allies, that they did wrong in assisting us to destroy, because one day they would have to reconstruct with their hands the very same edifices, either for the besieged if they were to conquer, or for us Spaniards, who, in reality, now compel them to rebuild what was demolished*." In going over the Libro del Cabildo,

poly, and who, rushing on certain destruction, swore, in their energetic way, "they would follow their leader to hell," on taking possession of a fortified town in Arcot put every soul in it to death, man, woman, and child, for no other reason than that the place had been gallantly defended. Heroes are nearly the same all the world over.

But, to be sure, the poor Mexican kings were better off. Juan de Varillas, a friar of the order of Nuestra Senora de la Merced, confessed them, and comforted them in their sufferings, that they were good christians, and that they died in good preparation, seeing they were baptized: li confesso e confortò nel supplicio: ch'eglino erano buoni Cristiani, e che morirono ben disposti: ond' è manifesto ch' erano stato battezzati. (Clavigero, iii. p. 233. Note.)

It is only after considering the operations of an army in detail, and the ferocious dispositions and habits of those of which it is almost necessarily, for the greatest part, composed, that we can fully appreciate all the glory of a Cornwallis, an Abercromby, or a Moore. This is not dictated. in the spirit of a canting philosophy, nor from a foolish imagination that soldiers will ever be other than what they are. No one would wish to see them imbued with the lacrymose propensities of a modern hero of romance. It is perhaps wisely ordained, that those who fight should not be those who feel.-Trans.

* Lorenzana, p. 286.

a manuscript already mentioned by us, which contains the history of the new city of Mexico from the year 1524 to 1529, I found nothing in all the pages but names of people who appeared before the alguazils "to demand the situation (solar) on which formerly stood the house of such or such a Mexican lord." Even at present they are occupied in filling and drying up the old canals which run through the capital. The number of these canals has diminished in a particular manner since the government of the Count de Galvez, though on account of the great breadth of the streets of Mexico, the canals are less inimical to the passage of carriages than in the most part of the cities of Holland.

We may reckon among the small remains of Mexican antiquities which interest the intelligent traveller, either in the bounds of the city of Mexico, or in its environs, the ruins of the Aztec dikes (albaradones) and aqueducts; the stone of the sacrifices, adorned with a relievo which represents the triumph of a Mexican king; the great calendar monument (exposed with the foregoing at the Plaza mayor;) the colossal statue of the goddess Teoyaomiqui, stretched out in one of the galleries of the edifice of the university, and habitually covered with three or four inches of earth; the Aztec manuscripts, or hieroglyphical pictures, painted on agave paper, on stag skins and cotton-cloth, (a

valuable collection unjustly taken away from the Chevalier Boturini*, very ill preserved in the archives of the palace of the viceroys, displaying in every figure the extravagant imagination of a people who delighted to see the palpitating heart of human victims offered up to gigantic and monstrous idols); the foundations of the palace of the kings of Alcolhuacan at Tezcuco; the colossal relievo traced on the western face of the porphyritical rock called the Peñol de los Baños; as well as several other objects which recall to the intelligent observer the institutions and works of people of the Mongol race, of which descriptions and drawings will be given in the historical account of my travels to the equinoxial regions of the new continent.

The only ancient monuments in the Mexican valley which from their size or their masses can strike the eyes of an European are the remains of the two pyramids of San Juan de Teotihuacan, situated to the north-east of the lake of Tezcuco, consecrated to the sun and moon, which the Indians called Tonatiuh Ytzaqual, house of the sun, and Metzli Ytzaqual, house of the moon.

*The author of the ingenious work, Ydea de una nueva Historia general de la America Septentrional por el Caballero Boturini. Author.

Robertson gives a character of this book somewhat lower; "His idea of a new history appears to me the work of a whimsical credulous man." Vol. iii. note 36. Trans.

According to the measurements made in 1803 by a young Mexican savant, Doctor Oteyza, the first pyramid, which is the most southern, has in its present state a base of 208 metres (645 feet) in length, and 55 metres (66 Mexican varat, or 171 feet ) of perpendicular elevation. The second, the pyramid of the moon, is eleven metres || (30 feet) lower, and its base is much less. These monuments, according to the accounts of the first travellers, and from the form which they yet exhibit, were the models of the Aztec teocallis. The nations whom the Spaniards found settled in New Spain attributed the pyramids of Teotihuacan to the Toultec nation; consequently their construction goes as

* 682 feet English. Trans.

+ Velasquez found that the Mexican vara contained exactly 31 inches of the old pied du roi of Paris. The northern façade of the Hotel des Invalides at Paris is only 600 feet French in length.

180 feet English. Trans. || 36 feet English. Trans.

§ Siguenza, however, in his manuscript notes, believes them to be the work of the Olmec nation, which dwelt round the Sierra de Tlascala, called Matlacueje. If this hypothesis, of which we are unacquainted with the historical foundations, be true, these monuments would be still more ancient. For the Olmecs belong to the first nations mentioned in the Aztec chronology as existing in New Spain. It is even pretended that the Olmecs are the only nation of which the migration took place, not from the north and north-west (Mongol Asia?), but from the east (Europe?).

far back as the eighth or ninth century; for the kingdom of Tolula lasted from 667 to 1031. The faces of these edifices are to within 52 exactly placed from north to south, and from east to west. Their interior is clay, mixed with small stones. This kernel is covered with a thick wall of porous amygdaloid. We perceive, besides, traces of a bed of lime which covers the stones (the tetzontli) on the outside. Several authors of the 16th century pretend, according to an Indian tradition, that the interior of these pyramids is hollow. Boturini says that Siguenza, the Mexican geometrician, in vain endeavoured to pierce these edifices by a gallery. They formed four layers, of which three are only now perceivable, the injuries of time and the vegetation of the cactus and agaves having exercised their destructive influence on the exterior of these monuments. A stair of large hewn stones formerly led to their tops, where, according to the accounts of the first travellers, were statues covered with very thin lamina of gold. Each of the four principal layers was subdivided into small gradations of a metre* in height, of which the edges are still distinguishable, which were covered with fragments of obsidian, that were undoubtedly the edge instruments with which the Toultec and Aztec priests in their