but the upper jaw bone is furnished with incisive 
teeth. The muzzle of the tapir is no doubt 
somewhat longer than the snout of our swine, 
but there is a great distance from the muzzle of 
the tapir to the trunk figured in the Codex Bor- 
gianus. Had the people of Aztlan, sprung from 
Asiatic origin, preserved some vague notions of 
elephants ? or, which appears to me much less 
probable, did their traditions go back to the 
period, when America was yet peopled with those 
gigantic animals, the petrified skeletons of which 
are found buried in the marly lands even on the 
ridge of the Mexican Cordilleras ? May there 
not also exist, in the north-west part of the New 
Continent, in countries which have been visited 
neither by Hearne, Mackenzie, nor Lewis, some 
unknown animal of this kind, which, from the 
configuration of its trunk, holds the middle place 
between the elephant and the tapir? The 
hieroglyphics of the days, which surround the 
group figured in the forty-ninth page of the col- 
lection of Veletri, clearly indicate, that this sacri- 
fice was made at the end of the year, after the 
nemontemi, or complementary days. The tem- 
ple of the Sun reminds us of the worship of a 
mild and humane people, the Peruvians. That 
worship, in which no other otFerings were made 
to the divinity than flowers, incense, and the first 
fruits of their harvests, existed without doubt at 
Mexico to the beginning of the fourteenth cen- 
