It was no ordinary offence to steal gold and silver.  Criminals convicted of this offence were not treated as common thieves, but were kept till the time when the goldsmiths celebrated their annual festival, and were then solemnly sacrificed to their god Xipe;[19] the priests flaying their bodies, cooking and eating them, and walking about dressed in their skins, a ceremony which was called tlacaxipehualiztli, “the man-flaying.”

Museums of Mexican antiquities are so much alike, that, in general, one description will do for all of them.  Mr. Uhde’s Museum at Heidelberg is a far finer one than that at Mexico, except as regards the picture-writings.  I was astonished at the enormous quantity of stone idols, delicately worked trinkets in various hard stones and even in obsidian, terra-cotta tobacco-pipes, figures, and astronomical calendars, &c., displayed there.

Mr. Christy’s collection is richer than any other in small sculptured figures from Central America.  It contains a squatting female figure in hard brown lava, like the one in black basalt which is drawn in Humboldt’s Vues des Cordilleres, and there called (I cannot imagine why) an Aztec priestess.  Above all, it contains what I believe to be the three finest specimens of Aztec decorative art which exist in the world.  One of these is the knife of which the figure at page 101 gives some faint idea, the other two being a wooden mask overlaid with mosaic, and a human skull decorated in the same manner, of which a more particular description will be found in the Appendix.  There are two kinds of Aztec articles in Mr. Christy’s collection which I did not observe either at Mexico or Heidelberg.  These are bronze needles, resembling our packing-needles, and little cast bronze bells, called in Aztec yotl, not unlike small horse-bells made in England at the present day; these are figured in the tribute-lists in the picture-writings.

[Illustration:  ANTIQUE BRONZE BELLS FROM MEXICO. Such as are often sculptured on Aztec Images.]

Apropos of the mammoth bones preserved in the Mexican Museum, I must insert a quotation from Bernal Diaz.  It is clear that the traditions of giants which exist in almost every country had their origin in the discovery of fossil bones, whose real character was not suspected until a century ago; but I never saw so good an example of this as in the Tlascalan tradition, which my author relates as follows.—­“And they” (the Tlascalan chiefs) “said that their ancestors had told them that, in times past, there lived amongst them in settlements men and women of great size, with huge bones; and, as they were wicked and of evil dispositions, they (the ancestors of the Tlascalans) fought against them and killed them; and those who were left died out.  And that we might see what stature they were of, they brought a bone of one of them, and it was very big, and its height was that of a man of reasonable stature; it was a thigh-bone, and I (Bernal