nitely outlined. There exists great discrepancy
between the different authorities, both as to the number of Aztec ages
or Suns, as they were called, their durations, their terminations, and
their names. The preponderance of testimony is in favor of _four_
antecedent cycles, the present being the _fifth_. The interval from the
first creation to the commencement of the present epoch, owing to the
equivocal meaning of the numeral signs expressing it in the picture
writings, may have been either 15228, 2316, or 1404 solar years. Why
these numbers should have been chosen, no one has guessed. It has been
looked for in combinations of numbers connected with the calendar, but
so far in vain.

While most authorities agree as to the character of the destructions
which terminated the suns, they vary much as to their sequence. Water,
winds, fire, and hunger, are the agencies, and in one Codex (Vaticanus)
occur in this order. Gama gives the sequence, hunger, winds, fire, and
water; Humboldt hunger, fire, winds, and water; Boturini water, hunger,
winds, fire. As the cycle ending by a famine, is called the Age of
Earth, Ternaux-Compans, the distinguished French _Americaniste_, has
imagined that the four Suns correspond mystically to the domination
exercised in turn over the world by its four constituent elements. But
proof is wanting that Aztec philosophers knew the theory on which this
explanation reposes.

Baron Humboldt suggested that the suns were "fictions of mythological
astronomy, modified either by obscure reminiscences of some great
revolution suffered by our planet, or by physical hypotheses, suggested
by the sight of marine petrifactions and fossil remains,"[216-1] while
the Abbe Brasseur, in his late works on ancient Mexico, interprets them
as exaggerated references to historical events. As no solution can be
accepted not equally applicable to the same myth as it appears in
Yucatan, Peru, and the hunting tribes, and to the exactly parallel
teachings of the Edda,[216-2] the Stoics, the Celts, and the Brahmans,
both of these must be rejected. And although the Hindoo legend is so
close to the Aztec, that it, too, defines four ages, each terminating by
a general catastrophe, and each catastrophe exactly the same in
both,[216-3] yet this is not at all indicative of a derivation from one
original, but simply an illustration how the human mind, under the
stimulus of the same intellectual cravings, produces like results. What
th