s, called so from their toothed appearance.

We had met numbers of Indians, bringing their wares to the Sunday
market in the great square of Atotonilco el Grande; and when we reached
the town on our way home, business was still going on briskly; so we
put up our horses, and spent an hour or two in studying the people and
the commodities they dealt in. It was a real old-fashioned Indian
market, very much such as the Spaniards found when they first
penetrated into the country. A large proportion of the people could
speak no Spanish, or only a few words. The unglazed pottery, palm-leaf
mats, ropes and bags of aloe-fibre, dressed skins, &c., were just the
same wares that were made three centuries ago; and there is no
improvement in their manufacture. This people, who rose in three
centuries from the condition of wandering savages to a height of
civilization that has no equal in history--considering the shortness of
the time in which it grew up--have remained, since the Conquest,
without making one step in advance. They hardly understand any reason
for what they do, except that their ancestors did things so--they
therefore must be right. They make their unglazed pottery, and carry it
five and twenty miles to market on their heads, just as they used to do
when there were no beasts of burden in the country. The same with their
fruits and vegetables, which they have brought great distances, up the
most difficult mountain-paths, at a ruinous sacrifice of time and
trouble, considering what a miserable sum they will get for them after
all, and how much even of this will be spent in brandy. By working on a
hacienda they would get double what their labour produces in this way,
but they do not understand this kind of reasoning. They cultivate their
little patches of maize, by putting a sharp stick into the ground, and
dropping the seed into the hole. They carry pots of water to irrigate
their ground with, instead of digging trenches. This is the more
curious, as at the time of the Conquest irrigation was much practised
by the Aztecs in the plains, and remains of water-canals still exist,
showing that they had carried the art to great perfection. They bring
logs of wood over the mountains by harnessing horses or mules to them,
and dragging them with immense labour over the rough ground. The idea
of wheels or rollers has either not occurred to them, or is considered
as a pernicious novelty.

It is very striking to see how, while Europ