What I wish to point out in all this is the contrast between the dry and scanty historic narrative which shows Tula with its Snake-Hill to have been an early station of the Azteca, occupied in the eleventh and twelfth century by one of their clans, and the monstrous myth of the later priests and poets, which makes of it a birthplace and abode of the gods, and its inhabitants the semi-divine conquerors and civilizers of Mexico and Central America. For this latter fable there is not a vestige of solid foundation. The references to Tula and the Toltecs in the _Chronicles of the Mayas_ and the _Annals of the Kakchiquels_ are loans from the later mythology of the Nahuas. It is high time for this talk about the Toltecs as a mighty people, precursors of the Azteca, and their instructors in the arts of civilization, to disappear from the pages of history. The residents of ancient Tula, the Tolteca, were nothing more than a sept of the Nahuas themselves, the ancestors of those Mexica who built Tenochtitlan in 1325. This is stated as plainly as can be in the Aztec records, and should now be conceded by all. The mythical Tula, and all its rulers and inhabitants, are the baseless dreams of poetic fancy, which we principally owe to the Tezcucan poets.[124] PART II. MYTHOLOGY AND FOLK-LORE. INTRODUCTORY. Fashions in the study of mythology come and go with something like the rapidity of change in costume feminine, subject to the autocracy of a Parisian man-modiste. Myths have been held in turn to be of some deep historical, or moral, or physical purport, and their content has been sought through psychologic or philologic analysis. Just now, all these methods are out of fashion. The newest theory is that myths generally mean nothing at all; that they are merely funny or fearsome stories and never were much more; and that at first they were not told of anybody in particular nor about anything in particular. As for philologic analysis, it is accused of failures and contradictory results; the names which it makes its material are alleged not to have belonged to the original story; and their etymology casts no more light on the meaning or the source of the myth than if they were Smith or Brown. According to this facile method, the secret of all mythology is an open one, because there is no secret at all. No painful preliminary study of language is necessary to the science, no laborious tracing of names through their various dialectic forms and phonetic changes to their first and original sense, for neither their earlier nor later sense is to the purpose.