945.
We are further told that just about the time of our Norman Conquest, the Toltecs were driven out from the Mexican plateau by famine and pestilence, and migrated again southward.

Only a few families remained, and from them the Aztecs, Chichemecs, and other barbarous tribes by whom the country was re-peopled, derived that knowledge of the arts and sciences upon which their own civilization was founded.

It was by this Toltec nation--say the Mexican writers--that the monuments of Xochichalco, Teotihuacan, and Cholula were built.

In their architecture the Aztecs did little more than copy the works left by their predecessors; and, to this day, the Mexican Indians call a builder a _toltecatl_ or _Toltec_.
If we consider this circumstantial account to be anything but a mere tissue of fables, the question naturally arises--what became of the remains of the Toltecs when they left the high plains of Mexico?
A theory has been propounded to answer this question, that they settled in Chiapas and Yucatan, and built Palenque, Copan, and Uxmal, and the other cities, the ruins of which lie imbedded in the tropical forest.
At the time that Prescott wrote his History of the Conquest, such a theory was quite tenable; but the new historic matter lately made known by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg has given a different aspect to the question.

Without attempting to maintain the credibility of this writer's history as a whole, I cannot but think that he has given us satisfactory grounds for believing that the ruined cities of Central America were built by a race which flourished long before the Toltecs; that they were already declining in power and civilization in the seventh century, when the Toltecs began to flourish in Mexico; and that the present Mayas of Yucatan are their degenerate descendants.
What I have seen of Central American and Mexican antiquities, and of drawings of them in books, tends to support the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg's view of the history of these countries.