EXPEDITION TO AMECAMECA AND POPOCATEPETL.

I pass over the incidents of the trip by rail to Amecameca. Nearly twenty-five years have elapsed since the time when I first dug out of the sand at the foot of Popocatepetl sundry vases and trinkets. At that day American or Mexican archæology was so little in vogue, so neglected by all, that I myself attached no importance to a discovery which to-day brings me back to the same locality. But the Indians who saw me carrying away the vases may in their turn have taken to rummaging over the ground and rifled my treasure. Perhaps to-day my cemetery is changed beyond the possibility of recognition, or even obliterated. To-morrow or the day after I shall know whether my anticipations are to be realized or disappointed.

Leaving Amecameca at 7 A. M., on July 5th, we came to the rancho of Tlamacas at eleven. We have five men to make the excavations. As I feared, the Indians have been digging here, and have taken away a great number of broken vases, all traces of which have disappeared.

The rancho of Tlamacas is at an elevation of 12,596 feet, and the nights here are very cold. We rose at five o'clock; the cone of Popocatepetl was like a mass of gold in the horizontal rays of the sun, and we surveyed in all its details the valley of Puebla. Malinche, Orizaba, and the long sierra that bounds the horizon on the east, all go to form a panorama of vast extent and of wondrous beauty. After breakfast we set out for my plundered cemetery. I will sink shafts and run trenches to determine whether anything has been left besides heaps of dirt and fragments of pottery. Even though we find nothing more, these fragments are of interest as attesting the existence of an Indian burying-place, 12,800 feet above sea-level, more than 425 feet above the timber-line. During the day no perfect specimen of any sort was found to repay us for the labor of climbing a steep ascent of over 820 feet in this highly rarefied atmosphere.

On July 8th we found six graves. In the first were the remains of a woman or girl, a vase of very odd shape, and two other small vases. I saved a portion of the skull; the remainder of the skeleton is so decayed that it crumbles on being touched. The body was buried with the legs and arms doubled up, and the chin resting on the knees; no traces remain either of the hands or the feet.

The second grave also contained vases, slightly different from

those of the first. Of the human remains, the only part that I could take away was the arch of the skull. It was of a jelly-like consistency, or like a piece of tripe. I have preserved it by coating it with a mixture of stearine and tallow.

The third was a double grave. I have taken the skull of the man-supposing the grave to contain the bodies of a man and wife -and carefully cleaned and dried it, together with various other parts of the skeleton.

The fourth must have been the grave of a chief, inasmuch as there was no trace of a skeleton. It was the custom of these populations to burn the bodies of their caciques, and to bury the ashes with their arms. In this grave I found a number of objects made of chalchihuitl, a hard stone, of green color, and susceptible of a high polish. I found also several obsidian arrow-heads, a great number of necklace beads made of divers hard stones, also some made of terra cotta, and several small idols of earthenware and of hard stones of great value. It is a singular circumstance that all or nearly all of these jewels or ornaments were broken, probably in sign of mourning. Not less remarkable is the fact that these ornaments of serpentine, granite, and porphyry, whether because they date from a very high antiquity, or because they have been buried in a soil that exerts some special chemical action upon them, are in many instances decomposed.

The fifth and sixth graves contained each one body, together with numerous vases of every shape, and two candlesticks. This latter discovery is important, if it is true that the Aztecs had no other means of artificial light but the ocote.* It was impossible to save any portion of the skeletons.

Now, whence came these bodies? Why this cemetery at the elevation of four thousand metres-one hundred and fifty metres above the timber-line? At the time of the conquest there was, as at present, no village within a distance of four or five leagues of this spot. Besides, the Indians stood in mortal dread of the volcano, the Popocatepetl (smoking mountain), and when the companions of Cortes visited the crater to get sulphur they were followed by a number of the Indians, who wondered at their audacity, but who themselves halted long before they had come to the limit of the snows. When first I discovered this burying-place, I supposed it to have been a refuge where the conquered Indians buried their dead

*Pieces of resinous wood.

safe from profanation by the Spaniards. Later I held the opinion that these remains must have belonged to a far more ancient race. But the close resemblance between the vases, personal ornaments, and other objects found here, and those known to be of Aztec, Chichimec, or Totonac origin, negatives the supposition of great antiquity.

Every day we are rewarded by the discovery of objects more or less interesting. Of ten graves opened on July 9th, five had previously been violated by the Indians; the other five yielded about sixty specimens, some of them very curious, while one is unique and of very great value. This is a terra-cotta cup with three feet, eighteen centimetres (about seven inches) in diameter, eight centimetres (about three inches) high, and five centimetres (about two inches) in depth. This cup is covered within and without with very pretty figures, painted in the brightest colors; white, yellow, blue, green, and red are combined in perfect harmony. I found another cup, a little smaller, but equally beautiful. Unlike the first, this smaller cup was earth-stained and soaked with water.

I set my two treasures in the sun to dry, and soon, to my great mortification, observed that the ornamentation of the one was peeling off, while the bright colors of the other were fading. I lost no time in removing them, and made all haste to photograph the larger cup.

Another object which I have found an excellent caricature in terra cotta of a friar-proves conclusively that this cemetery dates only from the troublous times immediately succeeding the conquest. This specimen when found was covered with black, sticky clay, and was in two pieces. On removing this clay and fitting the two pieces together, I found myself in the presence of a friar with his cowl, beneath which is seen his hair tonsured in the form of a crown; he is in the regulation dress of his order—scapulary and gown; in his right hand he holds a cross.

On July 10th we found upward of one hundred objects of different kinds, many of them very interesting. Among them was another of those painted cups, but, like the other two, its colors faded and its enameled relief peeled off on exposure to the light. The urns, vases, cups, plates, and other articles in pottery which we have discovered in this burying-place, are for the most part works of art in the best sense of the term. But the idols, though they occur in the same graves, are extremely rude and hideous in their ugliness.

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It is very singular that in none of the graves have we found a single lock of hair, though the hair usually resists decay for a long time. How are we to account for this? Was it the custom to cut off the hair before the body was committed to the earth? None of the historians-and I have consulted them all concerning the matter of interment-has anything to say on this subject.

DÉSIRÉ CHARNAY.

THE OBSERVANCE OF THE SABBATH.

THE question concerning the proper observance of the Christian Sabbath may be considered in either of two aspects-the secular or civil, and the religious or spiritual.

In the former aspect, the Sabbath—that is, the measurement of time by weeks, each period of six days separated from the next by a day of rest from ordinary labor-is a social institution of prehistoric origin; and the Christian Sabbath, in distinction from the Jewish and the Mohammedan, is characteristic of all the nations in the foremost rank of civilization. Geography distinguishes between the civilized nations and the semi-civilized. Diplomacy makes the same distinction. Nations that recognize in some sort the Christian Sabbath are included in Christendom, and Christendom includes all civilized nations. China is older than any other existing empire; is rich with the accumulations and the ceaseless productiveness of peaceful industry; boasts of its heroes and sages, its schools, its libraries, its most voluminous literature, its art of printing practiced long before Faust or Gutenberg had dreamed of such an invention; includes within its limits almost a third part of the earth's population; has had from immemorial ages a highly developed system of government-yet China is only the oldest and the richest of the semi-civilized nations. When China shall have learned to measure time by weeks, and to recognize the Christian Sabbath, that greatest of empires will no longer be classed with the semicivilized. Turkey and Egypt are semi-civilized; but when Sunday instead of Friday shall be the Sabbath at Constantinople and Brusa, at Cairo and Alexandria, those two countries will have been advanced from the semi-civilized class to the civilized. Japan, having become the most earnestly progressive nation outside of Christendom, is now just learning to date in years of the Christian era, to number the days of the week, and in some sort to mark the Chris