Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/119

Rh by two pieces of light wood. For paper, agave-leaves were used, and sometimes a piece of white cotton cloth or a neatly-dressed deerskin. Strips of these, one or two feet broad and from twenty to thirty feet long, were neatly joined together. The folds in these were the pages, and the boards at each end were the cover, of the book.

The Aztec language was copious and polished, and the orators of the tribe were very eloquent in the use of it. The words were often long, some of them having fifteen syllables. Besides this language, there were many others spoken; some have counted thirty-five dialects at the time of the conquest. Tradition says that the poet-chieftain Hungry Fox was the author of sixty hymns to the true God, only a very few of which, however, have come down to our time. Be this as it may, it is not likely that any of these compositions were written until the Roman alphabet came into use among his people, but were preserved in the memories of his followers. In writing figures the Aztecs expressed a small number by circles or by units. A tiny flag represented the number 20; a feather was 400; a sack, 8000; a flag with two cross-lines was 10, and the same picture with three dots beside it stood for 24. Records of the grain and other products which were furnished for the use of large Aztec communities are still preserved.

Nothing so well shows the high grade of civilization to which these Indians attained as their system for the measurement of time; this, it is supposed, they inherited from the Toltecs. They had discovered the exact length of the solar or tropical year, and the necessity of leap-years in order to bring their time up to the seasons. They divided this year of three hundred and sixty-five