HISTORY OF MEXICO. 



93 



SECT. II. 



Who were the Peoplers of America. 



THOSE who queftion the authority of the facred 

 writings fay the Americans derive not their origin from 

 Adam and Noah, and believe, or feign to believe, that 

 as God created Adam that he might be the father of the 

 Afiatics, alfo made before or after him other men, that 

 they might be the patriarchs of the Africans, Europeans, 

 and Americans. This does not arraign the authority 

 of the facred writings, fays a modern author (#), becaufe 

 although Mofes makes mention of no other firft patri- 

 arch than Adam, it was owing to his having undertaken 

 to write the hiftory of no other people than the Israelites. 

 But this is contrary to the tradition of the Americans, 

 who in their paintings and in their hymns called them- 

 felves the defcendants of thofe men who efcaped from the 

 general deluge. The Toltecas, Mexicans, Tlafcalans, 

 and all the other nations were agreed on this point. They 

 all faid that their anceftors came from elfewhere into 

 thofe countries; they pointed out the road they had 

 come, and even preferved the names, true or falfe, of 

 thofe their firft progenitors, who, after the confufion of 

 languages, feparated from the reft of men. 



F. Nunez de la Vega, bifhop of Chiapa, fays, in the 

 preface of his Synodal Constitutions , that in the vifit which 

 he made to his diocefs towards the end of the laft century, 

 he found many ancient calendars of the Chiapanefe, and 

 an old manufcript in the language of that country, made 

 by the Indians themfelvcs, in which it was faid, accord- 

 ing 



(a) The author of a miferable little performance, entitled, Le Philofophe Dou- 

 ceur, printed at Berlin, in the year 1775. 



