emigration and removal from place to place; and also that the dim record of the great events I have alluded to should be intertwined with others, referring to events of a far more recent date; that the personages and characters of the earliest time should be strangely mingled with the history of such as may have existed ages after; and, that the seat which a people actually occupied, should be in their records, the very theatre upon which the great events pictured by their traditions should have taken place.
The origin of the huge pyramidal monuments of Asia, in the traditional record remaining among the nations of antiquity, of the building of the tower of Babel, which was itself but a symbolic representation of the mountain on which the ark rested after the deluge, has been fully established by the pens of many able writers, and the resemblance between the latter, as described by the ancients, and the teocallis or temples of the ancient people of Anahuac, is too glaring to be overlooked or denied, by the most skeptically disposed.
There can be no reasonable doubt as to the strict analogy; and if there were, the traditions attached to the great pyramid of Cholula, among the rest, would remove it.
It is too interesting not to merit transcription.
"Before the great inundation," runs the tradition, "which took place four thousand eight hundred years after the creation of the world, the country of Anahuac was inhabited by giants; all of whom either perished in the inundation, or were transformed into fishes, save seven, who fled into caverns. When the waters subsided, one of the giants, called Xelhua, surnamed the Architect, went to Cholula, where, as a memorial of the mountain Tlaloc, which had served for an asylum to himself and his six brethren, he built an artificial hill in form of a pyramid. He ordered bricks to be made in the province of Tlanamalco, at the foot of the Sierra of Cocotl: and to convey them to Cholula, he placed a file of men who passed them from hand to hand. The gods beheld with wrath this edifice, the top of which was to
