By pursuing the combinations through the two remaining indictions, it will be found that the same number of dots will never coincide with the same hieroglyphic. These tables are generally thrown into the form of wheels, as are those also of their months and days, having a very pretty effect. Several have been published, at different times, from the collections of Siguenza and Boturini. The wheel of the great cycle of fifty-two years is encompassed by a serpent, which was also the symbol of “an age,” both with the Persians and Egyptians. Father Toribio seems to misapprehend the nature of these chronological wheels: “Tenian rodelas y escudos, y en ellas pintadas las figuras y armas de sus Demonios con su blason.” Hist. de los Indios, MS., Parte 1, cap. 4. [190] Among the Chinese, Japanese, Moghols, Mantchous, and other families of the Tartar race. Their series are composed of symbols of their five elements, and the twelve zodiacal signs, making a cycle of sixty years’ duration. Their several systems are exhibited, in connection with the Mexican, in the luminous pages of Humboldt (Vues des Cordillères, p. 149), who draws important consequences from the comparison, to which we shall have occasion to return hereafter. [191] In this calendar, the months of the tropical year were distributed into cycles of thirteen days, which, being repeated twenty times,--the number of days in a solar month,--completed the lunar, or astrological, year of 260 days; when the reckoning began again. “By the contrivance of these _trecenas_ (terms of thirteen days) and the cycle of fifty-two years,” says Gama, “they formed a luni-solar period, most exact for astronomical purposes.” (Descripcion, Parte 1, p. 27.) He adds that these _trecenas_ were suggested by the periods in which the moon is visible before and after conjunction. (Loc. cit.) It seems hardly possible that a people capable of constructing a calendar so accurately on the true principles of solar time should so grossly err as to suppose that in this reckoning they really “represented the daily revolutions of the moon.” “The whole Eastern world,” says the learned Niebuhr, “has followed the moon in its calendar; the free scientific division of a vast portion of time is peculiar to the West. Connected with the West is that primeval extinct world which we call the New.” History of Rome, vol. i. p. 239. [192] They were named “companions,” and “lords of the night,” and were supposed to preside over the night, as the other signs did over the day. Boturini, Idea, p. 57.