which is regarded as one of the best specimens of Aztec workmanship. Like the calendar, it was found buried in the Plaza Mayor, not far from the cathedral, doubtless tumbled there by the Spaniards when they destroyed the great teocalli. It is not beautiful according to ideas of symmetry formed from the Venus of Milo; it is strange and interesting on account of the quantity of symbols by which it is overwhelmed. Coatlicue, or Cihuatcotl, or Cihuacoatl, is the serpent woman, mother of the first human pair in the world; she is the goddess of the earth, in the night-time, after sunset. She is, therefore, the mistress of the dead. And then she is the mother of Quetzalcoatl, the god and hero of the early Nahuatl. This sounds better than it looks. The upper part is the head of a serpent, whose body is entwined with that of a woman. The skirt is a web of snakes, adorned with tassels and feathers. The figure has many hands, as a symbol of the production-giving power of the earth. The skull at the girdle shows that on her breast repose her children after death in eternal slumber.
Such were the Aztecs in 1500, after little more than a century of life in their new land. Much of their civilization, many of their customs, they must have caught from the older, longer established, refined court of the Texcucans, their neighbors at the other end of the lake, whose dynasty was much older, and whose traditions came down unimpaired from the cultivated Toltecs, whose remote ancestors, if they came from the same stem as the Aztecs and wandered to Anahuac from the same shadowy Az-
