ABSTRACT
The country of the ancient Mexicans, or Aztecs as they were called, formed but very small part of the extensive territories comprehended in the modern republic of Mexico. They were much enlarged in the latter days of the empire, when they may be considered as reaching from about the eighteenth degree north, to the twenty-first, on the Atlantic; and from the fourteenth to the nineteenth, including a very narrow strip, on the Pacific. Midway across the continent, somewhat nearer the Pacific than the Atlantic Ocean, at an elevation of nearly seven thousand five hundred feet, is the celebrated Valley of Mexico. The Mexicans, with whom our history is principally concerned, came also from the remote regions of the North,-the populous hive of nations in the New World, as it has been in the Old. They arrived on the borders of Anahuac towards the beginning of the thirteenth century, some time after the occupation of the land by the kindred races.
