stones, and the great regularity of their cut. The base
of the pyramid is an exact square, each side being eighty-two feet in
length. The perpendicular height appears not to be more than from
fifty-two to sixty-five feet. This monument, like all the Mexican
_teocallis_, is composed of several stages. Six are still
distinguishable, and a seventh appears to be concealed by the
vegetation with which the sides of the pyramid are covered. A great
stairway of fifty-seven steps conducts to the truncated top of the
_teocalli_, where the human victims were sacrificed. On each side of
the great stairs is a flight of small stairs. The facing of the stories
is adorned with hieroglyphics, in which serpents and crocodiles, carved
in relievo, are discernible. Each story contains a great number of
square niches, symmetrically distributed. In the first story we reckon
twenty-four on each side, in the second twenty, and in the third
sixteen. The number of these niches in the body of the pyramid is three
hundred and sixty-six, and there are twelve in the stairs toward the
east. The Abbe Marquez supposes that this number of three hundred and
seventy-eight niches has some allusion to a calendar of the Mexicans,
and he even believes that in each of them one of the twenty figures was
repeated, which, in the hieroglyphical language of the Toltecs, served
as a symbol for marking the days of the common year, and the
intercalated days at the end of the cycles. The year being composed of
eighteen months of twenty days, there would then be three hundred and
sixty days, to which, agreeable to the Egyptian practice, five
complementary days were added.... This pyramid was visited by M. Dupe,
a captain in the service of the King of Spain. He possesses the bust,
in basalt, of a Mexican, which I employed M. Massard to engrave, and
which bears great resemblance to the _calautica_ of the heads of Isis."

I prefer in this way to copy from an author of unquestionable authority
an important historical fact, rather than to search for less accessible
sources of evidence on which I rest the theory, that what of this kind
we have seen at the city of Mexico are but fragments from the wreck
that befell the American civilization of antiquity, which had succumbed
before the inroads of northern savages. This is sufficient inquiry into
antiquities till we come to the museum.

MEXICO ACCORDING TO CORTEZ.

It is but justice to add the substance of Cortez's account o