Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/100



HILE the Mexicans built temples to the sun and the moon like those in which their ancestors worshiped in Asia and retained many of the religious forms which prevailed there, they forgot many other things which had been known in the Old World from the earliest ages. In the book of Job iron is spoken of as taken out of the earth; in Mexico mountains of iron-ore are found, but no use was made of it until Europeans showed the people what to do with this most valuable of metals.

Antediluvians like Jabal, "the father of all such as dwell in tents and such as have cattle," and old Tubal Cain, who "worked in brass and iron," would have looked upon the Mexicans as far behind the times in which they lived. The farmers of ancient Syria, such as Gideon and Oman the Jebusite, taught oxen to tread out the grain on their threshing-floors; the Mexicans had never heard of such a thing. Of all the vast herds of cattle which roamed their uplands, not one had ever been tamed. There was not a beast of burden in all Mexico, neither had the people any idea that the milk of cows and of goats was good for human food.

The horse was unknown by the Mexicans until they saw those brought from Cuba by Cortez for the use of his cavalry. For a long time the Indians looked upon