{*} [This estimate is of course erroneous. “The ordinary rules of reckoning” cannot be applied to people living as did the Mexicans. The word _vecinos_ means not only householders, as pointed out in the author’s note, but also inhabitants. The translator who rendered the “Anonymous Conqueror” into Italian made no blunder when he used the word _habitatori_. Morgan (Ancient Society, p. 195) thinks the population was not more than 30,000, and asks “how a barbarous people without flocks and herds, and without field agriculture, could have sustained in equal areas a larger number of inhabitants than a civilized people can now maintain armed with these advantages.” (London at that time may have contained 145,000 inhabitants.) But Morgan’s estimate is without question too low. Zuazo and the Anonymous Conqueror were more nearly right in fixing, the population of the city at 60,000. There could not possibly have been room enough for sixty thousand Aztec houses in a city of which the circumference was less than three leagues. (No one makes it at any time to have been more than four leagues in circumference.) The houses in which the higher officials dwelt were spread over a wide extent of ground, were low, “seldom of more than one floor, never exceeding two.” (_Ante_, p. 285.) Public buildings and pleasure grounds took up much space. The great market-place, _tianguez_, was “thrice as large as the celebrated square of Salamanca” (p. 312). No one states the number of visitors at less than 40,000 (p. 317). (According to Ford, Handbook of Spain, the Plaza at Salamanca was the largest square in Spain. From 16,000 to 20,000 spectators could be accommodated at the bull-fights which took place there.) The temple area also was enormous. On a map of the city of Mexico, in the edition of the Letters of Cortés published at Nuremberg, 1524, the temple space is twenty times as great as that given to the market-place. The large number of visitors to the Plaza on market days is easily accounted for if we compare the thronged afternoon streets in the shopping districts of any large city with those same streets deserted at night when the visitors have returned to their homes. There were no shops in the Aztec capital and all the buying was done in the _tianguez_.--M.]