nations, had their gods dwelling among them, the mythological age, fruitful in marvels of every kind. The great temple of Mexico, already noticed, was comparatively modern. Its existence began with the priests of the bloody religion of the Aztecs, and ended with their empire.

For an account of some of the more remarkable ruins in Mexico proper, which we subjoin, we are indebted to the lively and entertaining work of Brantz Mayer, Esq., of Baltimore, entitled, "Mexico, As it Was and As it Is." The following is extracted from his description of the ruins of the pyramid of Xochicalco.

"AT the distance of six leagues from the city of Cuernavaca lies a cerro, three hundred feet in height, which, with the ruins that crown it, is known by the name of Xochicalco, or the "Hill of Flowers." The base of this eminence is surrounded by the very distinct remains of a deep and wide ditch; its summit is attained by five spiral terraces; the walls that support them are built of stone, joined by cement, and are Ancient Mexican, from still quite perfect; and at regular distances, as if to buttress these terraces, there are remains of bulwarks shaped like the bastions of a fortification. The summit of the hill is a wide esplanade, on the eastern side of which are stil! perceptible three truncated cones, resembling the tumuli und

the Monuments.