[975] Bancroft (ii. 92) says: “What is known of the Aztecs has furnished material for nine tenths of all that has been written on the American civilized nations in general.”
[976] Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (London, 1861). Tylor enlarges upon what he considers the evidences of immense populations; and respecting some of their arts he adds, from inspection of specimens of their handicraft, that “the Spanish conquerors were not romancing in the wonderful stories they told of the skill of the native goldsmiths.” On the other hand, Morgan (Houses and House Life, 223) thinks the figures of population grossly exaggerated.
[977] Vol. II. p. 427.
[978] When we consider that Rome, Constantinople, and Jerusalem, in spite of rapine, siege and fire, still retain numerous traces of their earliest times, and that not a vestige of the Aztec capital remains to us except its site, we must assume, in Wilson’s opinion (Prehistoric Man, i. 331), that its edifices and causeways must have been for the most part more slight and fragile than the descriptions of the conquerors implied. Morgan instances as a proof of the flimsy character of their masonry, that Cortes in seventeen days levelled three fourths of the city of Mexico. But, adds Wilson, “so far as an indigenous American civilization is concerned, no doubt can be entertained, and there is little room for questioning, that among races who had carried civilization so far, there existed the capacity for its further development, independently of all borrowed aid” (p. 336). The Baron Nordenskjöld informs me that there is in the library at Upsala a MS. map of Mexico by Santa Cruz (d. 1572) which contains numerous ethnographical details, not to be found in printed maps of that day.
[979] Native Races, ii. 159.
[980] Ibid. ii. 133.
[981] Bancroft has recently epitomized his views afresh in the Amer. Antiquarian, Jan., 1888.
[982] Bancroft wrote in San Francisco, it will be remembered.
[983] It was for Bandelier, in his “Social organization and mode of government of the ancient Mexicans” (Peabody Mus. Repts. ii. 557), to demonstrate the proposition that tribal society based, according to Morgan, upon kin, and not political society, which rests upon territory and property, must be looked for among the ancient Mexicans.
[984] Morgan’s Houses, etc., 225. Bandelier (Peabody Mus. Rept., vol. ii. 114) speaks of the views advanced by Morgan in his “Montezuma’s Dinner,” as “a bold stroke for the establishment of American ethnology on a new basis.” It must be remembered that Bandelier was Morgan’s pupil.