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 mother s 
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 
>ve see in the preceding page of the Borgian 
collection, seems to have a reference to the cul- 
mination of the Pleiades. We shull 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 
