At the same time we find that clay or wooden figures continued to be employed evidently as a method of keeping an accurate register of the population. In the capital, one building held duplicates of all the huacas throughout the land. When a new province was conquered the Inca carried its principal huaca to Cuzco. One or more living representatives of the conquered tribe, wearing its characteristic dress, were obliged to reside in the capital. In ancient Mexico these “living images of the gods” are one of the most striking features of the native civilization and have been persistently misunderstood, especially by modern authorities. As these “living gods” are specially treated in the “Lyfe of the Indians,” I shall merely point out here that small clay portraits or effigies of persons were made in Mexico at certain stages of an individual’s life and also after his death. These seem to have been employed for statistical purposes. In Mexico and Peru large numbers of small images were preserved in each household and were under the charge of its chief or “older brother,” who was obliged to guard and render account of them. Of course the Spanish conquerors took it for granted that all of these were idols and, in their ignorance, destroyed them unmercifully. Once the native system of tribal organization is understood, it becomes evident that an accurate register of all members of a tribe was of utmost importance. By means of a group of more or less skillfully-modelled figures or heads the size of a family could be ascertained at a glance by the government recorder. In the light of this recognition it seems more than probable that the immense numbers of small clay heads of various kinds, found in the “street of the dead” at the base of the great pyramids of Teotihuacan, and elsewhere, indicate that, in these localities, a periodical and official registration of deaths was carefully carried on. This assumption is fully corroborated by the conclusions I reached, in 1886, after making a minute study of a large number of terra-cotta heads(21) and ascertaining that numbers of them were portraits of dead persons. The above inference is, moreover, confirmed by the name of Teotihuacan, which means, literally, “the place of the lords or masters of the teotle.” The term teotl was given to the head of a tribe, who constituted the living image of the tribal ancestor. When he died he himself became one of the tribal ancestors and all dead lords were termed teotle.