I turn now to the traditions of the Miztecs, who dwelt on the outskirts of the Mexican Empire; this legend was taken by Fray Gregoria Garcia[4] from a book found in a convent in Cuilapa, a little Indian town, about a league and a half south of Oajaca; the book had been compiled by the vicar of the convent, “just as they

[1.  “Popular Science Monthly,” October, 1879, p. 800.

2.  Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. iii, p. 98.

3.  Ibid., p. 99.

4.  “Origen de los Ind.,” pp. 327-329.]

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themselves were accustomed to depict and to interpret it in their primitive scrolls”: 

“In the year and in the day of obscurity and darkness,” (the days of the dense clouds?), “yea, even before the days or the years were,” (before the visible revolution of the sun marked the days, and the universal darkness and cold prevented the changes of the seasons?), “when the world was in great darkness and chaos, when the earth was covered with water, and there was nothing but mud and slime on all the face of the earth—­behold a god became visible, and his name was the Deer, and his surname was the Lion-snake.  There appeared also a very beautiful goddess called the Deer, and surnamed the Tiger-snake.  These two gods were the origin and beginning of all the gods.”

This lion-snake was probably one of the comets; the tiger-snake was doubtless a second comet, called after the tiger, on account of its variegated, mottled appearance.  It will be observed they appeared before the light had returned,

These gods built a temple on a high place, and laid out a garden, and waited patiently, offering sacrifices to the higher gods, wounding themselves with flint knives, and “praying that it might seem good to them to shape the firmament, and lighten the darkness of the world, and to establish the foundation of the earth; or, rather, to gather the waters together so that the earth might appear—­as they had no place to rest in save only one little garden.”

Here we have the snakes and the people confounded together.  The earth was afterward made fit for the use of mankind, and at a later date there came—­

“A great deluge, wherein perished many of the sons and daughters that had been born to the gods; and it is said that, when the deluge was passed, the human race

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was restored, as at the first, and the Miztec kingdom populated, and the heavens and the earth established."[1]

Father Duran, in his MS.  “History Antique of New Spain,” written in A. D. 1585, gives the Cholula legend, which commences: 

“In the beginning, before the light of the sun had been created, this land was in obscurity and darkness and void of any created thing.”

In the Toltec legends we read of a time when—­