Note 323 — Chapter I

One is confirmed in this inference by comparing the two maps at the end of the first edition of Bullock’s “Mexico;” one of the modern city, the other of the ancient, taken from Boturini’s museum, and showing its regular arrangement of streets and canals; as regular, indeed, as the squares on a chess-board.{**}

{**} [The doubts so often excited by the descriptions of ancient Mexico in the accounts of the Spanish discoverers, like the similar incredulity formerly entertained in regard to the narrations of Herodotus, are dispelled by a critical investigation in conjunction with the results of modern explorations. Among recent travellers, Mr. Edward B. Tylor, whose learning and acumen have been displayed in various ethnological studies, is entitled to especial confidence. In company with Mr. Christy, the well-known collector, he examined the ploughed fields in the neighborhood of Mexico, making repeated trials whether it was possible to stand in any spot where no relic of the former population was within reach. “But this,” he says, “we could not do. Everywhere the ground was full of unglazed pottery and obsidian.” “We noticed by the sides of the road, and where ditches had been cut, numbers of old Mexican stone floors covered with stucco. The earth has accumulated above them to the depth of two or three feet, so that their position is like that of the Roman pavements so often found in Europe; and we may guess, from what we saw exposed, how great must be the number of such remains still hidden, and how vast a population must once have inhabited this plain, now almost deserted.” “When we left England,” he adds, “we both doubted the accounts of the historians of the Conquest, believing that they had exaggerated the numbers of the population, and the size of the cities, from a natural desire to make the most of their victories, and to write as wonderful a history as they could, as historians are prone to do. But our examination of Mexican remains soon induced us to withdraw this accusation, and even made us inclined to blame the chroniclers for having had no eyes for the wonderful things that surrounded them. I do not mean by this that we felt inclined to swallow the monstrous exaggeration of Solís and Gomara and other Spanish chroniclers, who seemed to think that it was as easy to say a thousand as a hundred, and that it sounded much better. But when this class of writers are set aside, and the more valuable authorities severely criticised, it does not seem to us that the history thus extracted from these sources is much less reliable than European history of the same period. There is, perhaps, no better way of expressing this opinion than to say that what we saw of Mexico tended generally to confirm Prescott’s History of the Conquest, and but seldom to make his statements appear to us improbable.” Anahuac, p. 147.—K.]