n such immense numbers on the sites of old
Mexican cities, are here by hundreds. I think there were, besides, some
of the moulds, also in terra-cotta, in which they were formed; at any
rate, they are to be seen, so that making the little heads must have
been a regular trade. What they were for is not so easy to say. Some
have bodies, and are made with flat backs to stand against a wall, and
these were probably idols. The ancient Mexicans, we read, had
household-gods in great numbers, and called them _Tepitotons_, "little
ones." The greatest proportion, however, are mere heads which never had
had bodies, and will not stand anyhow. They could not have been
personal ornaments, for there is nothing to fasten them on by. They are
rather a puzzle. I have seen a suggestion somewhere, that when a man
was buried, each surviving member of his family put one of these heads
into his grave. This sounds plausible enough, especially as both male
and female heads are found.

One shelf in the museum is particularly instructive. We called it the
"Chamber of Horrors," after the manner of Marlborough House, and it
contains numbers of the sham antiquities, the manufacture of which is a
regular thing in Mexico, as it is in Italy. They are principally vases
and idols of earthenware, for the art of working obsidian is lost, and
there can be no trickery about that[18]; and as to the hammers,
chisels, and idols in green jade, serpentine, and such like hard
materials, they are decidedly cheaper to find than to make. The Indians
in Mexico make their unglazed pottery just as they did before the
Conquest, so that, if they imitate real antiques exactly, there is no
possibility of detecting the fraud; but when they begin to work from
their own designs, or even to copy from memory, they are almost sure to
put in something that betrays them.

As soon as the Spaniards came, they began to introduce drawing as it
was understood in Europe; and from that moment the peculiarities of
Mexican art began to disappear. The foreheads of the Mexican races are
all very low, and their painters and sculptors even exaggerated this
peculiarity, to make the faces they depicted more beautiful,--so
producing an effect which to us Europeans seems hideously ugly, but
which is not more unnatural than the ideal type of beauty we see in the
Greek statues. After the era of the Spaniards we see no more of such
foreheads; and the eyes, which were drawn in profiles as one sees them