225 



sacred rights of mankind, there exist laws, which 

 sanction the slavery of the blacks, which permit 

 the planter to tear the child from its mothers 

 arms, to sell it in a distant land. These con- 

 siderations prove to us, and the fact is not very 

 consolatory, that whole nations may advance 

 rapidly towards civilization, while their particu- 

 lar institutions, and their religious rites, retain 

 the marks of their original barbarism. 



Number 8 indicates the ceremony of kindling 

 the new fire, at the period of the procession 

 which was made every fifty-two years to the 

 summit of a mountain near Iztapalapan. 



At the end of each cycle the intercalation was 

 made, sometimes of twelve, and at others of thir- 

 teen days. The people, expecting at the same time 

 the fourth destruction of the Sun and the Earth, 

 extinguished all the fires ; till, at the beginning 

 of the new cycle, the priests lighted them anew. 

 The painting represents a victim stretched on 

 the stone of sacrifice, having a wooden disk on 

 the breast, which the teopixqui inflames by rub- 

 bing. The hieroglyphic of the starry sky, which 

 we see in the preceding page of the Borgian 

 collection, seems to have a reference to the cul- 

 mination of the Pleiades. We shall treat farther 

 on, in the explanation of the twenty-third plate, 

 of the connexion, which, it is said, existed be- 

 tween this culmination and the beginning of 

 the cycle. 



VOL. XIII. Q 



