REVIEWS—A NEW HISTORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO. 449 
tected when philosophy hardly, existed as a science. But how shall we account 
for that blinking of the gross discrepancies between them? Is a love of the 
marvellous so inveterate in man that critics, even, shut their eyes to the most 
palpable contradictions ? 
“Could Mexico have then been seen as it now apnears—a modern city, built 
on an antique pattern—our authors might well have painted it in oriental colours, 
and almost fancied, too, some lingering resemblance to the great cities of the 
Moorish caliphate within its time-marked palaces. As the occupants of some 
chamber upon a house-top, in the day season, they might dream themselves, per- 
haps, io such a capital as they have fabricated for Montezuma. Domes, and 
minarets [ steeples], and elevated battlements cast strange shadows in the rarified at- 
mosphere, by moonlight, and make a picture so unreal that the visitor of to-day might 
almost fancy the actual existence of such a world as Cortez only figured. Untrue 
in fact—untrue even in fancy—his wild assertions have grown almost realities by 
passing so long unquestioned. Generation after generation allowed their taste 
and their architectural plans to be influenced by an imagined resemblance to 
something that had graced the spot before, and uncontradicted fabrications thus 
became almost truths. 
“This valley at the sea-level would have been for ever jungle, a dwelling- 
place for wild beasts, for the screech-owl and the bittern to enjoy unmolested ; 
and that such a spot, perpetually on the verge of inundation,—where the differ- 
ence between land and water can be measured by inches,—should be occupied by 
a, large city, demonstrates both the purity of the atmosphere and the uniformity 
of evaporation, which for centuries has maintained this slight elevation, But the 
proximity of the two surfaces produces disagreeable results—stagnation and de- 
composition—the festering evils of an undrained valley, though neutralized in its 
lower levels by salt and sterility. Sewerage is necessarily upon the surface—the 
drains of the city cess-pools are its street ditches, or canals. All poetic illusion 
vanishes, when from moonlight on the housetop we descend to the sober reality 
of day. Since the time of Cortez, the resources of engineering have been ex- 
hausted in attempts to establish any material change, without tunnelling the 
mountain, so as to drain Tezcuco /aguna. These very defects fulfilled the Indian 
idea of a stronghold, as they at all times insured them that security which a cir- 
eumvallation of mud and water could not furnish. Beyond this, we will not 
affirm the famous capital of the Aztecs differed materially from an ordinary Indian 
village of the first class.” 
This may serve to illustrate our meaning in characterising the new 
Historian as a famous doubter. He doubts everything; and at 
times he carries his reader along with him in his doubts. “I have 
presumed,” he says, “to doubt that water ever ran up hill; that 
navigable canals were ever fed by ‘ back-water ;’ that pyramids 
(€eocalli) could rest on a foundation of soft earth; that a canal, 
twelve feet broad by twelve feet deep, mostly below the water level, 
was ever dug by Indians with their rude implements; that gardens 
