173 
that went back to the epocha of a great deluge ; 
after which their ancestors^ led by a chief called 
V itan^ had come from a country lying toward 
the north. In the village of Teopixca, there 
still existed in the sixteenth century descendants 
of the family of Votan^ or Vodan ; for these two 
names are the same, the Toltecks and the Az- 
tecks not having the four consonants h, r, s, 
in their language. They who have studied the 
history of the Scandinavian nations in the heroic 
times, must be struck at finding in Mexico a 
name, which recalls that of Wodan or Odin, 
who reigned among the Scythians, and whose 
race, according to l^he very remarkable assertion 
of Bede*, gave kings to a great number of 
nations.” 
/ 
If it be true, as many learned men have sup- 
posed, that these same Toltecks, whom pesti- 
lence, followed by a great drought, had driven 
from the elevated plain of Anahuac about the 
middle of the eleventh century of our era, reap- 
peared in South America as founders of the 
empire of the Incas, why should not the Peruvi- 
ans have abandoned their quippus, and adopted 
the hieroglyphical writing of the Toltecks ? 
Almost at the same epocha, in the beginning of 
the twelfth century, a Greenland bishop had 
* Eeda, Hist. Eccles. lib. 1, c. 15. Francisco Nunnez de 
la Vega, Constitutiones Synoclales, p. 74. 
