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or stone, and in their form somewhat resembled the pyramidal structures of ancient Egypt. The bases of many of them were more thar a hundred feet square, and they towered to a still greater height. They were distributed into four or five stories, each of smaller dimensions than that below. The ascent was by a flight of steps, at an angle of the pyramid on the outside. This led to a sort of terrace, or gallery, at the base of the second story, which passed quite round the building to another flight of stairs, commencing also at the same angle as the preceding and directly over it, and leading to a similar terrace, so that one had to make a circuit of the temple several times before reaching the summit. In some instances the stairway led directly up the centre of the western face of the building. The top was a broad area on which were erected one or two towers, forty feet high, the sanctuaries, in which stood the sacred images of the presiding deities. Before these towers stood the dreadful stone of sacrifice, and two lofty altars, on which fires were kept as inextinguishable as those in the temple of Vesta. There were said to be six hundred of these altars on smaller buildings within the inclosure of the great temple of Mexico, which with those on the sacred edifices in other parts of the city, shed a brilliant illumination over its streets, through the darkest night.

"ONE of their most important festivals was that in honour of the god Tezcatlipoca, whose rank was inferior only to that of the Supreme Being. He was called the soul of the world, and supposed to have been its creator. He was depicted as a handsome man, endowed with perpetual youth. A year before the intended sacrifice, a captive distinguished for his personal beauty, and without a blemish on his body, was selected to represent this deity. Certain tutors took charge of him, and instructed him how to perform his new part with becoming grace and dignity. He was arrayed in a splendid dress, regaled with incense, and with a profusion of sweet scented flowers, of which the ancient Mexicans were as fond as their descendants at the present day. When he went abroad, he was attended by a train of the royal pages, and, as he halted in the streets to play some favourite melody, the crowd prostrated themselves before him, and did him homage, as the representative of their good deity. In this way he led an easy luxurious life, till within a month of his sacrifice. Four beautiful girls, bearing the names of the principal goddesses, were then selected to share the honours of his bed, and with them he

Ancient Mexican, from
Stephens.

continued to live in idle dalliance, feasted at the banquets of the principal nobles, who paid him all the honours of a divinity.

"At length the fatal day of sacrifice arrived. The term of his short-lived glories was at an end. He was stripped of his gaudy apparel, and bade adieu to the fair partners of his revelries. One of the royal barges transported him across the lake to a temple which rose on its margin, about a league from the city. Hither the inha bitants of the capital flocked, to witness the consummation of the ceremonies. As the sad procession wound up the sides of the pyra mid, the unhappy victim threw away his gay chaplet of flowers, and broke in pieces the musical instruments with which he had solaced the hours of captivity. On the summit he was received by six priests, whose long and matted locks flowed disorderly over their sable robes, covered with hieroglyphical scrolls of mystic import. They led him to the sacrificial stone, a huge block of jasper, with its upper surface somewhat convex. On this the prisoner was stretched. Five priests secured his head and his limbs; while the sixth clad in a scarlet mantle, emblematic of his bloody office, dexterously opened the breast of the wretched victim with a sharp razor of itztli,—a volcanic substance, hard as flint,-and inserting his hand in the wound, tore out the palpitating heart. The minister of death, first holding this up towards the sun, an object of worship throughou

Anahuac, cast it at the feet of the deity to whom the temple was devoted, while the multitudes below prostrated themselves in humble adoration. The tragic story of this prisoner was expounded by the priests as the type of human destiny, which brilliant in its commencement, too often closes in sorrow and disaster."*

This was the ordinary mode of human sacrifice. Another, which has been termed the gladiatorial sacrifice, was conducted in this manThe victim, being chained by one foot, was compelled to fight a succession of champions. If he vanquished them all, he escaped. If he failed, his life, of course, paid the forfeit.

ner.

The Aztecs were acquainted with all kinds of hieroglyphical writing, but they confined themselves principally to the lowest stage of figurative or picture writing. Had their empire continued long in existence, they would probably have followed the course of the Egyptians, and used the system known by the term phonetic, in which signs are made to represent sounds. The conquest of their empire made them acquainted with the alphabetical system of the Spaniards. However clumsy their system was, it sufficed for recording their

laws, domestic regulations, public decrees, mythology, calendars, rituals, and historical annals. Their system of chronology was so good that they could specify with accuracy the dates of the most important events in their history. In order to estimate aright the literature of the people, the picture writing should be considered in connection with the traditions of the priests who taught it, and to which it was only auxiliary. These manuscripts were made of the leaves of the aloe chiefly, but cotton cloth, prepared skins, and a composition of silk and gum were made to answer the purpose. They were sometimes made into rolls, but most frequently folded up, like a folding screen, into volumes, the pages of which might be referred to and read separately. Unfortunately the Spaniards looked upon these manuscripts as magic scrolls, and destroyed them as the symbols of superstition. Don Juan de Zumarraga, the first archbishop of Mexico, collected from all parts of the empire, and especially from the national archives in Tezcuco, a "mountain heap" of these works, and reduced them all to ashes. The Spanish soldiers vied with each other in imitating this example, and the surviving memorials of Mexican civilization are extremely rare, and scattered over the world, excepting in Spain, where there are none.

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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.†

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.