[276] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 28-31.—Relaciones, MS., No. 11.—Veytia, Hist. antig., lib. 2, cap. 51-54.
[278] “Que venganza no es justo la procuren los Reyes, sino castigar al que lo mereciere.” MS. de Ixtlilxochitl.
[279] See Clavigero, Stor. del Messico, tom. i. p. 247.—Nezahualcoyotl’s code consisted of eighty laws, of which thirty-four only have come down to us, according to Veytia. (Hist. antig., tom. iii. p. 224, nota.) Ixtlilxochitl enumerates several of them. Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 38, and Relaciones, MS., Ordenanzas.
[280] Nowhere are these principles kept more steadily in view than in the various writings of our adopted countryman Dr. Lieber, having more or less to do with the theory of legislation. Such works could not have been produced before the nineteenth century.
[281] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 36.—Veytia, Hist. antig., lib. 3, cap. 7.—According to Zurita, the principal judges, at their general meetings every four months, constituted also a sort of parliament or córtes, for advising the king on matters of state. See his Rapport, p. 106; also ante, p. 33.
[282] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 36.—Clavigero, Stor. del Messico, tom. ii. p. 137.—Veytia, Hist. antig., lib. 3, cap. 7.—“Concurrian á este consejo las tres cabezas del imperio, en ciertos dias, á oir cantar las poesías históricas antiguas y modernas, para instruirse de toda su historia, y tambien cuando habia algun nuevo invento en cualquiera facultad, para examinarlo, aprobarlo, ó reprobarlo. Delante de las sillas de los reyes habia una gran mesa cargada de joyas de oro y plata, pedrería, plumas, y otras cosas estimables, y en los rincones de la sala muchas de mantas de todas calidades, para premios de las habilidades y estímulo de los profesores, las cuales alhajas repartian los reyes, en los dias que concurrian, á los que se aventajaban en el ejercicio ne sus facultades.” Ibid.
[283] Veytia, Hist. antig., lib. 3, cap. 7.—Clavigero, Stor. del Messico, tom. i. p. 247.—The latter author enumerates four historians, some of much repute, of the royal house of Tezcuco, descendants of the great Nezahualcoyotl. See his Account of Writers, tom. i. pp. 6-21.
[284] “En la ciudad de Tezcuco estaban los Archivos Reales de todas las cosas referidas, por haver sido la Metrópoli de todas las ciencias, usos, y buenas costumbres, porque los Reyes que fuéron de ella se preciáron de esto.” (Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., Prólogo.) It was from the poor wreck of these documents, once so carefully preserved by his ancestors, that the historian gleaned the materials, as he informs us, for his own works.
[285] “Aunque es tenida la lengua Mejicana por materna, y la Tezcucana por mas cortesana y pulida.” (Camargo, Hist. de Tlascala, MS.) “Tezcuco,” says Boturini, “where the noblemen sent their sons to acquire the most polished dialect of the Nahuatlac language, and to study poetry, moral philosophy, the heathen theology, astronomy, medicine, and history.” Idea, p. 142.
[286] “He composed sixty songs,” says the author last quoted, “which have probably perished by the incendiary hands of the ignorant.” (Idea, p. 79.) Boturini had translations of two of these in his museum (Catálogo, p. 8), and another has since come to light.
[287] Difficult as the task may be, it has been executed by the hand of a fair friend, who, while she has adhered to the Castilian with singular fidelity, has shown a grace and flexibility in her poetical movements which the Castilian version, and probably the Mexican original, cannot boast. See both translations in Appendix, 2, No. 2.
[288] Numerous specimens of this may be found in Condé’s “Dominacion de los Árabes en España.” None of them are superior to the plaintive strains of the royal Abderahman on the solitary palmtree which reminded him of the pleasant land of his birth. See Parte 2, cap. 9.
The sentiment, which is common enough, is expressed with uncommon beauty by the English poet Herrick:
And with still greater beauty, perhaps, by Racine:
It is interesting to see under what different forms the same sentiment is developed by different races and in different languages. It is an Epicurean sentiment, indeed, but its universality proves its truth to nature.
[290] Some of the provinces and places thus conquered were held by the allied powers in common; Tlacopan, however, only receiving one-fifth of the tribute. It was more usual to annex the vanquished territory to that one of the two great states to which it lay nearest. See Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 38.—Zurita, Rapport, p. 11.
[291] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 41. The same writer, in another work, calls the population of Tezcuco, at this period, double of what it was at the Conquest; founding his estimate on the royal registers, and on the numerous remains of edifices still visible in his day, in places now depopulated. “Parece en las historias que en este tiempo, antes que se destruyesen, havia doblado mas gente de la que halló al tiempo que vino Cortés, y los demas Españoles: porque yo hallo en los padrones reales, que el menor pueblo tenía 1100 vecinos, y de allí para arriba, y ahora no tienen 200 vecinos, y aun en algunas partes de todo punto se han acabado.... Como se hecha de ver en las ruinas, hasta los mas altos montes y sierras tenian sus sementeras, y casas principales para vivir y morar.” Relaciones, MS., No. 9.
[292] Torquemada has extracted the particulars of the yearly expenditure of the palace from the royal account-book, which came into the historian’s possession. The following are some of the items, namely: 4,900,300 fanegas of maize (the fanega is equal to about one hundred pounds); 2,744,000 fanegas of cacao; 8000 turkeys; 1300 baskets of salt; besides an incredible quantity of game of every kind, vegetables, condiments, etc. (Monarch. Ind., lib. 2, cap. 53.) See, also, Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 35.
[293] There were more than four hundred of these lordly residences: “Así mismo hizo edificar muchas casas y palacios para los señores y cavalleros, que asistian en su corte, cada uno conforme á la calidad y méritos de su persona, las quales llegáron á ser mas de quatrocientas tasas de señores y cavalleros de solar conocido.” Ibid., cap. 38.
[294] Bancroft, Native Races, vol. ii. p. 162, points out a mistake in translation here, Prescott having made the estado the same measure as the vara. The wall was three times a man’s stature for one half its circumference and five times a man’s stature for the other half.—M.
[295] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 36. “Esta plaza cercada de portales, y tenia así mismo por la parte del poniente otra sala grande, y muchos quartos á la redonda, que era la universidad, en donde asistian todos los poetas, históricos, y philósophos del reyno, divididos en sus claves, y academias, conforme era la facultad de cada uno, y así mismo estaban aquí los archivos reales.”
[296] The reader who is familiar with the history of the Moors in Spain must inevitably be reminded of the palace in Cordova when he peruses these pages.—M.
[297] This celebrated naturalist was sent by Philip II to New Spain, and he employed several years in compiling a voluminous work on its various natural productions, with drawings illustrating them. Although the government is said to have expended sixty thousand ducats in effecting this great object, the volumes were not published till long after the author’s death. In 1651 a mutilated edition of the part of the work relating to medical botany appeared at Rome.—The original MSS. were supposed to have been destroyed by the great fire in the Escorial, not many years after. Fortunately, another copy, in the author’s own hand, was detected by the indefatigable Muñoz, in the library of the Jesuits’ College at Madrid, in the latter part of the last century; and a beautiful edition, from the famous press of Ibarra, was published in that capital, under the patronage of government, in 1790. (Hist. Plantarum, Præfatio.—Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana Nova (Matriti, 1790), tom. iii. p. 432.) The work of Hernandez is a monument of industry and erudition, the more remarkable as being the first on this difficult subject. And, after all the additional light from the labors of later naturalists, it still holds its place as a book of the highest authority, for the perspicuity, fidelity, and thoroughness with which the multifarious topics in it are discussed.
[298] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 36.
[299] “Some of the terraces on which it stood,” says Mr. Bullock, speaking of this palace, “are still entire, and covered with cement, very hard, and equal in beauty to that found in ancient Roman buildings.... The great church, which stands close by, is almost entirely built of the materials taken from the palace, many of the sculptured stones from which may be seen in the walls, though most of the ornaments are turned inwards. Indeed, our guide informed us that whoever built a house at Tezcuco made the ruins of the palace serve as his quarry.” (Six Months in Mexico, chap. 26.) Torquemada notices the appropriation of the materials to the same purpose. Monarch. Ind., lib. 2, cap. 45.
[300] Ixtlilxochitl, MS., ubi supra.
[301] Thus, to punish the Chalcas for their rebellion, the whole population were compelled, women as well as men, says the chronicler so often quoted, to labor on the royal edifices for four years together; and large granaries were provided with stores for their maintenance in the mean time. Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 46.
[302] If the people in general were not much addicted to polygamy, the sovereign, it must be confessed,—and it was the same, we shall see, in Mexico,—made ample amends for any self-denial on the part of his subjects.
[303] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 37.
[304] The Egyptian priests managed the affair in a more courtly style, and, while they prayed that all sorts of kingly virtues might descend on the prince, they threw the blame of actual delinquencies on his ministers; thus, “not by the bitterness of reproof,” says Diodorus, “but by the allurements of praise, enticing him to an honest way of life.” Lib. 1, cap. 70.
[305] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 42.—See Appendix, Part 2, No. 3, for the original description of this royal residence.
[306] “Quinientos y veynte escalones.” Davilla Padilla, Historia de la Provincia de Santiago (Madrid, 1596), lib. 2, cap. 81.—This writer, who lived in the sixteenth century, counted the steps himself. Those which were not cut in the rock were crumbling into ruins, as, indeed, every part of the establishment was even then far gone to decay.
[307] On the summit of the mount, according to Padilla, stood an image of a coyotl,—an animal resembling a fox,—which, according to tradition, represented an Indian famous for his fasts. It was destroyed by that stanch iconoclast, Bishop Zumárraga, as a relic of idolatry. (Hist. de Santiago, lib. 2, cap. 81.) This figure was, no doubt, the emblem of Nezahualcoyotl himself, whose name, as elsewhere noticed, signified “hungry fox.”{*}
{*} [“Fasting coyote.” This animal, “resembling a fox,” is familiar enough to those who dwell in our far Western States.—M.]
[308] [Bancroft, Native Races, ii. p. 171, says these figures were not statues but were all cut on the face of the rock border.—M.]
[309] “Hecho de una peña un leon de mas de dos brazas de largo con sus alas y plumas: estaba hechado y mirando á la parte del oriente, en cuia boca asomaba un rostro, que era el mismo retrato del Rey.” Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 42.
[310] Bullock speaks of a beautiful basin, twelve feet long by eight wide, having a well five feet by four deep in the centre, etc., etc. Whether truth lies in the bottom of this well is not so clear. Latrobe describes the baths as “two singular basins, perhaps two feet and a half in diameter, not large enough for any monarch bigger than Oberon to take a duck in.” (Comp. Six Months in Mexico, chap. 26; and Rambler in Mexico, Let. 7.) Ward speaks much to the same purpose (Mexico in 1827 (London, 1828), vol. ii. p. 296), which agrees with verbal accounts I have received of the same spot.{*}
{*} [Mayer, “Mexico as it Was and Is,” gives a picture of this “bath,” p. 234.—M.]
[311] “Gradas hechas de la misma peña tan bien gravadas y lizas que parecian espejos.” (Ixtlilxochitl, MS., ubi supra.) The travellers just cited notice the beautiful polish still visible in the porphyry.
[312] Padilla saw entire pieces of cedar among the ruins, ninety feet long and four in diameter. Some of the massive portals, he observed, were made of a single stone. (Hist. de Santiago, lib. 11, cap. 81.) Peter Martyr notices an enormous wooden beam, used in the construction of the palaces of Tezcuco, which was one hundred and twenty feet long by eight feet in diameter! The accounts of this and similar huge pieces of timber were so astonishing, he adds, that he could not have received them except on the most unexceptionable testimony. De Orbe Novo, dec. 5, cap. 10.{*}
{*} [Those who have seen the giant Sequoias of California can easily believe in those “enormous wooden beams.” The “Grizzly Giant,” still standing in the Mariposa grove, is two hundred and seventy-five feet high and considerably more than thirty feet in diameter at the ground. Eleven feet from the ground it is more than sixty-four feet in circumference. The Sequoias were not discovered until almost ten years after Prescott wrote this note.—M.]
[313] It is much to be regretted that the Mexican government should not take a deeper interest in the Indian antiquities. What might not be effected by a few hands drawn from the idle garrisons of some of the neighboring towns and employed in excavating this ground, “the Mount Palatine” of Mexico! But, unhappily, the age of violence has been succeeded by one of apathy.
[314] “They are doubtless,” says Mr. Latrobe, speaking of what he calls “these inexplicable ruins,” “rather of Toltec than Aztec origin, and, perhaps, with still more probability, attributable to a people of an age yet more remote.” (Rambler in Mexico, Let. 7.) “I am of opinion,” says Mr. Bullock, “that these were antiquities prior to the discovery of America, and erected by a people whose history was lost even before the building of the city of Mexico.—Who can solve this difficulty?” (Six Months in Mexico, ubi supra.) The reader who takes Ixtlilxochitl for his guide will have no great trouble in solving it. He will find here, as he might, probably, in some other instances, that one need go little higher than the Conquest for the origin of antiquities which claim to be coeval with Phœnicia and ancient Egypt.
[315] Zurita, Rapport, p. 12.
[316] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 43.
[317] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 43.
[318] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 43.
[319] “En traje de cazador (que lo acostumbraba á hacer muy de ordinario), saliendo á solas, y disfrazado para que no fuese conocido, á reconocer las faltas y necesidad que havia en la república para remediarlas.” Idem, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 46.
[320] “Un hombresillo miserable, pues quita á los hombres lo que Dios á manos llenas les da.” Ixtlilxochitl, loc. cit.
[321] Ibid., cap. 46.
[322] “Porque las paredes oian.” (Ixtlilxochitl, loc. cit.) A European proverb among the American aborigines looks too strange not to make one suspect the hand of the chronicler.
[323] “Le dijo, que con aquello poco le bastaba, y viviria bien aventurado; y él, con toda la máquina que le parecia que tenia arto, no tenia nada; y así lo despidió.” Ixtlilxochitl, loc. cit.
[324] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 46.
[325] “Verdaderamente los Dioses que io adoro, que son ídolos de piedra que no hablan, ni sienten, no pudiéron hacer ni formar la hermosura del cielo, el sol, luna, y estrellas que lo hermosean, y dan luz á la tierra, rios, aguas y fuentes, árboles, y plantas que la hermosean, las gentes que la poseen, y todo lo criado; algun Dios muy poderoso, oculto, y no conocido es el Criador de todo el universo. El solo es él que puede consolarme en mi afliccion, y socorrerme en tan grande angustia como mi corazon siente.” MS. de Ixtlilxochitl.
[326] MS. de Ixtlilxochitl.—The manuscript here quoted is one of the many left by the author on the antiquities of his country, and forms part of a voluminous compilation made in Mexico by Father Vega, in 1792, by order of the Spanish government. See Appendix, Part 2, No. 2.
[327] “Al Dios no conocido, causa de las causas.” MS. de Ixtlilxochitl.
[328] Their earliest temples were dedicated to the sun. The moon they worshipped as his wife, and the stars as his sisters. (Veytia, Hist. antig., tom. i. cap. 25.) The ruins still existing at Teotihuacan, about seven leagues from Mexico, are supposed to have been temples raised by this ancient people in honor of the two great deities. Boturini, Idea, p. 42.
[329] MS. de Ixtlilxochitl.—“This was evidently a gong,” says Mr. Ranking, who treads with enviable confidence over the “suppositos cineres” in the path of the antiquary. See his Historical Researches on the Conquest of Peru, Mexico, etc., by the Mongols (London, 1827), p. 310.
[330] “Toda la redondez de la tierra es un sepulcro: no hay cosa que sustente que con título de piedad no la esconda y entierre. Corren los rios, los arroyos, las fuentes, y las aguas, y ningunas retroceden para sus alegres nacimientos: aceléranse con ansia para los vastos dominios de Tlulóca [Neptuno], y cuanto mas se arriman á sus dilatadas márgenes, tanto mas van labrando las melancólicas urnas para sepultarse. Lo que fué ayer no es hoy, ni lo de hoy se afianza que será mañana.”
[331] “Aspiremos al cielo, que allí todo es eterno y nada se corrompe.”
[332] “El horror del sepulcro es lisongera cuna para él, y las funestas sombras, brillantes luces para los astros.”—The original text and a Spanish translation of this poem first appeared, I believe, in a work of Grenados y Galvez. (Tardes Americanas (México, 1778), p. 90, et seq.) The original is in the Otomi tongue, and both, together with a French version, have been inserted by M. Ternaux-Compans in the Appendix to his translation of Ixtlilxochitl’s Hist. des Chichimèques (tom. i. pp. 359-367). Bustamante, who has, also, published the Spanish version in his Galería de antiguos Príncipes Mejicanos (Puebla, 1821, pp. 16, 17), calls it the “Ode of the Flower,” which was recited at a banquet of the great Tezcucan nobles. If this last, however, be the same mentioned by Torquemada (Monarch. Ind., lib. 2, cap. 45), it must have been written in the Tezcucan tongue; and, indeed, it is not probable that the Otomi, an Indian dialect, so distinct from the languages of Anahuac, however well understood by the royal poet, could have been comprehended by a miscellaneous audience of his countrymen.
[333] An approximation to a date is the most one can hope to arrive at with Ixtlilxochitl, who has entangled his chronology in a manner beyond my skill to unravel. Thus, after telling us that Nezahualcoyotl was fifteen years old when his father was slain in 1418, he says he died at the age of seventy-one, in 1462. Instar omnium. Comp. Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 18, 19, 49.
[334] MS. de Ixtlilxochitl,—also Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 49.
[335] “No consentiendo que haya sacrificios de gente humana, que Dios se enoja de ello, castigando con rigor á los que lo hicieren; que el dolor que llevo es no tener luz, ni conocimiento, ni ser merecedor de conocer tan gran Dios, el qual tengo por cierto que ya que los presentes no lo conozcan, ha de venir tiempo en que sea conocido y adorado en esta tierra.” MS. de Ixtlilxochitl.
[336] Idem, ubi supra; also Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 49.
[337] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 49.
[338] “Solia amonestar á sus hijos en secreto que no adorasen á aquellas figuras de ídolos, y que aquello que hiciesen en público fuese solo por cumplimiento.” Ixtlilxochitl.
[339] Idem, ubi supra.
[340] The name Nezahualpilli signifies “the prince for whom one has fasted,”—in allusion, no doubt, to the long fast of his father previous to his birth. (See Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 45.) I have explained the meaning of the equally euphonious name of his parent, Nezahualcoyotl. (Ante, ch. 4.) If it be true that
it is no less certain that such names as those of the two Tezcucan princes, so difficult to be pronounced or remembered by a European, are most unfavorable to immortality.
[341] “De las concubinas la que mas privó con el rey fué la que llamaban la Señora de Tula, no por linage, sino porque era hija de un mercader, y era tan sabia que competia con el rey y con los mas sabios de su reyno, y era en la poesía muy aventajada, que con estas gracias y dones naturales tenia al rey muy sugeto á su voluntad de tal manera que lo que queria alcanzaba de él, y así vivia sola por si con grande aparato y magestad en unos palacios que el rey le mandó edificar.” Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 57.
[342] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 67.—The Tezcucan historian records several appalling examples of this severity,—one in particular, in relation to his guilty wife. The story, reminding one of the tales of an Oriental harem, has been translated for the Appendix, Part 2, No. 4. See also Torquemada (Monarch. Ind., lib. 2, cap. 66), and Zurita (Rapport, pp. 108, 109). He was the terror, in particular, of all unjust magistrates. They had little favor to expect from the man who could stifle the voice of nature in his own bosom in obedience to the laws. As Suetonius said of a prince who had not his virtue, “Vehemens et in coercendis quidem delictis immodicus.” Vita Galbæ, sec. 9.
[343] Torquemada saw the remains of this, or what passed for such, in his day. Monarch. Ind., lib. 2, cap. 64.
[344] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 73, 74.—This sudden transfer of empire from the Tezcucans, at the close of the reigns of two of their ablest monarchs, is so improbable that one cannot but doubt if they ever possessed it,—at least to the extent claimed by the patriotic historian. See ante, chap. 1, note 25, and the corresponding text.
[345] Ibid., cap. 72.—The reader will find a particular account of these prodigies, better authenticated than most miracles, in a future page of this history.
[346] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 75.—Or, rather, at the age of fifty, if the historian is right in placing his birth, as he does in a preceding chapter, in 1465. (See cap. 46.) It is not easy to decide what is true, when the writer does not take the trouble to be true to himself.
[347] His obsequies were celebrated with sanguinary pomp. Two hundred male and one hundred female slaves were sacrificed at his tomb. His body was consumed, amidst a heap of jewels, precious stuffs, and incense, on a funeral pile; and the ashes, deposited in a golden urn, were placed in the great temple of Huitzilopochtli, for whose worship the king, notwithstanding the lessons of his father, had some partiality. Ixtlilxochitl.
[348] [Ixtlilxochitl (born about 1568) wrote in the early part of the seventeenth century. A certificate which he presented to the viceroy bears the date of November 18, 1608. The error is apparently a clerical one; though a previous passage in the text seems to indicate some confusion on the author’s part.]
[349] [Señor Ramirez objects to this remark, on the ground that, however obscure the hieroglyphics may now seem, at the time of Ixtlilxochitl they were, in his language, “as plain as our letters to those who were acquainted with them.” Notas y Esclarecimientos, p. 10.—K.]
[350] The names of many animals in the New World, indeed, have been frequently borrowed from the Old; but the species are very different. “When the Spaniards landed in America,” says an eminent naturalist, “they did not find a single animal they were acquainted with; not one of the quadrupeds of Europe, Asia, or Africa.” Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (London, 1819), p. 250.
[351] Acosta, lib. 1, cap. 16.
[352] [The existence at some former period of such an island, or rather continent, seems to be regarded by geologists as a well-attested fact. But few would admit that its subsidence can have taken place through any sudden convulsion or within the period of human existence. Such, however, is the theory maintained by M. Brasseur de Bourbourg, who dates the event “six or seven thousand years ago,” and believes that the traditions of it have been faithfully preserved. This is the great cataclysm with which all mythology begins. It may be traced through the myths of Greece, Egypt, India, and America, all being identical and having a common origin. It is the subject of the Teo-Amoxtli, of which several of the Mexican manuscripts, the Borgian and Dresden Codices in particular, are the hieroglyphical transcriptions, and of which “the actual letter,” “in the Nahuatlac language,” is found in a manuscript in Boturini’s Collection. This manuscript is “in appearance” a history of the Toltecs and of the kings of Colhuacan and Mexico; but “under the ciphers of a fastidious chronology, under the recital more or less animated of the Toltec history, are concealed the profoundest mysteries concerning the geological origin of the world in its existing form and the cradle of the religions of antiquity.” The Toltecs are “telluric powers, agents of the subterranean fire;” they are identical with the Cabiri, who reappear as the Cyclops, having “hollowed an eye in their forehead; that is to say, raised themselves with masses of earth above the surface and filled the craters of the volcanoes with fire.” “The Chichimecs and the Aztecs are also symbolical names, borrowed from the forces of nature.” Tollan, “the marshy or reedy place,” was “the low, fertile region” now covered by the Gulf of Mexico. Quetzalcoatl is “merely the personification of the land swallowed up by the ocean.” Tlapallan, Aztlan, and other names are similarly explained. Osiris, Pan, Hercules, and Bacchus have their respective parts assigned to them; for “not only all the sources of ancient mythology, but even the most mysterious details, even the obscurest enigmas, with which that mythology is enveloped, are to be sought in the two mediterraneans hollowed out by the cataclysm, and in the islands, great and small, which separate them from the ocean.” (Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique.) There can be no refutation of such a theory, or of the assumptions on which it rests; but it may be proper to remark that its author has not succeeded in deciphering a single hierogiyphical character, and has published no translation of the real or supposed Teo-Amoxtli,—a point on which some misapprehension seems to exist.—K.]
[353] Count Carli shows much ingenuity and learning in support of the famous Egyptian tradition, recorded by Plato in his “Timæus,”—of the good faith of which the Italian philosopher nothing doubts. Lettres Améric., tom. ii. let. 36-39.
[354] Garcia, Orígen de los Indios de el nuevo Mundo (Madrid, 1729), cap. 4.
[355] Torquemada, Monarch. Ind., lib. 1, cap. 8.
[356] Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (London, 1826), vol. i. p. 81, et seq.—He may find an orthodox authority of respectable antiquity, for a similar hypothesis, in St. Augustine, who plainly intimates his belief that, “as by God’s command, at the time of the creation, the earth brought forth the living creature after his kind, so a similar process must have taken place after the deluge, in islands too remote to be reached by animals from the continent.” De Civitate Dei, ap. Opera (Parisiis, 1636), tom. v. p. 987.
[357] Beechey, Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait (London, 1831), Part 2, Appendix.—Humboldt, Examen critique de l’Histoire de la Géographie du Nouveau-Continent (Paris, 1837), tom. ii. p. 58.
[358] Whatever skepticism may have been entertained as to the visit of the Northmen, in the eleventh century, to the coasts of the great continent, it is probably set at rest in the minds of most scholars since the publication of the original documents by the Royal Society at Copenhagen. (See, in particular, Antiquitates Americanæ (Hafniæ, 1837), pp. 79-200.) How far south they penetrated is not so easily settled.