90 ANTIQUITIES IN TENNESSEE. 



and it is probably the same plague as that which in the eleventh century forced 

 the Toltecs to continue their emigrations southwards. It is true, no doubt, that 

 the Indians of the valley of Mexico, who perished by thousands in 1761, of the 

 MatlazaJuiatl, vomited blood at the nose and mouth ; but these hoimatamses fre- 

 quently occur under the tropics, accompanying bilious (ataxique) fevers ; and they 

 were also observed in the epidemical disease which prevailed over all South America, 

 from Potosi and Oruro to Quito and Popayan, and which, from the incomplete 

 description of Uloa, was a typhus peculiar to the elevated regions of the Cordil- 

 leras." The physicians of the United States, who adopt the opinion that the yellow- 

 fever originated in the country itself, think they discover the disease in the j^ests 

 which prevailed in 1535 and 1612 among the red men of Canada and New Eng- 

 land. From the little which we know of the Matluzahuatl of the Mexicans, we 

 miglit be inclined to believe that, in both Americas, from the remotest periods, the 

 copper-colored race has been subject to a disease which, in its complications, 

 resembles in several respects the yellow fever of Vera Cruz and Philadelphia, but 

 which differs essentially from it in the facility with which it is propagated in a 

 cold zone, where the thermometer during the day remains at 10° or 12° Centi- 

 grade (50° and 53° of Fahrenheit), and in the interior of the country, on the 

 central table land, at twelve or thirteen hundred toises above the level of the sea. 



Father Torribio, a Franciscan, better known by his Mexican name of Motolinia, 

 asserts that the smallpox, at its introduction in 1520 by a negro slave of Narvaez, 

 carried off half the inhabitants of ^Mexico. 



Torqvicmada advances the hazardous opinion that, in the two Matlazahuatl epi- 

 demics of 1545 and 1576, 800,000 Indians died in the former, and 2,000,000 in 

 the latter.^ 



During the four centuries in which the monarchy of the Toltecs flourished, 

 they multiplied considerably, extending their population in every direction, found- 

 ing numerous and large cities, and building those great monuments which required 

 the united efforts of multitudes for their completion ; but the calamities which 

 happened to them in the first year of the reign of Topiltzin, A. D. 1031-1052, 

 gave a fixtal shock to their prosperity and power ; for several years their country 

 was afflicted with such a protracted and severe drought, that their fields failed to 

 yield them the necessary fruits ; the air, infected with mortal contagion, filled the 

 graves with the dead, and the minds of the survivors with consternation — a great 

 part of the natives died by famine and sickness, and the wretched remains of the 

 nation, in order to save themselves from the common calamity and from utter 

 destruction, deserted Mexico and sought relief from their misfortunes in other 

 countries. There was, therefore, in this desolating plague of the Toltecs, the 

 usual association oi famine oxid. pestilence ; and it is probable that, as in the history 

 of many other nations, the former was the cause of the latter, and that the disease 

 probably partook of the nature of the tt/phus and typhoid fevers of the present day. 

 The gentleman of Elvas, in his " Narrative of the Expedition of Hernando De 

 Soto," states that in the pleasant and fertile country, in the neighborhood of the 



» Political Essay on the Kiirgdom of New Spain, vol. i, pp. 111-118 ; vol. iv, pp. 135-137. 



