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Updated: June 4, 2025
What I have seen of Central American and Mexican antiquities, and of drawings of them in books, tends to support the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg's view of the history of these countries. Traces of communication between the two peoples are to be found in abundance, but nothing to warrant our holding that either people took its civilization bodily from the other.
These old books and traditions mention “Huehue-Tlapalan” as a distant northeastern country, from which the Nahuas or Toltecs came to Mexico; and Brasseur de Bourbourg, who has translated one of the old books and given much attention to others, supposes the Toltecs and the Mound-Builders to be the same people, or did suppose this previous to the appearance of his “Atlantic theory.” But this point will be more fully considered when we come to the Central American antiquities.
Brasseur de Bourbourg says: “In the histories written in the Nahuatl language, the oldest certain date is nine hundred and fifty-five years before Christ.” This, he means, is the oldest date in the history of the Nahuas or Toltecs which has been accurately determined.
In this connection we must not forget M. Brasseur Wirtgen, a student of natural history who writes of his cat: "My habit of reading," he says, "which divided us from each other in our respective thoughts, prejudiced my cat very strongly against my books.
He was a brasseur d'affaires, a stockbroker I suppose you call it in English; and he had a wife and family, and he was earning a large income. He chucked it all to become a painter. He just went off and settled down in Brittany and began to paint. He hadn't got any money and did the next best thing to starving." "And what about his wife and family?" asked Philip. "Oh, he dropped them.
Then when we turn to the most ancient traditions of the human race in both the old and the new worlds, and find everywhere fire and water linked together in the accounts of the great catastrophes that are said nearly to have annihilated the human race, I for one am inclined to accept them, and to believe that when, in the "Leo Amontli," as translated by Brasseur de Bourbourg, we read of "the volcanic convulsions that lasted four days and four nights," of "the thunder and lightning that came out of the sea," of "the mountains that were rising and sinking when the great deluge happened," and that when Plato on the other side of the Atlantic speaks of the earthquakes that accompanied the engulfment of Atlantis, we hear the dim echoes that have been sounding down through all time from that remote past, of the fearful volcanoes and earthquakes that terrified mankind at the time of the great cataclysm.
Compared with absurdities of this order, the wildest imaginings of M. Brasseur de Bourbourg are entitled to be ranked with the conjectures of a sane philosophy. Mr. Squier, as we have seen, gives no countenance to baseless speculations, and the publication of his book has, it is evident, fallen on them as a heavy blow and great discouragement.
Landa’s manuscript seems to have lain neglected in the library, for little or nothing was heard of it until it was discovered and studied by Brasseur de Bourbourg, who, by means of it, has deciphered some of the old American writings. An extensive and important manuscript work, written two hundred years ago by Francisco Ximenes, an ecclesiastic, is preserved in Guatemala.
M. Brasseur is preposterously natural, full of aplomb and impertinence. He never flags, never hesitates; it is impossible to take him seriously, as we say of delightful, mischievous people in real life. I have been amused to see a discussion in the papers as to whether "La Veine" is a fit play to be presented to the English public.
He had given almost as much time as Brasseur de Bourbourg to Mexican hieroglyphics, and naturally had made nothing out of them. His chief desire was to discover the Secret of the Pyramid not the pyramids of Egypt, as you fancied, but the Pyramid of the Sun, Tonatiuh, at Teohuacan.
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