tamia, and China;[68-3] and in the
new world, the states of Peru, Araucania, the Muyscas, the Quiches, and
Tlascala were tetrarchies divided in accordance with, and in the first
two instances named after, the cardinal points. So their chief
cities--Cuzco, Quito, Tezcuco, Mexico, Cholula--were quartered by
streets running north, south, east, and west. It was a necessary result
of such a division that the chief officers of the government were four
in number, that the inhabitants of town and country, that the whole
social organization acquired a quadruplicate form. The official title of
the Incas was "Lord of the four quarters of the earth," and the
venerable formality in taking possession of land, both in their domain
and that of the Aztecs, was to throw a stone, to shoot an arrow, or to
hurl a firebrand to each of the cardinal points.[69-1] They carried out
the idea in their architecture, building their palaces in squares with
doors opening, their tombs with their angles pointing, their great
causeways running in these directions. These architectural principles
repeat themselves all over the continent; they recur in the sacred
structures of Yucatan, in the ancient cemetery of Teo-tihuacan near
Mexico, where the tombs are arranged along avenues corresponding exactly
to the parallels and meridians of the central tumuli of the sun and
moon;[69-2] and however ignorant we are about the mound builders of the
Mississippi valley, we know that they constructed their earthworks with
a constant regard to the quarters of the compass.

Nothing can be more natural than to take into consideration the regions
of the heavens in the construction of buildings; I presume that at any
time no one plans an edifice of pretensions without doing so. Yet this
is one of those apparently trifling transactions which in their origin
and applications have exerted a controlling influence on the history of
the human race.

When we reflect how indissolubly the mind of the primitive man is welded
to his superstitions, it were incredible that his social life and his
architecture could thus be as it were in subjection to one idea, and his
rites and myths escape its sway. As one might expect, it reappears in
these latter more vividly than anywhere else. If there is one formula
more frequently mentioned by travellers than another as an indispensable
preliminary to all serious business, it is that of smoking, and the
prescribed and traditional rule was that th