ning marriage, it being expedient that certain classes only should
intermarry, not only to avoid complications but also to ensure a certain
degree of cooeperation conducive to the prosperity of the State. In the
tribal laws still existing amongst the native tribes of North America, I
see the logical survivals of an ancient scheme of organization.

After gaining the above recognition of some of the actual duties of the
priest-rulers of ancient Mexico, it is possible to understand the meaning
of the native sentence, noted by Sahagun, that the native games of patolli
and tlachtli constituted a practice in "the art of government." From this
it is clear that the former, played by two individuals with dice and
markers upon a mat in the shape of a cross, and symbolical of the Four
Quarters, was originally invented by the priest-rulers for an eminently
practical purpose. The mat being an image of the quadruple state and its
subdivisions, it was possible to make it serve as a register-board
exhibiting the distribution of the population, the number of individuals
in each class and its death and birth rates. We are informed that when
parents, according to the inflexible law, carried their newborn child to
the priest, he consulted his books full of day-signs and foretold what its
future was to be.

A proof that it was the positions of the stars which determined the season
and furnished the means of fixing a date, is furnished by the fact that
the stars were also "consulted" and believed to exert an influence upon
the destiny of the child.

The implicit faith in the predictions of the priests and in the absolute
influence of the position of the heavenly bodies and the date of its birth
upon the individual indicates that the parents were kept in ignorance as
to the workings of the machinery of state and that the priesthood were
reverenced for their power of prophecy. The belief that they could
personally exercise a favorable influence over the destiny of the child
seems also to have been encouraged in the parents, since an offering of
gifts at the period of registration was customary. After the Conquest,
when the native government had been completely broken up, and the enforced
registration of birth and the prediction of the priest had utterly lost
their original significance, native parents still consulted the surviving
members of the priest-rulers; and these ancient statisticians, in order to
gain a livelihood, continued to consul