Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/106

each, to which they added the five days when they said the sun was resting. "Here again we find another point of contact with the Egyptians and the Chaldeans." Of course, says the Doctor, by noticing the length of the shadows projected by the stelæ on the smooth floor of the platform, they could know the hour of the day; at night—as the Indians do even to-day—they could tell the time quite accurately by observing the courses of the stars. By placing a style, or any narrow object, on the top of the columns so as to rest on the centres, and noticing when its shadow fell perpendicularly on the platform, and covered exactly the line they had traced for that purpose between the stelæ, they knew when the sun passed their zenith, which phenomenon occurs twice every year, in March and July.

The Doctor remarks that he has adopted the use of the metric standard of linear measure as much from necessity as from choice, and from "the strange discovery that the metre is the only measure of dimension which agrees with that adopted by these most ancient artists and architects." The explorer continues:—

"We cannot suppose that the gnomon was built at random; that the diameter of the stelæ and the distance they are placed from one another are wholly fortuitous. . . . Judging of past humanity by the present, we must of necessity agree that these diameters and this distance of the centres are the result of accurate calculations and knowledge. . . . I have taken for granted that they knew when the sun had reached the tropics, and therefore its greatest declination,—23° 27',—because the days that the declination does not vary they called by a name signifying, according to Pio Perez,^[1] the bed or place where the sun rests.

 

"To sum up: These builders seem to have taken as bases for their calculation the latitude of the place and the declination of the sun when at his resting-place,—as they called the solstitial points. That this manner of computing time was used by the primitive inhabitants of the great metropolis, Chichen Itza, or by those who dwelt in it when at the height of its splendor, when scholars flocked from all parts of the world to consult its wise men, is more than at present we can positively know. . . .

1. "Maya Chronology," by Señor Don Juan Pio Perez, first published in the Appendix to Stephens's "Incidents of Travel in Yucatan."