[1013] Pinart, no. 590.
[1014] He repeats Alzate’s plate of the restoration of the ruins.
[1015] Bancroft refers (iv. 483) to various compiled accounts, to which may be added his own and Short’s (p. 371). Cf. F. Boncourt in the Revue d’Ethnographie (1887).
[1016] Prescott, Kirk ed., i. 12. See the map of the plateau of Anahuac in Ruge, Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeck., i. 363.
[1017] Cf. Gros in the Archives de la Com. Scient. du Méxique, vol. i.; H. de Saussure on the Découverte des ruines d’une ancienne ville Méxicaine située sur le plateau de l’Anahuac (Paris, 1858,—Bull. Soc Géog. de Paris).
[1018] The same is true of the earliest Spanish buildings. Icazbalceta (México en 1554, p. 74) says that the soil is constantly accumulating, and the whole city gradually sinks.
[1019] Bancroft (iv. 505, 516, with references) says that such objects, when brought to light by excavations, have not always been removed from their hiding-places; and he argues that beneath the city there may yet be “thousands of interesting monuments.” Cf. B. Mayer’s Mexico as it was, vol. ii.
Bandelier (Archæol. Tour, Part ii. p. 49) gives us valuable “Archæological Notes about the City of Mexico,” in which he says that Alfredo Chavero owns a very large oil painting, said to have been executed in 1523, giving a view of the aboriginal city and the principal events of the Conquest. It shows that the ancient city was about one quarter the size of the modern town.
We find descriptions of the city before the conquerors transformed it, in Brasseur’s Hist. Nations Civ. iii. 187; iv. line 13; and in Bancroft (ii. ch. 18) there is a collation of authorities on Nahua buildings, with specific references on the city of Mexico (ii. p. 567). Bandelier describes with citations its military aspects at the time of the Conquest (Peabody Mus. Reports, x. 151).
The movable relics found in Mexico are the following:—