Science Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

A Victorian scientist praising Mexico City as “grand” and “marvellous” isn’t just sightseeing; it’s taxonomy with a view. Edward Burnett Tylor helped build anthropology as a discipline, and this line carries that early anthropological habit of turning lived places into objects of appraisal. “Taking it as a whole” sounds judicious, even empirical, as if the city can be summed like a specimen: you bracket the messy particulars, then deliver a verdict. The pose is measured; the power is in what gets smoothed out.

The most revealing move is the citation of Cortes. Tylor doesn’t simply admire Mexico’s “situation” (a word that flatters geography while avoiding politics); he borrows legitimacy from the conquistador’s gaze. That alignment is doing cultural work. Cortes is the original European narrator of Tenochtitlan’s splendor, and invoking him frames Mexico through a conquest-era script: astonishment first, possession implied. “Truly said” reads like a stamp of verification, as if colonial testimony becomes scientific evidence when repeated by a nineteenth-century Englishman.

Subtext: Mexico is impressive because it conforms to standards recognizable to Europe, and it becomes more “marvellous” when filtered through European authority. Context matters here: mid-1800s travel writing and science often treated non-European societies as data points in a grand story of “civilization.” Tylor’s compliment is real, but it’s also a subtle annexation of narrative control: Mexico’s greatness is affirmed, then narrated back to itself through Cortes, then through the scientist who certifies Cortes.