652 COSMOS. 



two thousand years earlier, had Brought the "tanned skins of 

 wild women," (of the large Gorilla apes) in order to suspend 

 them in a temple. Hernandez, the private physician of Philip 

 II., and sent by that monarch to Mexico, in order to have all 

 the vegetable and zoological curiosities of the country depicted 

 in accurate and finished drawings, was able to enlarge his col- 

 lection by copies of many very carefully executed historical 

 pictures, which had been painted at the command of Neza- 

 hualcoyotl, a king of Tezcuco,^ half a century before the arrival 

 of the Spaniards. Hernandez also availed himself of a collec- 

 tion of medicinal plants which he found still growing in the 

 celebrated old Mexican garden of Huaxtepec, which owing to 

 its vicinity to a newly established Spanish hospital,f the Con- 

 quistadores had not laid waste. Almost at this time the fossil 

 mastodon bones on the elevated plateaux of Mexico, New 

 Granada and Peru, which have since become so important 

 with respect to the theory of the successive elevation of 

 mountain chains, were collected and described. The designa- 

 tions of giant bones and fields of Giants ( Campos de Gigantes] 

 sufficiently testily the fantastic character of the early interpre- 

 tation applied to these fossils. 



* This king died in the time of the Mexican king Axayaeatl, who 

 reigned from 1464 to 1477. The learned native historian, Fernando de 

 Alva Jxtlilxochitl, whose manuscript chronicle of the Chichimeque, I 

 saw in 1803, in the palace of the Viceroy of Mexico, and of which, Mr. 

 Prescott has so ably availed himself in his work (Conquest of Mexico, 

 vol. i. pp. 61, 173 and 206; vol. iii. p. 112), was a descendant of the 

 poet king Nezahualcoyotl. The Aztec name of the historian, Fernando 

 de Alva, means Vanilla face. M. Ternaux-Compans, in 1840, caused a 

 French translation of this manuscript to be printed in Paris. The notice 

 of the long elephants' hair collected by Cadamosto occurs in Ramusio, 

 vol. i. p. 109, and in Grynoeus, cap. 43, p. 33. 



t Clavigero, Storia antica del Messico (Cesena, 1780), t. ii. p. 153. 

 There is no doubt from the accordant testimonies of Hernan Cortes 

 in his reports to the Emperor Charles V., of Bernal Diaz, Gomara, 

 Oviedo and Hernandez, that at the time of the conquest of Mon- 

 tezuma's empire, there were no menageries and botanic gardens in any 

 part of Europe which could be compared with those of Huaxtepec, Cha- 

 poltapec, Iztapalapan, and Tezcuco. (Prescott, op. cit. vol. i. p. 178; 

 vol.ii. pp. 66 and 117-121 ; vol. iii. p. 42). On the early attention which 

 is mentioned in the text as having been paid to the fossil bones in the 

 ''fields of giants," see Garcilaso, lib. ix. cap. 9; Acosta, lib. iv. cap. 30; 

 and Hernandez (ed. of 1556), t. i.cap. 32. p. 105. 



