their mode of life, one prepared meal each day expresses very nearly all the people in this condition of society can do for the sustenance of mankind.
Although the sedentary Village Indians were one ethnical period in advance of the Northern Indians, there can be but little doubt that their mode of life in this respect was substantially the same. Among the Aztecs or ancient Mexicans a dinner was provided about midday, but we have no satisfactory account of a breakfast or a supper habitually and regularly prepared. Civilization, with its diversified industries, its multiplied products, and its monogamian family, affords a breakfast and supper in addition to a dinner. It is doubtful whether they are older than civilization;
and even if they can be definitely traced backward into the older period of barbarism, there is little probability of their being found in the Middle period. Clavigero attempts to invest the Aztecs with a breakfast, but he was unable to find any evidence of a supper. "After a few hours of labor in the morning," he observes, "they took their breakfast, which was most commonly atolli, a gruel of maize, and their dinner after midday; but among all the historians we can find no mention of their supper."[1] The "gruel of maize" here mentioned as forming usually the Aztec breakfast suggests the "hominy of the Iroquois," which, like it, was not unlikely kept constantly prepared in every Mexican house as a lunch for the hungry. Two meals each day are mentioned by other Spanish authors, but as the Aztecs, as well as the tribes in Yucatan and Central America, were ignorant of the use of tables and chairs in eating their food, divided their food from the kettle, placing the dinner of each person usually in a separate bowl, and separated at their meals, the men eating first and by themselves, and the women and children afterwards, this similarity of usage renders it probable they were not far removed from the Iroquois in respect to the time and manner of taking their food Montezuma's dinner, witnessed by Bernal-Diaz and others, and elaborately described by a number of authors, shows that the Aztecs had a smoking hot dinner each day, prepared regularly, and on a scale adequate to a large household; that the dinner of each person was placed in one bowl, and all these bowls to the number of several hundred were brought in and set down together upon the floor of one room,
- ↑ History of Mexico, ii, 262
