conclude by saying that it is an admirable thing to see them made, and no small argument for the capacity of the men who found out such an invention.” [25] In the original, _aras_. In the Latin of Hernandez, _arae_ I suppose to be the little polished stone slabs which are set on the altars in Roman Catholic churches, and in which their sacred quality is, so to speak, contained. Vetancurt (_Teatro Mejicano_) gives an account, taken from the above. Hernandez (_Rerum Med. Nov. Hisp. Thes.: Rome_, 1631) gives a similar account of the process. He compares the wooden instrument used to a cross-bow. It was evidently a T-shaped implement, and the workman held the cross-piece with his two hands against his breast, while the end of the straight stick rested on the stone. He furthermore gives a description of the making of the well-known _maquahuitl_, or Aztec war-club, which was armed on both sides with a row of obsidian knives, or teeth, stuck into holes with a kind of gum. With this instrument, he says, a man could be cut in half at a blow—an absurd statement, which has been repeated by more modern writers. II. ON THE SOLAR ECLIPSES RECORDED IN THE LE TELLIER MS. The curious Aztec Picture-writing, known as the _Codex Telleriano-Remenensis_, preserved in the Royal Library of Paris, contains a list or calendar of a long series of years, indicated by the ordinary signs of the Aztec system of notation of cycles of years. Below the signs of the years are a number of hieroglyphic pictures, conveying the record of remarkable events which happened in them, such as the succession and death of kings, the dates of wars, pestilences, &c. The great work of Lord Kingsborough, which contains a fac-simile of this curious document, reproduces also an ancient interpretation of the matters contained in it, evidently the work of a person who not only understood the interpretation of the Aztec picture-writings, but had access to some independent source of information,—probably the more ample oral traditions, for the recalling of which the picture-writing appears only to have served as a sort of artificial memory. It is not necessary to enter here into a fuller description of the MS., which has also been described by Humboldt and Gallatin.