f the Mexicans.
They were easily conquered by the European troops, partly because of
their betrayal by various of the neighboring nations whom they had
formerly conquered. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, according
to Prescott, the Aztec king ruled the continent from the Atlantic to the
Pacific.

From the scientific side of their extinct civilization it is their
knowledge of astronomy that chiefly causes astonishment (see also p.
85). As in the case of the Chaldeans and Babylonians, a motive
for the study of the stars and planets was the priestly one of
accurately fixing the religious festivals. The tropical year being thus
ascertained, their tables showed the exact time of the equinox or sun's
transit across the equatorial, and of the solstice. From a very early
period they had practised agriculture, growing Indian corn and "Mexican
aloe." Having no animals of draft, such as the horse, or ox, their
farming was naturally of a rude and imperfect sort.

"The degree of civilization," says Prescott, "which the Aztecs reached,
as inferred by their political institutions, may be considered, perhaps,
not much short of that enjoyed by our Saxon ancestors under Alfred."

In a passage comparing the Aztecs to the American Indians, we read:

The latter has something peculiarly sensitive in his nature. He
shrinks instinctively from the rude touch of a foreign hand. Even
when this foreign influence comes in the form of civilization he
seems to sink and pine away beneath it. It has been so with the
Mexicans. Under the Spanish domination their numbers have silently
melted away. Their energies are broken. They no longer tread their
mountain plains with the conscious independence of their ancestors.
In their faltering step and meek and melancholy aspect we read the
sad characters of the conquered race.... Their civilization was of
the hardy character which belongs to the wilderness. The fierce
virtues of the Aztec were all his own.

Humboldt found some analogy between the Aztec theory of the universe, as
taught by the priests, and the Asiatic "cosmogonies." The Aztecs, in
explaining the great mystery of man's existence after death, believed
that future time would revolve in great periods or cycles, each
embracing thousands of years. At the end of each of the four cycles of
future time in the present world, "the human family will be swept from
the earth by the agency of