my possession. I fear we have no perfect examples of the Zapotec
calendar, nor of that of the Tarascos of Michoacan, although an
anonymous author, most of whose MS. has been preserved, reduced the
latter to writing, and it may some day turn up.[50] The Aztec calendars
collected by Boturini would, were they published, give us sufficient
material, probably, to understand clearly the methods of that tribe.

One momentous purpose which the calendar served was for supplying omens
and predictions; another was for the appointment of fasts and festivals,
for the religious ritual. The calendar arranged for these objects was
called, in the Nahuatl, _tonalamatl_, "the book of days," and in
Maya _tzolante_, "that by which events are arranged." So intimately
were all the acts of individual and national life bound up with these
superstitions, that an understanding of them is indispensable to a
successful study of the psychology and history of the race.

After the Conquest some of the notions about judicial astrology, then
prevalent in Europe, crept into the native understanding, and notably,
in the _Books of Chilan Balam_ we find forecastes of lucky and
unlucky days, and discussions of planetary influence, evidently borrowed
from the Spanish almanacs of the seventeenth century.

Most of the Aborigines of the Continent possessed a keen sense of
locality, and often a certain rude skill in cartography. The relative
position of spots and proportionate distances were approximately
represented by rough drawings. They knew the boundaries of their lands,
the courses of streams, the trend of shores, and could display them
intelligently. These maps, as they are called, present a very different
appearance from ours. Those of the Aztecs are rather pictured diagrams,
something like those we find in fifteenth century books of travel. A