Note 829 — Chapter III

Brinton’s main statement is in his Were the Toltecs an historic nationality? Read before the American Philosophical Society, Sept. 2, 1887 (Phila., 1887); published also in their Proceedings, 1887, p. 229. Cf. also Brinton’s Amer. Hero. Myths (Phil., 1882), p. 86, where he throws discredit on the existence of the alleged Toltec king Quetzalcoatl (whom Sahagún keeps distinct from the mythical demi-god); and earlier, in his Myths of the New World (p. 29), he had suggested that the name Toltec might have “a merely mythical signification.” Charnay, who makes the Toltecs a Nahuan tribe, had defended their historical status in a paper on “La Civilisation Tolteque,” in the Revue d’Ethnographie (iv., 1885); and again, two years later, in the same periodical, he reviewed adversely Brinton’s arguments. (Cf. Saturday Review, lxiii. 843.) Otto Stoll, in his Guatemala, Reisen und Schilderungen (Leipzig, 1886), is another who rejects the old theory.