Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/755

Rh on the backs of men, or in light canoes through canals from the neighboring small salt lakes; or supplied with water sufficient for fountains, drinking, and domestic purposes, through an earthen pipe "of the size of a man's body," brought some miles "from Chapultepec;" the water adjacent to the city being then, as now, salt and unfit for use. What their manufactures could have been, with stone tools and the most primitive machinery, it is not difficult to conjecture. Probably not materially different from what the traveler may yet see at the present day in the case of the Indian woman, who seated by the wayside, with a bundle of wool under her arm and a spindle consisting of a stem of wood, one end resting in a cup formed from the shell of a gourd, dexterously and rapidly draws out and spins a coarse, but not uneven thread. What their architecture was may be inferred from the circumstance that Cortes, with his little band of less than five hundred Spaniards, leveled to the ground three quarters of the city of Tenochtitlan in the seventeen days of his siege; while of the old city of Mexico, with its reported palaces and temples, there is absolutely nothing left which is indicative of having formed a part of any grand or permanent structure.

That there was, antecedent to the Aztecs, in this country of Mexico and Central America, a superior race to which the name of Toltecs or Mayas has been applied, who built the elaborate stone structures of Yucatan and of other portions of Central America, and who, it would seem, must have been acquainted with the use of metals, can not be doubted. At a town called Tula, about fifty miles from Mexico, on the line of the Mexican Central, where the Toltecs are reported to have first settled, the traveler will see on the plaza, the lower half—i. e., from the feet to the waist—of two colossal and rude, sitting figures; also, several perfect cylindrical sections of columns, which were very curiously arranged to fit into and support each other by means of a tenon and mortise, all of stone. The material of which these objects of unquestionably great antiquity are composed, and which all archaeologists who have seen them agree are not Mexican or Aztec in their origin, is a very peculiar black basalt, so hard that a steel tool hardly makes an impression upon it. When the same traveler arrives in the city of Mexico, and is shown the three greatest archaeological treasures of American origin—namely, the great idol, "Huitzilopotchli," the "Sacrificial Stone," and the so called "Calendar" stone, now built into one of the outer walls of the cathedral—he might remark that the material of which they are all constructed is the same hard, black stone which constitutes the relics at Tula, and that neither in the large collections of the Museum of Mexico, nor anywhere else, arc there any articles, of assumed Aztec origin, composed of like material. Hence an apparently legitimate inference that the latter have a common origin with the constructions at Tula, and are relics of the Toltecs or older nations, and not of the Aztecs.