The Toltecs play a part in the initial pages of the New World’s story akin to the fabled Cyclops of antiquity. They belong to that vague era which lies beyond all definite records, and furnish a name for the historian and the ethnologist alike to conjure with: like the Druids or the Picts of the old British antiquary, or the Phœnicians of his American disciple. Yet it is not without its value thus to discover among the nations of the New World, even a fabulous history, with its possible fragments of truth embodied in the myth. Mr. Gallatin has compiled a laborious digest of the successive migrations and dynasties of Mexico, as chronicled from elder sources, by Ixtlilxochitl, Sahagun, Veytia, Clavigero, the Mendoza Collection, the Codex Tellurianus, and Acosta.[92] The oldest dates bring the Toltec wanderers to Huehuetlapallan, A.D. 387, and close their dynasty in the middle of the tenth century; when they are superseded by Chichimecas and Tezcucans, whose joint sovereignty, by the unanimous concurrence of authorities, endured till the sixteenth century. But, meanwhile, the same authorities chronicle the foundation of Mexico or Tenochtitlan, variously in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, by Aztec conquerors; and profess to supply the dynastic chronology of Aztec power. The earliest date is not too remote for the commencement of a civilisation that has left such evidences of its later maturity; but unfortunately the various authorities differ not by years only, but by centuries. Ixtlilxochitl carries back the founding of Mexico upwards of a century farther than any other authority; and in the succeeding date, which professes to fix the election of its king, Acamapichtli, the discrepancies between him and other authorities vary from two to considerably more than two and a half centuries, and leave on the mind of the critical student impressions as unsubstantial as those pertaining to the regal dynasties of Alban and Sabine Rome. Spanish chroniclers and modern historians have striven to piece into coherent details the successive migrations into the Vale of Anahuac, and the desertion of the mythic Aztalan for the final seat of Aztec empire on the lake of Tezcuco; but their shadowy history marshals before us only shapes vague as the legends of the engulfed Atlantis.