It was the posterity of this man whom the unhappy Montezuma thought he recognised in the soldiers of Cortez, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico. “We know,” said the unhappy monarch, in his first interview with the Spanish general, “by our books, that myself, and those who inhabit this country, are not natives, but strangers, who came from a great distance. We know, also, that the chief who led our ancestors hither returned, for a certain time, to his primitive country, and thence came back to seek those who were here established, who after a while returned again, alone. We always believed that his descendants would one day come to take possession of this country. Since you arrive from that region where the _sun rises_, I cannot doubt but that the king who sends you is our natural master.” Humboldt says that the Azteca tribes left their country, Aztalan, in the year of our Lord 544; and wandered to the south or southwest, coming at last to the vale of Mexico. It would appear from this view, that as the nations of Aztalan, with their fellow nations, left vast works, and a vast extent of country, apparently in a state of cultivation, with cities and villages, more in number than three thousand, as Breckenridge supposed, they must, therefore, have settled here long before the Christian era. And this Quetzalcoatl, a celebrated minister of these opinions, appears to have been the _first_ who announced the religion of the east among the people of the west. There was also one other minister, or Brahmin, who appeared among the Mozca tribes in South America, whom they named _Bochica_. This personage taught the worship of the sun; and, if we were to judge, we should pronounce him a missionary of the Confucian system, a worshipper of fire, which was the religion of the ancient Persians, of whose country Confucius was a native. This also is evidence that the first inhabitants of America came here at a period near the flood, long before that worship was known, or they would have had a knowledge of this Persian worship, which was introduced by _Bochica_ among the American nations, which, it seems, they had not, until taught by this man. Bochica, it appears, became a legislator among those nations, and changed the form of their government to a form, the construction of which, says Baron Humboldt, bears a strong analogy to the governments of Japan and Thibet, on account of the _pontiffs_ holding in their hands both the secular and the spiritual reins. In Japan, an island on the east of Asia, or rather many islands, which compose the Japanese empire, is found a religious sect, styled Sinto, who do not believe in the sanguinary rites of shedding either human blood, or that of animals, to propitiate their gods; they even abstain from animal food, and detest bloodshed, and will not touch any dead body.—(_Morse’s Geography_, p. 523.)