The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races, page 549 by E.A. Allen
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e. Devout people sometimes offered themselves or their children for the sacrifice. The number of victims, of course, varied from year to year, but it is possible that it counted up into the thousands every year.
What we are able to gather from the religious beliefs of the civilized nations sustains the conclusions we have already arrived at in reference to their culture. We can but believe this had been greatly overrated. It is the religion of barbarians, not of a cultivated and enlightened people the historians would have us believe in. It is a religion in keeping with the character of the people who had confederated together for the purpose of compelling unwilling tribute from weaker tribes. It is in keeping with what we would expect of a people still in the Stone Age, who still practised communism in living, and whose political and social organization was founded on the gens as a unit.
It will not be out of place to devote some space to a consideration of their advance in learning; and first of all let us see about their system of counting or numeration. This knowledge, as Mr. Gallatin remarks, must necessarily have preceded any knowledge of astronomy, or any effort to compute time. They must have known how to count the days of a year before they knew how many days it contained. We all know how natural it is for a child to count by means of his fingers. This was undoubtedly the first method employed by primitive man. Proof of this is found in the wide extended use of the decimal system. Among the civilized nations, traces of this early custom are still preserved in the meaning of the words used to express the numbers.
To express the numbers up to twenty, small dots or circles were used--one for each unit. For the number twenty they painted a little flag, for the number four hundred, a feather; and for eight thousand, a purse or pouch. The following table represents the method of enumeration employed by the Mexicans. But it is necessary to remark they used different terminations for differe