To return to the Museum. There are stamps in terra-cotta with geometrical patterns, for making lines and ornaments on the vases before they were baked, and for stamping patterns upon the cotton cloth which was one of their principal manufactures, as it is now. Connected with the same art are the _malacates_, or winders, which I have already described. Little grotesque heads made of baked clay, like those I have mentioned as being found in such immense numbers on the sites of old Mexican cities, are here by hundreds. I think there were, besides, some of the moulds, also in terra-cotta, in which they were formed; at any rate, they are to be seen, so that making the little heads must have been a regular trade. What they were for is not so easy to say. Some have bodies, and are made with flat backs to stand against a wall, and these were probably idols. The ancient Mexicans, we read, had household-gods in great numbers, and called them _Tepitotons_, “little ones.” The greatest proportion, however, are mere heads which never had had bodies, and will not stand anyhow. They could not have been personal ornaments, for there is nothing to fasten them on by. They are rather a puzzle. I have seen a suggestion somewhere, that when a man was buried, each surviving member of his family put one of these heads into his grave. This sounds plausible enough, especially as both male and female heads are found. One shelf in the museum is particularly instructive. We called it the “Chamber of Horrors,” after the manner of Marlborough House, and it contains numbers of the sham antiquities, the manufacture of which is a regular thing in Mexico, as it is in Italy. They are principally vases and idols of earthenware, for the art of working obsidian is lost, and there can be no trickery about that;[19] and as to the hammers, chisels, and idols in green jade, serpentine, and such like hard materials, they are decidedly cheaper to find than to make. The Indians in Mexico make their unglazed pottery just as they did before the Conquest, so that, if they imitate real antiques exactly, there is no possibility of detecting the fraud; but when they begin to work from their own designs, or even to copy from memory, they are almost sure to put in something that betrays them. [19] This assertion must be qualified by a remark of the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who tells us that in some places the Indians still use lancets of obsidian to bleed themselves with. I believe there is nothing of the kind to be found in the part of Mexico which we visited.