Of some of the supposed Aztec Bible-traditions I have already spoken in no very high terms. There is another tradition, however, resting upon unimpeachable evidence, which relates the occurrence of a series of destructions and regenerations of the world, and recalls in the most striking manner the Indian cosmogony; and, when added to the argument from the similarity of the systems of astronomical notation of Mexico and Asia, goes far towards proving a more or less remote connection between the inhabitants of the two continents.
There is another side to the question, however, as has been stated already. How could the Mexicans have had these traditions and customs from the Old World, and not have got the knowledge of some of the commonest arts of life from the same source? As I have said, they do not seem to have known the proper way of putting the handle on to a stone-hammer; and, though they used bronze, they had not applied it to making such things as knives and spear-heads. They had no beasts of burden; and, though there were animals in the country which they probably might have domesticated and milked, they had no idea of anything of the kind. They had oil, and employed it for various purposes, but had no notion of using it or wax for burning. They lighted their houses with pine-torches; and in fact the Aztec name for a pine-torch—ocotl—was transferred to candles when they were introduced.
Though they were a commercial people, and had several substitutes for money—such as cacao-grains, quills of gold-dust, and pieces of tin of a particular shape, they had no knowledge of the art of weighing anything, but sold entirely by tale and measure. This statement, made by the best authorities, their language tends to confirm. After the Conquest they made the word tlapexouia out of the Spanish “peso,” and also gave the meaning of weighing to two other words which mean properly to measure and to divide equally. Had they had a proper word of their own for the process, we should find it. The Mexicans scarcely ever adopted a Spanish word even for Spanish animals or implements, if they could possibly make their own language serve. They called a sheep an ichcatl, literally a “thread-thing,” or “cotton”: a gun a “fire-trumpet:” and sulphur “fire-trumpet-earth.” And yet, a people ignorant of some of the commonest arts had extraordinary knowledge of astronomy, and even knew the real cause of eclipses,[[22]] and represented them in their sacred dances.
[22] The Aztec name for an eclipse of the sun is worthy of remark. They called it tonatiuh qualo, literally “the sun’s being eaten.” The expression seems to belong to a time when they knew less about the phenomenon, and had some idea like that of the Asiatic nations who thought the sun was occasionally swallowed up by the great dragon.
Set the difficulties on one side of the question against those on the other, and they will nearly balance. We must wait for further evidence.
Our friend Don José Miguel Cervantes, the President of the Ayuntamiento, took us one day to see the great prison of Mexico, the Acordada. As to the prison itself, it is a great gloomy building, with its rooms and corridors arranged round two courtyards, one appropriated to the men, the other to the women. A few of the men were at work making shoes and baskets, but most were sitting and lying about in the sun, smoking cigarettes and talking together in knots, the young ones hard at work taking lessons in villainy from the older hands; just the old story.
Offenders of all orders, from drunkards and vagrants up to highway robbers and murderers, all were mixed indiscriminately together. But we should remember that in England twenty years ago it was usual for prisons to be such places as this; and even now, in spite of model prisons and severe discipline, the miserable results of our prison-system show, as plainly as can be, that when we have caught our criminal we do not in the least know how to reform him, now that our colonists have refused him the only chance he ever had.
It is bad enough to mix together these men under the most favourable circumstances for corrupting one another. Every man must come out worse than he went in; but this wrong is not so great as that which the untried prisoners suffer in being forced into the society of condemned criminals, while their trials drag on from session to session, through the endless technicalities and quibbles of Spanish law.
We made rather a curious observation in this prison. When one enters such a place in Europe, one expects to see in a moment, by the faces and demeanour of the occupants, that most of them belong to a special criminal class, brought up to a life of crime which is their only possible career, belonging naturally to police-courts and prisons, herding together when out of prison in their own districts and their own streets, and carefully avoided by the rest of society. You may know a London thief when you see him; he carries his profession in his face and in the very curl of his hair. Now in this prison there was nothing of the kind to be seen. The inmates were brown Indians and half-bred Mexicans, appearing generally to belong to the poorest class, but just like the average of the people in the streets outside. As my companion said, “If these fellows are thieves and murderers, so are our servants, and so is every man in a serape we meet in the streets, for all we can tell to the contrary.” There was positively nothing at all peculiar about them.
If they had been all Indians we might have been easily deceived. Nothing can be more true than Humboldt’s observation that the Indian face differs so much from ours that it is only after years of experience that a European can learn to distinguish the varieties of feature by which character can be judged of. He mistakes peculiarities which belong to the race in general for personal characteristics; and the thickness of the skin serves still more to mask the expression of their faces. But the greater part of these men were Mexicans of mixed Indian and Spanish blood, and their faces are pretty much European.