coffee nor the sugar- cane, but they obtained
sugar from the stems of maize. Of their
medicinal plants we have a powerful sample in
the one which comes from the town of Jalapa.
Their forests supplied them with vanille, of which
Mexico long held the monopoly. On their
cactuses they reared their cochineal insect, which
is still an important article of commerce. With
an abundance of cotton at hand, they did not
want for clothing. The greatest novelty for the
Spaniards, which they had to show, was tobacco,
which they called yetl. They both smoked and
snuffed it; but this indulgence, it seems, was
confined to the rich.

One of their most curious crops was the aloe,
or rather agave, known amongst them by the
name of maguey, and which supplied them with
pulque, a fermented drink of which they were
very fond. The aloes, planted in rows ten feet
apart, grew with little or no care, for ten or a
dozen years. But as soon as the flowering stem
began to shoot, it was cut out, so as to leave a
sort of cup, in which the sap of the plant was
collected, and taken daily, or several times a day.
Fermentation speedily followed. The resulting
beverage had one peculiarity which unfitted it
for European palates: it was rare that it had not
a slight aroma of rotten eggs, arising, perhaps,
from the uncleanly way in which it was prepared,
and the skins in which it was sent to market.
The agave furnished, and furnishes still, a
valuable fibre for cordage, sailcloth, and other
uses to which hemp is applied. The points of
the leaves served as needles and awls. With
the leaves entire, houses were thatched. The
root was eaten.

If Mexican agriculture had great available
wealth within its reach, far surpassing the
resources which Europe had to offer to its first
inhabitants, its poverty in live stock was extreme.
It possessed not a single beast of burden;
not a horse, an ox, an ass, or a camel. The
ancient Mexicans had not even the alpaca, which
affords the Peruvians a feeble means of transport.
The sheep and the goat were equally unknown.

Now, the muscular force of the larger animals
is one of the most efficient aids to human progress.
Where beasts of burden do not exist,
man is obliged to take their place. Hence, for a
portion of a population, the necessity of servile
employment. All kind of transport, therefore,
in the Aztec empire, was performed on the
backs of men. The chiefs went in litters on the
shoulders of their "tamanes," or porters. Of
course the tillage of the fields was done by hand.
This is still the case in China, where, beyond the
valleys of the great rivers, or far from the canals,
transport on human backs is customary, and the
soil is principally cultivated by human arms.
The conquest relieved the Mexicans of those
degrading tasks. Man is no longer a beast of
burden. Mules for commerce on a large scale,
asses for the supply of towns, and horses for
travellers, have become his substitutes. Only in
the mountain districts are heavy loads, wood for
instance, of from sixty to eighty pounds, carried
on the backs of men.

The animal food which they were unable to
obtain from flocks and herds was furnished by
the chase and by a few animals which they had
domesticated. Like the Chinese, they ate a
variety of dog, called techichi. But their
principal resource for meat was the turkey,
called totolin, which they reared in enormous
quantities. Turkeys were a drug, sufficiently
abundant to cause a national surfeit. Cortes
relates that the poultry-yards of Montezuma's
palace were stocked with several thousand
turkeys; and Bernal Diaz tells how, every day, a
couple of hundred were sacrificed to feed the
beasts in the emperor's menagerie; proving first,
that the said menagerie was vast, and secondly,
that turkeys were not very dear. It was from
Mexico that turkeys were brought to Europe.

For the transmission of news and orders,
Montezuma organised relays of men capable of a
speed approaching that of the mails of our olden
time before the dawn of the railway period.
Through the agency of these swift couriers, his
table was served with fish which had been
swimming the day before, in the Gulf of Mexico, or
along the shores of Acapulco. For the same
pleasant purpose Maximilian will avail himself
of four-footed carriers and the carriage-road
which runs from Vera Cruz to the capital.

The Mexicans were passionate lovers of
flowers. They fully appreciated the vegetable
treasures which nature had profusely lavished
upon them. In their splendid gardens they
assembled those which were most remarkable for
their perfume or their brilliant colours. With
these they associated medicinal plants methodically
arranged, the shrubs most remarkable for
their flowers or foliage, or for the excellence of
their fruits or seeds, together with trees of
majestic or elegant aspect. They were
particularly fond of sprinkling their parterres and
clumps on the steep slopes of hills, where they
seemed suspended. If they rivalled Semiramis's
hanging gardens, they may be reckoned among
the wonders of the world.

Aqueducts brought water from afar, which fell
in cascades or spread in basins peopled with
curious and gaudy fish. Mysterious pavilions
were hidden beneath the leaves; statues arose in
the midst of flowers. Exactly as we collect the
rarest animals to adorn our gardens devoted to
science, so the Mexicans compelled the animal
kingdom to pay its tribute of ornament to their
pleasure-grounds. Before the Jardin des Plantes
and the Zoological Gardens were, the Mexican
Horticultural Menagerie was. There, were
bright-feathered birds, in aviaries as big as
houses; wild animals, carnivorous beasts, and
even serpents. There, Bernal Diaz first saw the
rattlesnake, which he describes as "having
castanets in its tail." At that date, Europe
possessed no Jardin des Plantes or Zoological
Garden. That of Padua, said to be the first, was
founded in 1445; Venice, however, claims to