CXIV NOTES. 



the first historian of his nation (the Aztecs), says decidedly, in the manuscripts 

 prepared by him so early as the beginning of the 16th century, that the 

 province of Teochiapan, and the whole of Guatimala, from one coast to the 

 other, was peopled by Toltecs ; and even that at the commencement of the 

 Spanish Conquest there still lived in the village of Teopixca a family who 

 boasted of their descent from Wotan. The Bishop of Chiapa, Francisco 

 Nuflez de la Vega, who was President of a Provincial-Concilium in Guatimala, 

 collected many things respecting the legends of the American Wotan in his 

 " Preambulo de las Constituciones diocesanas." Whether the tradition of the 

 first Scandinavian Odin (Odinn, Othinus) or Wuotan, said to have come from 

 the banks of the Don, has any historic foundation, is still very uncertain 

 (Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, Bd. i. S. 120 150). The identity of 

 the American and Scandinavian Wotan, which does not indeed rest solely on 

 the mere similarity of sound, still remains as doubtful as does the identity of 

 Wuotan (Odinn) and Buddha, or that of the names of the Indian founder of 

 the Buddhistic religion and the planet Budha. 



The supposed existence of a Peruvian week of seven days, so often adduced 

 as a Semitic similarity between the two continents in respect to the manner 

 of dividing time, rests, as Pater Acosta, who visited Peru soon after the 

 Spanish Conquest, had already shown (Hist, natural y moral de las Indias, 

 1591, lib. vi. cap. 3), on a mere error; and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega 

 himself corrected his earlier statement (Parte i. lib. ii. cap. 35), by saying 

 distinctly, that in each of the months, which were reckoned by the Moon, 

 there were three festival days, and that the people were to work eight days 

 and rest the ninth day (Parte i. lib. vi. cap. 2,3). The so-called Peruvian 

 weeks were therefore of nine days. (See my " v ues des Cordilleres," T. i. 

 p. 341343.) 



(so?) p. 301. Bockh iiber Philolaos, S. 102 and 117. 

 ^ 8 ) p. 304. We ought to distinguish, in the history of discoveries, be- 

 ween the epoch when a discovery was made, and that of its first publication. 

 By not attending to this distinction, discordant and erroneous dates have 

 been introduced into astronomical compendiums. Thus, for example, Hnygens 

 discovered the sixth satellite of Saturn, Titan, on the 25th of March, 

 1655, (Hugenii Opera varia, 1724, p. 523), and published the discovery for 

 the first time on the 5th of March, 1656. (Systema Saturnium, 1659, 

 p. 2.) Huygens, who had been uninterruptedly occupied with Saturn since 

 the month of March 1655, enjoyed the full and undoubted view of the open 

 ring on the 17th of December, 1657 (Sysl. Sat. p. 21), but did not publish 



