394 



Some writers have suspected, that the Mexi 

 cans, before the reform of the calendar of Tla~ 

 lixco, had intercalated a day every four years. 

 A festival of the god of fire (Xiuhteuctli), cele- 

 brated with more solemnity in the year which 

 bore the symbol tochtli, seems to have given rise 

 to this opinion. Count Carli, whose American 

 Letters exhibit a singular mixture of just obser- 

 vations, of ingenious ideas, of mere sportive no- 

 tions, and of things incompatible with the princi- 

 ples of sound philosophy, and the true system of 

 the motions of the heavenly bodies, imagines, that 

 he has discovered, in the festivals of nine days, 

 celebrated every four years, the remains of a 

 lunar intercalation. He supposes, that the Mex- 

 ican priests computed in a year twelve lunations 

 of twenty-nine days, eight hours ; and that to 

 bring back, every four years, these years of three 

 hundred and fifty-two days to real lunar years, 

 they added nine days. This supposition is al- 

 most as vague as that of the same writer, when 

 he attributes to the celestial bodies the mistake 

 of the ancient calendars, in admitting that, some 

 thousands of years before our era, the Earth 

 finished its revolution round the Sun in three 

 hundred and sixty days*, and that a lunar 

 month was only twenty-seven days and a half. 



* Lettres Americaines, torn. 2, p. 153, 161, 167, 333, and 

 371. 



