OF THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 77 



The rainbow from time immemorial was a token among the 

 early Peruvians and people of Central America, that the earth 

 would not again be destroyed by a deluge. 



Not only infant baptism by water was found both in the old 

 Babylonian religion and among the Mexicans, but the offering of 

 cakes, — which is recorded by the prophet Jeremiah as part of the 

 worship of the Babylonian goddess-mother, " The Queen of 

 Heaven," — was found in the ritual of the Aztecs. 



The Mexicans hung up the heads of their sacrificed enemies ; 

 this was also a custom practiced among the Jews : " And the Lord 

 said unto Moses, ' Take all the heads of the people, and hang them 

 up before the Lord, against the sun, that the fierce anger of the 

 Lord may be turned away from Israel. Slay ye every one, his men 

 that were joined at Baal-peor.' " (Numbers, xxx : 4, 5. 



As among the Jews, the ark was a sort of portable temple in 

 which the Deity was supposed to be continually present, so among 

 the Mexicans and tribes of Honduras, an ark was held as an object 

 too sacred to be touched by any person but the priest — (Kings- 

 borough's Mexican Antiquities, page 258). 



The practice of deforming the skull and forehead by means of 

 bandages or bands was prevalent among the Egyptians and other 

 nations of antiquity ; so, too, was the custom practiced among the 

 early American races. A number of carved heads surmonted by 

 casques, and having a peculiar form of elongation, found in Stucco- 

 relief in the ruins of Palenque, are duplicated in the same form of 

 skull found on an Egyptian monument of the tomb of Rameses II, 



The Aztecs, or Toltecs, like rtie Egyptians, had progressed 

 through all the three different modes of writing, — the picture 

 writing, the symbolical, and the phonetic. They recorded all their 

 laws, their mythology, astronomical calenders, and rituals, their 

 political annuals, and their chronology. They wrote poetry and 

 cultivated orator)', and paid much attention to rhetoric. One of the 

 most important accessions gained by the Aztecs from the Toltecs 

 was their mode of dividing time. They embodied a part of the 

 knowledge thus gained by engraving an immense circular block of 

 stone with ciphers and heiroglyphics, by means of which they were 

 enabled to settle the hours of the day with precision, the period of 

 the solstices and the equinoxes, and that of the transit of the sun 



