AN ECONOMIC STUDY OF MEXICO. 735 



ported 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 Chapulte- 

 pec ; " 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 bv 

 the wayside, with a bundle of wool under her arm and a spindle con- 

 sisting 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 Mexi- 

 co and Central America, a superior race to which the name of Tol- 

 tecs or Mayas has been applied, who built the elaborate stone struct- 

 ures 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 col- 

 umns, which were very curiously arranged to fit into and support 

 each other by means of a tenon and mortise, all of stone. The ma- 

 terial 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 ba- 

 salt, 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, " Huitzilopochtli," 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 Mexi- 

 co, nor anywhere else, are 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. 



