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but the upper jaw bone is furnished with incisive 

 teeth. The muzzle of the tapir is no doubt 

 somewhat longer than the snout of our swine, 

 but there is a great distance from the muzzle of 

 the tapir to the trunk figured in the Codex Bor- 

 gianus. Had the people of Aztlan, sprung from 

 Asiatic origin, preserved some vague notions of 

 elephants ? or, which appears to me much less 

 probable, did their traditions go back to the 

 period, when America was yet peopled with those 

 gigantic animals, the petrified skeletons of which 

 are found buried in the marly lands even on the 

 ridge of the Mexican Cordilleras ? May there 

 not also exist, in the north-west part of the New 

 Continent, in countries which have been visited 

 neither by Hearne, Mackenzie, nor Lewis, some 

 unknown animal of this kind, which, from the 

 configuration of its trunk, holds the middle place 

 between the elephant and the tapir? The 

 hieroglyphics of the days, which surround the 

 group figured in the forty-ninth page of the col- 

 lection of Veletri, clearly indicate, that this sacri- 

 fice was made at the end of the year, after the 

 nemontemi, or complementary days. The tem- 

 ple of the Sun reminds us of the worship of a 

 mild and humane people, the Peruvians. That 

 worship, in which no other offerings were made 

 to the divinity than flowers, incense, and the first 

 fruits of their harvests, existed without doubt at 

 Mexico to the beginning of the fourteenth cen- 



