60 DR. DANIEL WILSON ON 
woven with the religious system and historical chronology of the Egyptians, abun- 
dantly prove the correction of the Egyptian Calendar by accumulated experience, at a date 
long anterior to the resort of the Greek astronomer, Thales, to Egypt. At the close of the 
fifteenth century, the Aztecs had learned to correct their calendar to solar time; but 
their cycle was one of only fifty two years. The Peruvians also had their recurrent religious 
festivals connected with the adjustment of their sacred calendar to solar time; but 
the geographical position of Peru, with Quito, its holy city, lying immediately under the 
equator, greatly simplified the process by which they regulated their religious festivals by 
the solstices and equinoxes ; and the facilities which their equatorial position afforded for 
determining the few indispensable periods in their calendar removed all stimulus to 
further progress. The religion of the state, moreover, was based on the divine honours 
paid to the sun ; eclipses were regarded with the same superstitious dread as among the 
rudest savage nations ; and the conservatism of an established national creed must have 
proved peculiarly unfavorable to astronomical science. The impediments to Galileo's 
observations were trifling compared with those which must have beset the Inca priest who 
ventured to question the diurnal revolution of the sun round the earth: or to solve the 
awful mystery of an eclipse by so simple an explanation as the interposition of the moon 
between the sun and the earth. The Mexican Calendar Stone embodies evidence of greater 
knowledge ; and was believed by Humboldt to indicate unmistakeable relations to the 
ancient science of South-Eastern Asia. It is of more importance here to note the shortness 
of the Mexican cycle, and the small amount of error in their deviation from true solar time, 
as compared with the European calendar at the time when the Spaniards first 
intruded on Montezuma’s rule. That the Spaniards were ten days in error, as com- 
pared with the Aztec reckoning, only proves the length of time during which error 
had been accumulating in the reformed Julian calendar of Europe; and so tends 
to confirm the idea that the civilisation of the Mexicans was of no very great anti- 
quity. The whole evidence supplied by Northern archeology proves that in so far 
as that civilisation was of foreign origin, they must have derived it from the South, 
where alike in Central and in Southern America, diverse races, and a native civilisation 
replete with elements of progress, have left behind them many enduring memorials of 
skill and ingenuity. But the extremely slight and very partial traces of its influence 
on any people of the Northern continent would of its self suffice to awaken doubts as to its 
long duration. The civilisation of Greece and Rome did indeed exercise no direct influence 
on transalpine Europe; but long centuries before the Romans crossed the Alps, as the dis- 
closures of the lake villages, the crannoges, the kitchen middens, and the sepulchral 
mounds of Central and Northern Europe prove, the nations beyond their ken were 
familar with weaving, 
agriculturists, had domesticated animals, acquired systems of phonetic writing, and learned 
and with the ceramic and metallurgic arts ; were far advanced as 
the value of a currency of the precious metals. 
Midway between North America with its unredeemed barbarism, and the southern 
seats of a native American civilisation, Mexico represents, as I believe, the first con- 
tact of the latter with the former. A gleam of light was just begining to dawn 
on the horizon of the Northern continent, The long night of its Dark Ages was coming 
to a close, when the intrusion of the Spaniards abruptly arrested the incipient civi- 
lization; and began the displacement of its aborigines and the repetition of the Aryan 
