with a leafy branch in its beak. Then Tezpi, seeing that the country
began to vegetate, left his bark on the mountain of Colhuacan.

"The document, however, that gives the most valuable information," says
Lenormant, "as to the cosmogony of the Mexicans is one known as 'Codex
Vaticanus,' from the library where it is preserved. It consists of four
symbolic pictures, representing the four ages of the world preceding the
actual one. They were copied at Chobula from a manuscript anterior to
the conquest, and accompanied by the explanatory commentary of Pedro de
los Rios, a Dominican monk, who, in 1566, less than fifty years after
the arrival of Cortez, devoted himself to the research of indigenous
traditions as being necessary to his missionary work."

There were, according to this document, four ages of the world. The
first was an age of giants (the great mammalia?) who were destroyed by
famine; the second age ended in a conflagration; the third age was an
age of monkeys.

"Then comes the fourth age, Atonatiuh, 'Sun of Water,' whose number is
10 X 400 + 8, or 4008. It ends by a great inundation, a veritable
deluge. All mankind are changed into fish, with the exception of one man
and his wife, who save themselves in a bark made of the trunk of a
cypress-tree. The picture represents Matlalcueye, goddess of waters, and
consort of Tlaloc, god of rain, as darting down toward earth. Coxcox and
Xochiquetzal, the two human beings preserved, are seen seated on a
tree-trunk and floating in the midst of the waters. This flood is
represented as the last cataclysm that devastates the earth."

The learned Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg translates from the Aztec
language of the "Codex Chimalpopoca" the following Flood legend: