ay of forming a correct idea of that old city,
is owing to the defective character of our witnesses. The one confesses
to the habitual practice of falsehood for the purpose of deceiving the
Indians; the other acknowledges practices that render the character of
both infamous, and would make their testimony of no weight in a court
of justice unless corroborated. We must therefore feel our way as best
we can.

With the rude implements of the Indians, houses of the driest blocks of
mud, though covered with cement and painted with colored wash, could
easily have been thrown down; but gunpowder or iron bars would have
been necessary to overturn a wall composed either of stone or
_tepetate_ and cement. Villages built of dried mud are often imposing
in their appearance, and are yet most perishable; for the first
overflow of waters, that shall cover but a few inches of the walls of
the houses, will in a few hours reduce a whole village to a mass of
ruins. Again, the dry wall that has fallen becomes saturated, and
dissolves itself into soft mud. My hypothesis is, therefore, not
without its difficulty, for at every inundation of the city in the
times of the Aztecs we have to suppose it totally destroyed; an evil
that could not be remedied until the water had entirely subsided, and
new mud had been formed into blocks and dried in the sun, and a new
village or city built every twenty-five years.

To sum up my theory of Aztec civilization: they had earthen gods,
earthen cooking utensils, and earthen aqueducts; their temples were
small buildings, upon moderately-sized Indian burial mounds, and their
palaces and sacred inclosures were of dried mud, and of a single story
in height.

THE TOLTECS.

With this solution, the difficulty that occurred to Humboldt is in part
removed, viz., that the allotted time--one hundred and seventy
years--was too short a period in which to transform a tribe of North
American Indians into a settled community. The remainder of the
difficulty is explained by an event taking place in our own days. It is
hardly thirty years since the Apache Indians began the systematic
plunder of the northern states of Mexico, and now even these nomades
begin to show the first glimmerings of civilization. Their captives
teach them the use of much of the plunder they have brought to their
own villages. Though their treatment of female captives is inhuman, yet
it is not an uncommon thing for a captive to become a wife, and