TRADITIONS TWO SOURCES OF ACCURATE KNOWLEDGE. 93 



mitted by songs and ballads, in those nations which have attained 

 a certain degree of civilization, and had not the use of letters. 

 Unfortunately, if we except the hymns of the great monarch of 

 Tezcoco, which are of recent date, and allude to no historical fact 

 of an earlier epoch than his own times, no such Mexican remnants 

 have been transmitted to us, or published. On the other hand the 

 recollection and oral transmission of events may have been aided 

 by the hieroglyphics imperfect as they were ; thus, those of the 

 significant names of a king and of a city, together with the symbol 

 of the year, would remind the Mexicans of the history of the war 

 of that king against that city which had been early taught him 

 whilst a student in the temple." 1 



It is thus, perhaps, that the virtuoso rather than the historical 

 student has been the sufferer by the superstitious conflagrations of 

 Zumarraga and the Spanish soldiers. We have unquestionably 

 lost most of the minute events of early Aztec history. We have 

 remained ignorant of much of the internal policy of the realm, and 

 have been obliged to play the antiquarian in the discussion of dates 

 and epochs, whose perfect solution, even, would not cast a solitary 

 ray of light upon the grand problem of this continent's develop- 

 ment or population. But amid all this obscurity, ignorance, and 

 diffuseness, we have the satisfaction to know that some valuable 

 facts escaped the grasp of these destroyers, and that the grand 

 historical traditions of the empire were eagerly listened to and 

 recorded by some of the most enlightened Europeans who hastened 

 after the conquest to New Spain. The song, the story, and the 

 anecdote, handed down from sire to son in a nation which pos- 

 sessed no books, no system of writing, no letters, no alphabet, — 

 formed in reality the great chain connecting age with age, king 

 with king, family with family; — and, as the gigantic bond length- 

 ened with time, some of its links were adorned with the embel- 

 lishments of fancy, whilst others, in the dim and distant past, 

 became almost imperceptible. Nor were the conquerors and their 

 successors men devoted to the antiquities of the Mexicans with the 

 generous love of enthusiasts who delight in disclosing the means 

 by which a people emerged from the obscurity of a tribe into the 

 grandeur of a civilized nation. In most cases the only object they 

 had in magnifying, or even in manifesting the real character, 

 genius and works of the Mexicans, is to be found in their desire to 

 satisfy their country and the world that they had indeed conquered 



1 1 vol. Trans. Am. Ethnol. Soc, p. 145. Art. Mexican Hist. Chron., &c. &c, 

 by Albert Gallatin. 



