yes Soe 
MORGAN.] SAME AMONG ANCIENT MEXICANS. 101 
their mode of life, one prepared meal each day expresses very nearly all 
the people in this condition of society can do for the sustenance of mankind. 
Aithough the sedentary Village Indians were one ethnical period in 
advance of the Northern Indians, there can be but little doubt that their 
mode of life in this respect was substantially the same. Among the Aztecs 
or ancient Mexicans a dinner was provided about midday, but we have no 
satisfactory account of a breakfast or a supper habitually and regularly 
prepared. Civilization, with its diversified industries, its multiplied prod- 
ucts, and its monogamian family, affords a breakfast and supper in addi- 
tion to a dinner. It is doubtful whether they are older than civilization ; 
and even if they can be definitely traced backward into the older period of 
barbarism, there is little probability of their being found in the Middle 
period. Clavigero attempts to invest the Aztecs with a breakfast, but he 
was unable to find any evidence of a supper. ‘ After a few hours of labor 
in the morning,” he observes, “they took their breakfast, which was most 
commonly atolli, a gruel of maize, and their dinner after midday; but 
among all the historians we can find no mention of their supper.” The 
‘‘oruel of maize” here mentioned as forming usually the Aztec breakfast 
suggests the “hominy of the Iroquois,” which, like it, was not unlikely kept 
constantly prepared in every Mexican house as a lunch for the hungry. 
Two meals each day are mentioned by other Spanish authors, but as the 
Aztecs, as well as the tribes in Yucatan and Central America, were ignorant 
of the use of tables and chairs in eating their food, divided their food from 
the kettle, placing the dinner of each person usually in a separate bowl, and 
separated at their meals, the men eating first and by themselves, and the 
women and children afterwards, this similarity of usage renders it proba- 
ble they were not far removed from the Iroquois in respect to the time and 
manner of taking their food) Montezuma’s dinner, witnessed by Bernal- 
Diaz and others, and elaborately described by a number of authors, shows 
that the Aztecs had a smoking hot dinner each day, prepared regularly, 
and on a scale adequate to a large household; that the dinner of each per- 
son was placed in one bowl, and all these bowls to the number of several 
hundred were brought in and set down together upon the floor of one room, 
1History of Mexico, ii, 262. 
