686 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



teenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, among them 

 Le Clerc, La Hontan, and Lafiteau, attest this fact with a host of ex- 

 amples, and other notices of such maps are given by Cop way and 

 Schoolcraft. 



A much greater advance in map-making had been made in Mexico 

 and Central America centuries before the European immigration. The 

 whole Aztec kingdom was registered and mapped off at the time 

 the Spaniards came into the country. In the plat-books the crown- 

 land was colored violet, the land of the nobles red, and the common 

 lands yellow ; and the plats were so carefully executed that they were 

 to a certain extent accepted as evidence under Spanish rule. These 

 books, a remarkable result of a highly developed civilization in an 

 Indian state, were of great importance in processes, and it is possible 

 to obtain satisfactory information from them even now. Thirty-six of 

 the registry-maps are still left in the " Codex Mendoza " ; Alexander 

 von Humboldt publishes in his "Atlas of New Spain" a representa- 

 tion of a carefully delineated estate concerning which an action was 

 brought ; and Brasseur de Bourbourg and Prescott speak of maps in 

 the archives of the Aztec princes, which represented in regular order 

 the mountains, woods, rivers, cities, boundaries, roads, and coast-lines, 

 and contained valuable statistical and other information on their mar- 

 gins. Alexander von Humboldt saw, in the hands of a native of a 

 town near Tetlama, a geographical map that had been hidden in the 

 woods from the Europeans, which was made before the landing of 

 Cortez. The conquerors of Mexico themselves received from the king 

 a plan of the coast with its rivers and capes painted on cotton cloth, 

 and from the natives another map that indicated all the rivers, moun- 

 tains, and large towns from Xikalanko to Nicaragua. A fragment of 

 a very interesting historical document still exists in the library of the 

 city of Mexico. It is the ground-plan of Tenochtitlan, the estate in 

 which Montezuma II entertained his guest Cortez, and which the lat- 

 ter knew so well how to plunder. Bullock saw it, and had a copy 

 taken of it, in 1824. Aubin had in his possession, in I860, twenty-five 

 leaves of the Mexican land-register, with portraits of the kings of the 

 last period of independence, and texts added from the years 1539, 1573, 

 and 1599, with what is more important for us, three maps by the last 

 Aztec prince, Guatemozin. It was copied at his command, in 1533, 

 from older maps, and contained data from 1361. Three other maps 

 of the same brave but unfortunate ruler, which go back to 1438, were 

 copied in 1704 by the royal Spanish interpreter, Manuel Mancio. Fi- 

 nally, Peter Martyr describes a similar map, painted on white cotton 

 cloth, that was not less than thirty feet long. 



Squier and Davis state that the Toltec states Nicaragua, for in- 

 stance had books written on deer-skin, in which were marked by the 

 elders of the towns, in black and red, the boundaries of the districts, 

 the rivers, lakes, woods, and even single estates. In Peru relief -maps 





