, when we find a high
civilization in hot countries, as in the plains of India, we have to
account for it by supposing an immigration of races bringing their
civilization with them from more temperate climates. This theory of
civilization favours the idea of the Central American cities having
been built by a people from Mexico. The climate of the Mexican
highlands, which may be taken in a rough way to correspond with that of
North Italy, is well suited to a nation's development. But the cities
of Yucatan and Chiapas, though geographically not far removed from the
Mexican plateau, are brought by their small elevation above the sea
into a very different climate. They are in the land of tropical heat
and the rankest vegetation, in the midst of dense forests where
pestilential fevers and overwhelming lassitude make it almost
impossible for Europeans to live, and where the Indians who still
inhabit the neighbourhood of the ruined cities are the merest savages
sunk in the lowest depths of lazy ignorance.

If this climate-theory of progress have any truth in it, no barbarous
tribe could have raised itself in such a country to the social state
which is indicated by the ruins of such temples and cities. They must
have been settlers from some more temperate region.

While wandering about the hill of Xochicalco we came upon a spot that
strongly excited our curiosity. It was simply a small paved oval space
with a little altar at one end, and, lying round about it, some
fragments of what seemed to have been a hideous grotesque idol of baked
clay. Perhaps it was a shrine dedicated to one of the inferior deities,
such as often surrounded the greater temples; for, in Mexico,
astronomy, astrology, and religion had become mixed up together, as
they have been in other quarters of the globe, and even the
astronomical signs of days and months had temples of their own.

Xochicalco means "In the House of Flowers." The word
"flower,"--_xochitl_,--is often a part of the names of Mexican places
and people, such as the lake of Xochimilco--"In the Flower-plantation."
_Tlilxochitl_, literally "black flower," is the Aztec name for vanilla,
so that the name of that famous Mexican historian, Ixtlilxochitl, whose
name sticks in the throats of readers of Prescott, means
"Vanilla-face." Why the place was called "In the House of Flowers" is
not clear. The usual explanation seems not unlikely, that it was
because offerings of flowers and first-fruits we