5), inhabited an extremely poor and barren region of Mexico, to sacrifice the first animal killed in a hunting expedition and to offer it to “the Sun whom they called father and to the earth their mother.” They severed its head and raised this as though offering it to the sun. They _then tilled the earth where the blood had been spilt_ and left the animal which had been sacrificed, on the spot (Ixtlilxochitl, Historia Chichimeca chap. VI and Relaciones p. 335). This passage, establishing the cultivation of the soil where the blood had been spilt, sheds a flood of light on the origin of the offerings of human blood and the sacrifices of human life, which were such a prominent and hideous feature of the Aztec religion. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, instead of the blood being spilt directly upon the earth, to insure and increase the fruitfulness of the soil, a human being was stretched across a conical stone which became thus the image of the earth-mother, his heart was extracted and offered to the sun, the Above, and his blood was then smeared on the mouth of certain idols representing the Below. In the B. N. MS. an interesting illustration and account are given of an idol of the earth-mother who is figured as standing on a pedestal adorned with skulls and cross-bones with outstretched tongue which signified, “that she always had great thirst for human blood” and “never refused sacrifices offered to her.” Two priests are likewise pictured in the act of offering bowls containing human blood to the idol and a third, mounted on a ladder, is pouring the contents of another bowl over its head. It is obvious how the constant associations of the earth-mother with sanguinary sacrifices and bloodthirstiness would, in time, give rise to the idea of a hostile, maleficent power, linked with darkness and devouring fire, who, under the aspect of the serpent-woman, waged an eternal warfare on the human race and clamored for victims and bloody sacrifices. The natural sequence to the above associations is that in ancient Mexico the powers exerting fatal influence upon the human race are all represented as female, viz.: the Cihuacoatl or woman-serpent, the Ciuapipiltin and the Tzit-zime, etc. These and various other personifications of the female principle are described in detail in my notes and commentary to the B. N. MS.