olaris and of the circumpolar
constellations. The game itself was a beautiful and well-conceived
illustration of the flight of time, typified by the aerial circles
performed by the men masked as birds, and of its methodical division into
fixed periods.

Leaving the subject of the calendar for the present we must revert to my
tables recording the apparent annual and nocturnal axial rotation of the
circumpolar constellations.

Whilst studying these the reflection naturally arose, that the people who
observed Ursa Major must have paid equal attention to Cassiopeia and
noticed that these constellations ever occupied opposite positions to each
other as they circled around the pole. Dwelling on the fact that in
ancient Mexico Ursa Major was associated with an ocelot, I remembered the
many representations in which an ocelot is represented as confronting an
eagle, usually in mortal combat. Mexican war-chiefs were classed into two
equally honorable grades, designated as the "ocelots and the quauhtlis,
_i. e._, eagles." The constellation of Cassiopeia presents to me, a marked
resemblance to the image of a bird with outspread wings, whose head is
turned toward Polaris. The fact that when this star-group seems to be
above, Ursa Major seems to be below, and _vice versa_, would obviously
suggest the idea of an eternal combat between two adversaries who
alternately succumbed and resuscitated. It was interesting on reasoning
further, to note that once the above idea had taken root it must have been
impossible not to associate in course of time, the quadruped and the bird
with the elements to which they seemed to pertain, and gradually to
conceive the idea of an everlasting antagonism between the powers of the
sky and of the earth, or light and darkness, and other opposites which
suggested themselves naturally, or were artificially created, by the
fertile mind of man. In this connection it should be observed that the
mythical adversary of Tezcatlipoca, the ocelot, designated as Ursa Major,
is Huitzilopochtli, whose idol, in the Great Temple of Mexico, represented
him masked as a hummingbird (see Atlas Duran). The special reason why this
bird became associated with the god is explained by the following passage
in Gomara (Histoire generale des Indes. Paris, 1584, chap. 96, p. 190):
"This bird died, or rather fell asleep in the month of October and
remained attached by its feet to a twig. It awakened again in April when
the flowers blosso