For this Tollan, where Quetzalcoatl reigned, is not by any means, as some have supposed, the little town of Tula, still alive, a dozen leagues or so northwest from the city of Mexico; nor was it, as the legend usually stated, in some undefined locality from six hundred to a thousand leagues northwest of that city; nor yet in Asia, as some antiquaries have maintained; nor, indeed, anywhere upon this weary world; but it was, as the name denotes, and as the native historian Tezozomoc long since translated it, where the bright sun lives, and where the god of light forever rules so long as that orb is in the sky.

Tollan is but a syncopated form of _Tonatlan_, the Place of the Sun.[1] [Footnote 1: "Tonalan, o lugar del sol," says Tezozomoc (_Cronica Mexicana_, chap.

i).

The full form is _Tonatlan_, from _tona_, "hacer sol," and the place ending _tlan_.

The derivation from _tollin_, a rush, is of no value, and it is nothing to the point that in the picture writing Tollan was represented by a bundle of rushes (Kingsborough, vol.vi, p.
177, note), as that was merely in accordance with the rules of the picture writing, which represented names by rebuses.