Such then is the flimsy foundation upon which the whole Toltec structure has been reared. Now who were the people whom the Aztecs nicknamed Toltecs? We have already declared them to have been the ancestors of the present Mayans of Yucatan and the surrounding countries--in a word, Mayans themselves. Let us see if we can get some way on the road to proof of our assertion. That a people were living in Mexico before the Aztec invasion cannot be doubted; but if, as these Toltec enthusiasts would have us believe, they were apart from any and all other American peoples, where are they to-day? From the Land of Ice to the Land of Fire, there was not a spot that was so thickly populated at the discovery of America that a weaker tribe need have been wiped out. America was so sparsely inhabited that a conquered tribe could always find some direction to flee and form a new settlement. But if we accept the Toltec myth, we have to believe that a nation numbering some four or five millions in the eleventh century had at the time of the Conquest, four centuries later, disappeared. It is just possible, but it is most improbable. But if they did not disappear, where are we to look for this mislaid nation? Tradition says they went south. But was the country to the south of Mexico uninhabited then? For if these Toltecs were not strong enough to withstand the attacks of the Aztecs in their own strongholds, it is scarcely reasonable to suppose they would be of sufficient strength or in sufficient numbers to possess themselves of and conquer the inhabitants of a country along the fertile plains of one part of which, Guatemala, they would have found, it may be reasonably supposed, as dense a population as the Spaniards found later. The Toltec theory presumes that the expelled architects went south and found vast empty spaces where they continued their building operations. This is presuming altogether too much. Yucatan, Chiapas, Guatemala, were all inhabited at that time: what the Spaniards found there proves that much. But if you accept our suggestion that the Toltecs were but an outlying branch of the great Mayan race which possessed all Central America from Arizona and Texas to the frontier line of Nicaragua, then the miraculous disappearance of the Toltecs is not miraculous at all. They fled south among their own people, and became absorbed by a natural process in the various parts of Mayan territory, where they found buildings as great and greater than any they had built in their northern Mexican home. Far from the fugitives from the militant Aztecs being the founders of the wonderful cities in Yucatan and Guatemala, they were at the time of their flight probably much less civilised than their cousins at Chichen or Palenque.