Hideous, therefore, as were the human sacrifices, with their annual thousands of victims; the offerings of infants to propitiate Tlaloc, their rain-god; and the loathsome banquets on the bodies of their sacrificed victims:—if indeed this be not an exaggeration of Spanish credulity and fanaticism;—it is nevertheless difficult to concur in the verdict of the gifted historian of _The Conquest of Mexico_, that “it was beneficently ordered by Providence that the land should be delivered over to another race who would rescue it from the brutish superstitions that daily extended wider and wider, with extent of empire.” The rule of the conquerors, with their Dominican ministers of religion, was no beneficent sway; and its fruits in later times have not proved of such value as to reconcile the student of that strange old native civilisation of the votaries of Quetzalcoatl, to its abrupt arrestment, at a stage which can only be paralleled by the earlier centuries of Egyptian progress. Metallurgic arts were carried in some respects further by the Mexicans than by the Peruvians. Silver, lead, and tin were obtained from the mines of Tasco and Pachuca; copper was wrought in the mountains of Zacotollan, by means of galleries and shafts opened with persevering toil where the metallic veins were imbedded in the solid rock; and there, as at the Lake Superior copper regions, the traces of such ancient mining have proved the best guides to modern searchers for the ores. The arts of casting, engraving, chasing, and carving in metal, were all practised with great skill. Vessels both of gold and silver were wrought of enormous size: so large, it is said, that a man could not encircle them with his arms; and the abundant gold was as lavishly employed in Mexico as in Peru, in the gorgeous adornment of temples and palaces. Ingenious toys, birds and beasts with moveable wings and limbs, fish with alternate scales of silver and gold, and personal ornaments in great variety, were wrought by the Mexican goldsmiths of the precious metals, with such curious art, that the Spaniards acknowledged the superiority of the native workmanship over anything they could achieve. When Cortes first entered the capital of Montezuma in 1513, the Mexican ruler received him in the palace built by his father Axayacatl, and hung round his neck a decoration of the finest native workmanship. The shell of a species of craw-fish, set in gold, formed the centre, and massive links of gold completed the collar, from which depended eight ornaments of the same metal, delicately-wrought in imitation of the prized shell-fish.