so often described by travelers and scientific men, from Cortez to Humboldt, and from Humboldt down. This is now built into the western wall of the great Cathedral of Mexico, and can be seen and inspected by everybody.
But more interesting than this, is the collection which I found, lying heaped carelessly together, and unguarded from Vandal hands, in the patio of one of the old Convents—now a school for young ladies—near the Palacio Nacional. If this collection was left thus unguarded, at the mercy of the relic hunters of the United States or Europe, there would not be a piece as large as a chestnut left in forty-eight hours. The people who cut into infinitesimal chips, the three last ties, and broke into fragments and carried off, within two hours, the last iron rail of the Pacific railroad, or those ladies(?) who rushed to the place at the table at which the Prince of Wales had been sitting in an English town a few months since, and quarreled and fought for the possession of the cherry stones which he had spit out of his mouth, would make short work of them.
The chief of these relics is the great sacrificial stone, a block of fine-grained lava, shaped like a mill-stone, ten feet in diameter, and over three feet in thickness, covered with boldly sculptured figures, and elaborately wrought on every part. In the center of this stone is a basin, holding about as much as an ordinary American wooden pail, into which the blood of the human victims ran, when the Priests of the Sun, cut open their bosoms with flint knives and tore out their living hearts. From this basin a channel cut in the face of the stone conducted the blood to the side, from whence it ran down into a large stone trough, which is now to be seen
