institution. The traveler relates that at that time (1823) the people of Mexico called the monument reloj de Moctezuma ("Montezuma's watch"), a statement which Brantz Mayor repeats in his work Mexico as It Was and Is (1844). Gama's drawing is reproduced in both books. (We may add that today excellent molds of the relief exist in the American Museum of Natural History of New York and in other foreign institutions.) There also was taken one of the most perfect existing photographs of the stone, which adorns the pages of the great work Monumentos del Arte Mexicano Antiguo; there also the expert and notable artist, Don José María Velasco, drew it with his customary fidelity and precision. Finally in the year 1885, the monument was transported to the place which it now occupies in the grand salon of the Museum of Archaeology.
At about this time, the able archaeologist, talented and illustrious historian, and eminent man of letters, Alfredo Chavero, produced a most brilliant disquisition, which for many years changed the course of ideas regarding the monument. Fundamentally contrary to the theory of Gama, although agreeing with it in some details, this study possesses very interesting aspects; nevertheless, rather than an adequate decipherment of the hieroglyphs it is a demonstration of the vast knowledge of Chavero in the general topics of archaeological science.
Following so luminous a work, there are no studies truly worthy of being taken into consideration, except that of Don Dionisio Abadiano, prolix and minute beyond any other, sufficiently erudite also, but in almost its entirety aberrant and full of inacceptable subtleties and arguments as distorted as arbitrary. We will say nothing very different of the work of Felipe J. Valentini, without denying, however, the merit of his other works to the German doctor.
As little can we admit, well elaborated and estimable as may be the work (The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations) in which it is propounded, the thesis of Señora Zelia Nuttall, investigator to whom the archaeological science of Mexico owes so many services. The distinguished Americanist claims in essence that the central part of the monolith represents the circumpolar zone of the celestial vault, the naolin and the four rectangles comprised in it being an allegory of the movements of the Great Bear, which form apparently the cross or Buddhist swastika gyrating around the Pole Star, center of the system whose strange and notable fixity was the origin of the worship which the aborigines and other peoples
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