Page:The Conquest of Mexico Volume 1.djvu/30

 "virgin birth" of Huitzilopotchli he quotes Milman: "Buddh, according to a tradition known in the West, was born of a virgin." It is regarded as an historical fact to-day that the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, was the son of Suddhodana, a chieftain of the Sakya, and his wife Maya. And, though the circumstances of his birth have been surrounded with certain miraculous phenomena, there exists no oriental tradition that he was the son of a virgin. Again, Prescott writes: "The probability of. . . communication with Eastern Asia is much strengthened by the resemblance of sacerdotal institutions," to which is the footnote: "And monastic institutions were found in Tibet and Japan from the earliest ages." Now the first monastery in Tibet was founded at Sam-yas, and the order of lamas instituted, by Padma-Sambhava in 749 A.D., which can hardly be regarded as belonging to the "earliest ages." Furthermore in matters of detail, the Tibetan "monks" stand in far closer relationship to those of the Church of Rome than to the Aztec priesthood. In fact there is practically nothing in common between them save the elementary conception of a class of men devoted professionally to the service of certain divinities.

Such then was the critical equipment which Prescott could bring to bear upon the problems, historical, ethnographical, sociological, and arch{{ae]]ological, presented by the Valley of Mexico. With regard to the problems themselves, it must be realised that the very material upon which he had to work was in the main literary. The products of the spade and, in the tropical lands, of the axe and machete were comparatively insignificant, and could hardly, at that period, be brought into true relation with literary evidence. Above all, the existence of the great Maya culture, extending over that portion of Central America divided to-day between Northern Honduras, Guatemala, British Honduras, and the Mexican States of Chiapas and Yucatan, was still unrealised by writers on America. Prescott refers, almost uneasily, to the pioneer researches of Dupaix and de Waldeck at Palenque and Uxmal, and suggests tentatively that the "mysterious" ruins there may have been erected by the Toltecs after their expulsion from Mexico. The work of Stephens and Catherwood he mentions in the preliminary notice to his appendix, but even this notable book did not provide him with the evidence which he needed in order to see the culture of the Mexican Valley in its proper light. Indeed it was not until the year 1881 that an {{c|xxiv}}