It can, moreover, be directly connected with the recumbent statues representing the centre; for, whilst Bernal Diaz recorded that the statue on the summit of the Great Temple held a collection of all the seeds of the land, Cortés, in his descriptive letter, gives us an important detail which evidently applied to the identical statue. He relates that “the bodies of the idols are made of a dough consisting of all the kinds of seeds and vegetables that these people ate. These are ground, mixed with each other and then moistened with the blood of the hearts of human victims ...” (_op. cit._ p. 105). Sahagun relates that an image of the earth goddess, under the title of Seven-serpents or twins, was made of this sacred dough and that offerings of all kinds of maize, beans, etc., were made before it “because she is the author and giver of all these things which sustain the life of the people” (book II, 4). It is well known that the dough images were broken into small pieces and these were distributed to the priests and people, who partook of the substance after having prepared themselves by fasting, for the sacred rite. I draw attention to the fact that the above sacred substance is but the natural outcome of the primitive notion already mentioned, which led the hunters to spill blood upon the earth, to obtain its increased fruitfulness. An insight having been thus obtained of the origin of blood sacrifices in ancient America, it is possible to understand the meaning of certain representations showing the performance of ritual blood-offerings.