ish invaders demolished every vestige of the Aztec religious
monuments, just as Roman Catholic images and paraphernalia were once
treated by the "straitest sects" of Protestants, or even Mohammedans.

The beautiful plateau around the lakes of Mexico, as well as other
central portions of America, were without any doubt occupied from the
earliest ages by peoples who gradually advanced in civilization from
generation to generation and passed through cycles of revolutions--in
one century relapsing, in another advancing by leaps and bounds by an
infusion of new blood or a change of environment--exactly similar to the
checkered annals of the successive dynasties in the Nile Valley and the
plains of Babylonia. In the New World, as in the Old World, from
prehistoric times wealth was accumulated at such centers, bringing
additional comfort and refinement, and implying the practise of the
useful arts and some applications of science. As to the legendary
migrations or even those extinct races whose names still remain, Max
Mueller said:[8]

[Footnote 8: Chips from a German Workshop, i, 327.]

The traditions are no better than the Greek traditions about
Pelasgians, Aeolians, and Ionians, and it would be a mere waste of
time to construct out of such elements a systematic history, only
to be destroyed again sooner or later, by some Niebuhr, Grote, or
Lewis.

_Anahuac_ (i. e., "waterside" or "the lake-country"), in the early
centuries of our era, was a name of the country round the lakes and town
afterward called Mexico. To this center, as a place for settlement,
there came from the north or northwest a succession of tribes more or
less allied in race and language--especially (according to one theory)
the _Toltecs_ from Tula, and the _Aztecs_ from Aztlan. Tula, north of
the Mexican Valley, had been the first capital of the Toltecs, and at
the time of the Spanish conquest there were remains of large buildings
there. Most of the extensive temples and other edifices found throughout
"New Spain" were attributed to this race and the word "toltek" became
synonymous with "architect."

Some five centuries after the Toltecs had abandoned Tula, the Aztecs or
early Mexicans arrived to settle in the Valley of Anahuac. With the
Aztecs came the Tezcucans, whose capital, Tezcuco, on the eastern border
of the Mexican lake, has given it its still surviving name.

The Aztecs, again, after long migrations from place to plac