Vetancurt (Teatro Mejicano) gives an account, taken from the above.  Hernandez (Rerum Med.  Nov.  Hisp.  Thes.:  Rome, 1631) gives a similar account of the process.  He compares the wooden instrument used to a cross-bow.  It was evidently a T-shaped implement, and the workman held the cross-piece with his two hands against his breast, while the end of the straight stick rested on the stone.  He furthermore gives a description of the making of the well-known maquahuitl, or Aztec war-club, which was armed on both sides with a row of obsidian knives, or teeth, stuck into holes with a kind of gum.  With this instrument, he says, a man could be cut in half at a blow—­an absurd statement, which has been repeated by more modern writers.

II.  ON THE SOLAR ECLIPSES RECORDED IN THE LE TELLIER MS.

The curious Aztec Picture-writing, known as the Codex Telleriano-Remenensis, preserved in the Royal Library of Paris, contains a list or calendar of a long series of years, indicated by the ordinary signs of the Aztec system of notation of cycles of years.  Below the signs of the years are a number of hieroglyphic pictures, conveying the record of remarkable events which happened in them, such as the succession and death of kings, the dates of wars, pestilences, &c.  The great work of Lord Kingsborough, which contains a fac-simile of this curious document, reproduces also an ancient interpretation of the matters contained in it, evidently the work of a person who not only understood the interpretation of the Aztec picture-writings, but had access to some independent source of information,—­probably the more ample oral traditions, for the recalling of which the picture-writing appears only to have served as a sort of artificial memory.  It is not necessary to enter here into a fuller description of the MS., which has also been described by Humboldt and Gallatin.

Among the events recorded in the Codex are four eclipses of the sun, depicted as having happened in the years 1476, 1496, 1507. 1510.  Humboldt, in quoting these dates, makes a remark to the effect that the record tends to prove the veracity of the Aztec history, for solar eclipses really happened in those years, according to the list in the well-known chronological work, L’Art de Verifier les Dates, as follows:  28 Feb., 1476; 8 Aug., 1496; 13 Jan., 1507; 8 May, 1510.  The work quoted, however, has only reference to eclipses visible in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and not to those in America.  The question therefore arises, whether all these four eclipses recorded in L’Art de Verifier les Dates, were visible in Mexico.  As to the last three, I have no means of answering the question; but it appears that Gama, a Mexican astronomer of some standing, made a series of calculations for a totally distinct purpose about the end of the last century, and found that in 1476 there was no eclipse of the sun visible in Mexico, but that there was a great one on the 13th Feb., 1477, and another on the 28th May, 1481.