Notes

I.The Authorities on the so-called Civilization of Ancient Mexico and Adjacent Lands, and the Interpretation of such Authorities.

THE ancient so-called civilization which the Spaniards found in Mexico and Central America is the subject of much controversy: in the first place as regards its origin, whether indigenous, or allied to and derived from the civilizations of the Old World; and in the second place as regards its character, whether it was something more than a kind of grotesque barbarism, or of a nature that makes even the Spanish culture, which supplanted it, inferior in some respects by comparison. The first of these problems, as regards its origin, is considered in another place. As respects the second, or its character, it is proposed here to follow the history of opinions.

In a book published at Seville in 1519, Martin Fernandez d’Enciso’s Suma de geographia que trata de todas las partidas y provincias del mundo: en especial de las Indias, the European reader is supposed to have received the earliest hints of the degree of civilization—if it be so termed—of which the succeeding Spanish writers made so much. A brief sentence was thus the shadowy beginning of the stories of grandeur and magnificence which we find later in Cortes, Bernal Diaz, Las Casas, Torquemada, Sahagún, Ramusio, Gomara, Oviedo, Zurita, Tezozomoc, and Ixtlilxochitl, and which is repeated often with accumulating effect in Acosta, Herrera, Lorenzana, Solis, Clavigero, and their successors. Bandelier points out how Robertson, in his views of Mexican civilization as in “the infancy of civil life,” really opened the view for the first time of the exaggerated and uncritical estimates of the older writers, which Morgan has carried in our day to the highest pitch, and, as it would seem, without sufficient recognition of some of the contrary evidence.

It has usually been held that the creation among the Mexicans about thirty years after the founding of Mexico of a chief-of-men (Tlacatecuhtli) instituted a feudal monarchy. Bandelier, speaking of the application of feudal terms by the old writers to Mexican institutions, says: “What in their first process of thinking was merely a comparative, became very soon a positive terminology for the purpose of describing institutions to which this foreign terminology never was adapted.” He instances that the so-called “king” of these early writers was a translation of the native term, which in fact only meant “one of those who spoke;” that is, a prominent member of the council. Bandelier traces the beginning of the feudal ideas as a graft upon the native systems, in the oldest document issued by Europeans on Mexican soil, when Cortes (May 20, 1519) conferred land on his allies, the chiefs of Axapusco and Tepeyahualco, and for the first time made their offices hereditary. It is Bandelier’s opinion that “the grantees had no conception of the true import of what they accepted; neither did Cortes conceive the nature of their ideas.” This was followed after the Spanish occupation of Mexico by the institution of “repartimientos,” through which the natives became serfs of the soil to the conquerors.

The story about this unknown splendor of a strange civilization fascinated the world nearly half a century ago in the kindly recital of Prescott; but it was observed that he quoted too often the somewhat illusory and exaggerated statements of Ixtlilxochitl, and was not a little attracted by the gorgeous pictures of Waldeck and Dupaix. With such a charming depicter, the barbaric gorgeousness of this ancient empire, as it became the fashion to call it, gathered a new interest, which has never waned, and Morgan is probably correct in affirming that it “has called into existence a larger number of works than were ever before written upon any people of the same number and of the same importance.” Even those who, like Tylor, had gone to Mexico sceptics, had been forced to the conclusion that Prescott’s pictures were substantially correct, and setting aside what he felt to be the monstrous exaggerations of Solis, Gomara, and the rest, he could not find the history much less trustworthy than European history of the same period. It has been told in another place how the derogatory view, as opposed to the views of Prescott, were expressed by R. A. Wilson in his New Conquest of Mexico, in assuming that all the conquerors said was baseless fabrication, the European Montezuma becoming a petty Indian chief, and the great city of Mexico a collection of hovels in an everglade,—the ruins of the country being accounted for by supposing them the relics of an ancient Phœnician civilization, which had been stamped out by the inroads of barbarians, whose equally barbarious descendants the Spaniards were in turn to overcome. It cannot be said that such iconoclastic opinions obtained any marked acceptance; but it was apparent that the notion of the exaggeration of the Spanish accounts was becoming sensibly fixed in the world’s opinion. We see this reaction in a far less excessive way in Daniel Wilson’s Prehistoric Man (i. 325, etc.), and he was struck, among other things, with the utter obliteration of the architectural traces of the conquered race in the city of Mexico itself. When, in 1875, Hubert H. Bancroft published the second volume of his Native Races, he confessed “that much concerning the Aztec civilization had been greatly exaggerated by the old Spanish writers, and for obvious reasons;” but he contended that the stories of their magnificence must in the main be accepted, because of the unanimity of witnesses, notwithstanding their copying from one another, and because of the evidence of the ruins. He strikes his key-note in his chapter on the “Government of the Nahua Nations,” in speaking of it as “monarchical and nearly absolute;” but it was perhaps in his chapter on the “Palaces and Households of the Nahua Kings,” where he fortifies his statement by numerous references, that he carried his descriptions to the extent that allied his opinions to those who most unhesitatingly accepted the old stories.

The most serious arraignment of these long-accepted views was by Lewis H. Morgan, who speaks of them as having “caught the imagination and overcome the critical judgment of Prescott, ravaged the sprightly brain of Brasseur de Bourbourg, and carried up in a whirlwind our author at the Golden Gate.”

Morgan’s studies had been primarily among the Iroquois, and by analogy he had applied his reasoning to the aboriginal conditions of Mexico and Central America, thus degrading their so-called civilization to the level of the Indian tribal organization, as it was understood in the North. Morgan’s confidence in its deductions was perfect, and he was not very gracious in alluding to the views of his opponents. He looked upon “the fabric of Aztec romance as the most deadly encumbrance upon American ethnology.” The Spanish chroniclers, as he contended, “inaugurated American aboriginal history upon a misconception of Indian life, which has remained substantially unquestioned till recently.” He charges upon ignorance of the structure and principles of Indian society, the perversion of all the writers, from Cortes to Bancroft, who, as he says, unable to comprehend its peculiarities, invoked the imagination to supply whatever was necessary to fill out the picture. The actual condition to which the Indians of Spanish America had reached was, according to his schedule, the upper status of barbarism, between which and the beginning of civilization he reckoned an entire ethnical period. “In the art of government they had not been able to rise above gentile institutions and establish political society. This fact,” Morgan continues, “demonstrates the impossibility of privileged classes and of potentates, under their institutions, with power to enforce the labor of the people for the erection of palaces for their use, and explains the absence of such structures.”

This is the essence of the variance of the two schools of interpretation of the Aztec and Maya life. The reader of Bancroft will find, on the other hand, due recognition of an imperial system, with its monarch and nobles and classes of slaves, and innumerable palaces, of which we see to-day the ruins. The studies of Bandelier are appealed to by Morgan as substantiating his view. Mrs. Zelia Nuttall (Proc. Am. Assoc. Adv. Sci., Aug., 1886) claims to be able to show that the true interpretation of the Borgian and other codices points in part at least to details of a communal life.

The special issues which for a test Morgan takes with Bancroft are in regard to the character of the house in which Montezuma lived, and of the dinner which is represented by Bernal Diaz and the rest as the daily banquet of an imperial potentate. Morgan’s criticism is in his Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines (Washington, 1881). The basis of this book had been intended for a fifth Part of his Ancient Society, but was not used in that publication. He printed the material, however, in papers on “Montezuma’s Dinner” (No. Am. Rev., Ap. 1876), “Houses of the Moundbuilders” (Ibid., July, 1876), and “Study of the Houses and House Life of the Indian Tribes” (Archæol. Inst. of Amer. Publ.). These papers amalgamated now make the work called Houses and House Life.

Morgan argues that a communal mode of living accords with the usages of aboriginal hospitality, as well as with their tenure of lands, and with the large buildings, which others call palaces, and he calls joint tenement houses. He instances, as evidence of the size of such houses, that at Cholula four hundred Spaniards and one thousand allied Indians found lodging in such a house; and he points to Stephens’s description of similar communal establishments which he found in our day near Uxmal. He holds that the inference of communal living from such data as these is sufficient to warrant a belief in it, although none of the early Spanish writers mention such communism as existing; while they actually describe a communal feast in what is known as Montezuma’s dinner; and while the plans of the large buildings now seen in ruins are exactly in accord with the demands of separate families united in joint occupancy. In such groups, he holds, there is usually one building devoted to the purpose of a Tecpan, or official house of the tribe. Under the pressure to labor, which the Spaniards inflicted on their occupants, these communal dwellers were driven, to escape such servitude, into the forest, and thus their houses fell into decay. Morgan’s views attracted the adhesion of not a few archæologists, like Bandelier and Dawson; but in Bancroft, as contravening the spirit of his Native Races, they begat feelings that substituted disdain for convincing arguments. The less passionate controversialists point out, with more effect, how hazardous it is, in coming to conclusions on the quality of the Nahua, Maya, or Quiché conditions of life, to ignore such evidences as those of the hieroglyphics, the calendars, the architecture and carvings, the literature and the industries, as evincing quite another kind, rather than degree, of progress, from that of the northern Indians.

II.Bibliographical Notes upon the Ruins and Archæological Remains of Mexico and Central America.

Elsewhere in this work some account is given of the comprehensive treatment of American antiquities. It is the purpose of this note to characterize such other descriptions as have been specially confined to the antiquities of Mexico, Central America, and adjacent parts; together with noting occasionally those more comprehensive works which have sections on these regions. The earliest and most distinguished of all such treatises are the writings of Alexander von Humboldt, to whom may be ascribed the paternity of what the French define as the Science of Americanism, which, however, took more definite shape and invited discipleship when the Société Américaine de France was formed, and Aubin in his Mémoire sur la peinture didactique et l’écriture figurative des Anciens Méxicains furnished a standard of scholarship. How new this science was may be deduced from the fact that Robertson, the most distinguished authority on early American history, who wrote in English, in the last part of the preceding century, had ventured to say that in all New Spain there was not “a single monument or vestige of any building more ancient than the Conquest.” After Humboldt, the most famous of what may be called the pioneers of this art were Kingsborough, Dupaix, and Waldeck, whose publications are sufficiently described elsewhere. The most startling developments came from the expeditions of Stephens and Catherwood, the former mingling both in his Central America and Yucatan the charms of a personal narrative with his archæological studies, while the draughtsman, beside furnishing the sketches for Stephens’s book, embodied his drawings on a larger scale in the publication which passes under his own name. The explorations of Charnay are those which have excited the most interest of late years, though equally significant results have been produced by such special explorers as Squier in Nicaragua, Le Plongeon in Yucatan, and Bandelier in Mexico.

The labors of the French archæologist, which began in 1858, resulted in the work Cités et ruines Américaines: Mitla, Palenqué, Izamal, Chichen-Itza, Uxmal, recueillies et photographiées par Désiré Charnay, avec un Texte par M. Viollet le Duc. (Paris, 1863.) Charnay contributed to this joint publication, beside the photographs, a paper called “Le Méxique, 1858-61,—souvenirs et impressions de Voyage.” The Architect Viollet le Duc gives us in the same book an essay by an active, well-equipped, and ingenious mind, but his speculations about the origin of this Southern civilization and its remains are rather curious than convincing.

The public began to learn better what Charnay’s full and hearty confidence in his own sweeping assertions was, when he again entered the field in a series of papers on the ruins of Central America which he contributed (1879-81) to the North American Review (vols. cxxxi.-cxxxiii.), and which for the most part reached the public newly dressed in some of the papers contributed by L. P. Gratacap to the American Antiquarian, and in a paper by F. A. Ober on “The Ancient Cities of America,” in the Amer. Geog. Soc. Bulletin, Mar., 1888. Charnay took moulds of various sculptures found among the ruins, which were placed in the Trocadero Museum in Paris. What Charnay communicated in English to the No. Amer. Review appeared in better shape in French in the Tour du Monde (1886-87), and in a still riper condition in his latest work, Les anciens villes du Nouveau Monde: voyages d’explorations au Méxique et dans l’Amérique Centrale. 1857-1882. Ouvrage contenant 214 gravures et 19 cartes ou plans. (Paris, 1885.)

We proceed now to note geographically some of the principal ruins. In the vicinity of Vera Cruz the pyramid of Papantla is the conspicuous monument, but there is little else thereabouts needing particular mention. Among the ruins of the central plateau of Mexico, the famous pyramid of Cholula is best known. The time of its construction is a matter about which archæologists are not agreed, though it is perhaps to be connected with the earliest period of the Nahua power. Duran, on the other hand, has told a story of its erection by the giants, overcome by the Nahuas. Its purpose is equally debatable, whether intended for a memorial, a refuge, a defence, or a spot of worship—very likely the truth may be divided among them all. It is a similar problem for divided opinion whether it was built by a great display of human energy, in accordance with the tradition that the bricks which composed its surface were passed from hand to hand by a line of men, extending to the spot where they were made leagues away, or constructed by a slower process of accretion, spread over successive generations, which might not have required any marvellous array of workmen. The fierce conflict which—as some hold—Cortés had with the natives around the mound and on its slopes settled its fate; and the demolition begun thereupon, and continued by the furious desolaters of the Church, has been aided by the erosions of time and the hand of progress, till the great monument has become a ragged and corroded hill, which might to the casual observer stand for the natural base, given by the Creator, to the modern chapel that now crowns its summit; but if Bandelier’s view (p. 249) is correct, that none of the conquerors mention it, then the conflict which is recorded took place, not here, but on the vanished mound of Quetzalcoatl, which in Bandelier’s opinion was a different structure from this more famous mound, while other writers pronounce it the shrine itself of Quetzalcoatl.

We have reference to a Cholula mound in some of the earliest writers. Bernal Diaz counted the steps on its side. Motolinía saw it within ten years of the Conquest, when it was overgrown and much ruined. Sahagún says it was built for defensive purposes. Rojas, in his Relacion de Cholula, 1581, calls it a fortress, and says the Spaniards levelled its convex top to plant there a cross, where later, in 1594, they built a chapel. Torquemada, following Motolinía and the later Mendieta, says it was never finished, and was decayed in his time, though he traced the different levels. Its interest as a relic thus dates almost from the beginnings of the modern history of the region. Boturini mentions its four terraces. Clavigero, in 1744, rode up its sides on horseback, impelled by curiosity, and found it hard work even then to look upon it as other than a natural hill. The earliest of the critical accounts of it, however, is Humboldt’s, made from examinations in 1803, when much more than now of its original construction was observable, and his account is the one from which most travellers have drawn,—the result of close scrutiny in his text and of considerable license in his plate, in which he aimed at something like a restoration. The latest critical examination is in Bandelier’s “Studies about Cholula and its vicinity,” making part iii. of his Archæological Tour in Mexico in 1881.

What are called the finest ruins in Mexico are those of Xochicalco, seventy-five miles southwest of the capital, consisting of a mound of five terraces supported by masonry, with a walled area on the summit. Of late years a cornfield surrounds what is left of the pyramidal structure, which was its crowning edifice, and which up to the middle of the last century had five receding stories, though only one now appears. It owes its destruction to the needs which the proprietors of the neighboring sugar-works have had for its stones. The earliest account of the ruins appeared in the “Descripcion (1791) de los antiqüedades de Xochicalco” of José Antonio Alzate y Ramirez, in the Gacetas de Literatura (Mexico, 1790-94, in 3 vols.; reprinted Puebla, 1831, in 4 vols.), accompanied by plates, which were again used in Pietro Marquez’s Due Antichi Monumenti de Architettura Messicana (Roma, 1804), with an Italian version of Alzate, from which the French translation in Dupaix was made. Alzate furnished the basis of the account in Humboldt’s Vues (i. 129; pl. ix. of folio ed.), and Waldeck (Voyage pitt., 69) regrets that Humboldt adopted so inexact a description as that of Alzate. From Nebel (Viage pintoresco) we get our best graphic representations, for Tylor (Anahuac) says that Casteñeda’s drawings, accompanying Dupaix, are very incorrect. Bancroft says that one, at least, of these drawings in Kingsborough bears not the slightest resemblance to the one given in Dupaix. In 1835 there were explorations made under orders of the Mexican government, which were published in the Revista Mexicana (i. 539,—reprinted in the Diccionario Universal, x. 938). Other accounts, more or less helpful, are given by Latrobe, Mayer, and in Isador Löwenstern’s Le Méxique (Paris, 1843).

The ancient Anahuac corresponds mainly to the valley of Mexico city. Bancroft (iv. 497) shows in a summary way the extent of our knowledge of the scant archæological remains within this central area.

In the city of Mexico not a single relic of the architecture of the earlier peoples remains, though a few movable sculptured objects are preserved.

Tezcuco, on the other side of the lake from Mexico, affords some traces of the ante-Conquest architecture, but has revealed no such interesting movable relics as have been found in the capital city. Twenty-five miles north of Mexico are the ruins of Teotihuacan, which have been abundantly described by early writers and modern explorers. Bancroft (iv. 530) makes up his summary mainly from a Mexican official account, Ramon Almaraz’s Memoria de los trabajos ejecutados por la comision cientifica de Pachuca (Mexico, 1865), adding what was needed to fill out details from Clavigero, Humboldt, and the later writers.

Bancroft (iv. ch. 10), in describing what is known of the remains in the northern parts of Mexico, gives a summary of what has been written regarding the most famous of these ruins, Quemada in Zacatecas.

Bancroft (iv. ch. 7) has given a separate chapter to the antiquities of Oajaca (Oaxaca) and Guerrero, as the most southern of what he terms the Nahua people, including and lying westerly of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and he speaks of it as a region but little known to travellers, except as they pass through a part of it lying on the commercial route from Acapulco to the capital city of Mexico. Bancroft’s summary, with his references, must suffice for the inquirer for all except the principal group of ruins in this region, that of Mitla (or Lyó-Baa), of which a full recapitulation of authorities may be made, most of which are also to be referred to for the lesser ruins, though, as Bancroft points out, the information respecting Monte Alban and Zachila is far from satisfactory. Of Monte Alban, Dupaix and Charnay are the most important witnesses, and the latter says that he considers Monte Alban “one of the most precious remains, and very surely the most ancient of the American civilizations.” On Dupaix alone we must depend for what we know of Zachila.

It is, however, of Mitla (sometime Miquitlan, Mictlan) that more considerable mention must be made, and its ruins, about thirty miles southerly from Mexico, have been oftenest visited, as they deserve to be; and we have to regret that Stephens never took them within the range of his observations. Their demolition had begun during a century or two previous to the Spanish Conquest, and was not complete even then. Nature is gloomy, and even repulsive in its desolation about the ruins; but a small village still exists among them. The place is mentioned by Duran as inhabited about 1450; Motolinía describes it as still lived in, and in 1565-74 it had a gobernador of its own. Burgoa speaks of it in 1644.

The earliest of the modern explorers were Luis Martin, a Mexican architect, and Colonel de la Laguna, who examined the ruins in 1802; and it was from Martin and his drawings that Humboldt drew the information with which, in 1810, he first engaged the attention of the general public upon Mitla, in his Vues des Cordillères. Dupaix’s visit was in 1806. The architect Eduard L. Mühlenpfordt, in his Versuch einer getreuen Schilderung der Republik Mejico (Hannover, 1844, in 2 vols.), says that he made plans and drawings in 1830, which, passing into the hands of Juan B. Carriedo, were used by him to illustrate a paper, “Los palacios antiguos de Mitla,” in the Ilustracion Mexicana (vol. ii.), in which he set forth the condition of the ruins in 1852. Meanwhile, in 1837, some drawings had been made, which were twenty years later reproduced in the ninth volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, as Brantz Mayer’s Observations on Mexican history and archæology, with a special notice of Zapotec, remains as delineated in Mr. J. G. Sawkins’s drawings of Mitla, etc. (Washington, 1857). Bancroft points out (iv. 406) that the inaccuracies and impossibilities of Sawkins’ drawings are such as to lead to the conclusion that he pretended to explorations which he never made, and probably drafted his views from some indefinite information; and that Mayer was deceived, having no more precise statements than Humboldt’s by which to test the drawings. Matthieu Fossey visited the ruins in 1838; but his account in his Le Méxique (Paris, 1857) is found by Bancroft to be mainly a borrowed one. G. F. von Tempsky’s Mitla, a narrative of incidents and personal adventure on a journey in Mexico, Guatemala and Salvador, 1853-1855, edited by J. S. Bell (London, 1858), deceives us by the title into supposing that considerable attention is given in the book to Mitla, but we find him spending but a part of a day there in February, 1854 (p. 250). The book is not prized; Bandelier calls it of small scientific value, and Bancroft says his plates must have been made up from other sources than his own observations. Charnay, here, as well as elsewhere, made for us some important photographs in 1859. This kind of illustration received new accessions of value when Emilio Herbrüger issued a series of thirty-four fine plates as Album de Vistas fotográficas de las Antiguas Ruinas de los palacios de Mitla (Oaxaca, 1874). In 1864, J. W. von Müller, in his Reisen in den Vereinigten Staaten, Canada und Mexico (Leipzig, in 3 vols.), included an account of a visit. The most careful examination made since Bancroft summarized existing knowledge is that of Bandelier in his Archæological Tour in Mexico in 1881 (Boston, 1885), published as no. ii. of the American series of the Papers of the Archæological Institute of America, which is illustrated with heliotypes and sketch plans of the ruins and architectural details in all their geometrical symmetry. Bancroft (iv. 392, etc.) could only give a plan of the ruins based on the sketches of Mühlenpfordt as published by Carriedo, but the student will find a more careful one in Bandelier, who also gives detailed ones of the several buildings (pl. xvii., xviii.)

There is no part of Spanish America richer in architectural remains than the northern section of Yucatan, and Bancroft (iv. ch. 5) has occasion to enumerate and to describe with more or less fullness between fifty and sixty independent groups of ruins. Stephens explored forty-four of these abandoned towns, and such was the native ignorance that of only a few of them could anything be learned in Merida. And yet that this country was the land of a peculiar architecture was known to the earliest explorers. Francisco Hernandez de Cordova in 1517, Juan de Grijalva in 1518, Cortés himself in 1519, and Francisco de Montejo in 1527 observed the ruins in Cozumel, an island off the northwest coast of the peninsula, and at other points of the shore. It is only, however, within the present century that we have had any critical notices. Rio heard reports of them merely. Lorenzo de Zavala saw only Uxmal, as his account given in Dupaix shows. The earliest detailed descriptions were those of Waldeck in his Voyage pittoresque et achéologique dans la province d’Yucatan (Paris, 1838, folio, with steel plates and lithographs), but he also saw little more than the ruins of Uxmal, in the expedition in which he had received pecuniary support from Lord Kingsborough. It is to John L. Stephens and his accompanying draughtsman, Frederic Catherwood, that we owe by far the most essential part of our knowledge of the Yucatan remains. He had begun a survey of Uxmal in 1840, but had made little progress when the illness of his artist broke up his plans. Accordingly he gave the world but partial results in his Incidents of Travel in Central America. Not satisfied with his imperfect examination, he returned to Yucatan in 1841, and in 1843 published at New York the book which has become the main source of information for all compilers ever since, his Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (N. Y., 1842; London, 1843; again, N. Y., 1856, 1858). It was in the early days of the Daguerrean process, and Catherwood took with him a camera, from which his excellent drawings derive some of their fidelity. They appeared in his own Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America (N. Y., 1844), on a larger scale than in Stephens’s smaller pages.

Stephens’s earlier book had had an almost immediate success. The reviewers were unanimous in commendation, as they might well be. It has been asserted that it was in order to avail of this new interest that a resident of New Orleans, Mr. B. M. Norman, hastened to Yucatan, while Stephens was there a second time, and during the winter of 1841-42 made the trip among the ruins, which is recorded in his Rambles in Yucatan, or Notes of Travel through the peninsula, including a Visit to the Remarkable Ruins of Chi-chen, Kabah Zayi, and Uxmal (New York, 1843).

The Daguerrean camera was also used by the Baron von Friederichsthal in his studies at Uxmal and Chichen-Itza, and his exploration seems to have taken place between the two visits of Stephens, as Bancroft determines from a letter (April 21, 1841) written after the baron had started on his return voyage to Europe. In Paris, in October, 1841, under the introduction of Humboldt, Friederichsthal addressed the Academy, and his paper was printed in the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages (xcii. 297) as “Les Monuments de l’Yucatan.” The camera was not, however, brought to the aid of the student with the most satisfactory results till Charnay, in 1858, visited Izamal, Chichen-Itza, and Uxmal. He gave a foretaste of his results in the Bulletin de la Soc. de Géog. (1861, vol. ii. 364), and in 1863 gave not very extended descriptions, relying mostly on his Atlas of photographs in his Cités et Ruines Américaines, a part of which volume consists of the architectural speculations of Viollet le Duc. Beside the farther studies of Charnay in his Anciens Villes du Nouveau Monde (Paris, 1885), there have been recent explorations in Yucatan by Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon and his wife, mainly at Chichen-Itza, in which for a while he had the aid and countenance of Mr. Stephen Salisbury, Jr., of Worcester, Mass. Le Plongeon’s results are decidedly novel and helpful, but they were expressed with more license of explication than satisfied the committee of that society, when his papers were referred to them for publication, and than has proved acceptable to other examiners. Nearly all other descriptions of the Yucatan ruins have been derived substantially from these chief authorities.

The principal ruins of Yucatan are those of Uxmal and Chichen-Itza, and references to the literature of each will suffice. Those at Uxmal are in some respects distinct in character from the remains of Honduras and of Chiapas. There are no idols as at Copan. There are no extensive stucco-work and no tablets as at Palenqué. The general type is Cyclopean masonry, faced with dressed stones. The Casa de Monjas, or nunnery (so called), is often considered the most remarkable ruin in Central America; and no architectural feature of any of them has been the subject of more inquiry than the protuberant ornaments in the cornices, which are usually called elephants’ trunks. It has been contended that the place was inhabited in the days of Cortes.

The earliest printed account of Uxmal is in Cogolludo’s Yucathan (Madrid, 1688), pp. 176, 193, 197; but it was well into this century before others were written. Lorenzo de Zavala gave but an outline account in his Notice, printed in Dupaix in 1834. Waldeck (Voyage Pitt. 67, 93) spent eight days there in May, 1835, and Stephens gives him the credit of being the earliest describer to attract attention. Stephens’s first visit in 1840 was hasty (Cent. Amer., ii. 413), but on his second visit (1842) he took with him Waldeck’s Voyage, and his description and the drawings of Catherwood were made with the advantage of having these earlier drawings to compare. Stephens (Yucatan, i. 297) says that their plans and drawings differ materially from Waldeck’s; but Bancroft, who compares the two, says that Stephens exaggerated the differences, which are not material, except in a few plates (Stephens’s Yucatan, i. 163; ii. 264—ch. 24, 25). About the same time Norman and Friederichsthal made their visits. Bancroft (iv. 150) refers to the lesser narratives of Carillo (1845), and another, recorded in the Registro Yucateco (i. 273, 361), with Carl Bartholomæus Heller (April, 1847) in his Reisen in Mexico (Leipzig, 1853). Charnay’s Ruines (p. 362), and his Anciens Villes (ch. 19, 20), record visits in 1858 and later. Brasseur reported upon Uxmal in 1865 in the Archives de la Com. Scientifique du Méxique (ii. 234, 254), and he had already made mention of them in his Hist. Nations Civ., ii. ch. 1.

The ruins of Chichen-Itza make part of the eastern group of the Yucatan remains. As was not the case with some of the other principal ruins, the city in its prime has a record in Maya tradition; it was known in the days of the Conquest, and has not been lost sight of since, though its ruins were not visited by explorers till well within the present century, the first of whom, according to Stephens, was John Burke, in 1838. Stephens had heard of them and mentioned them to Friederichsthal, who was there in 1840 (Nouv. Annales des Voyages, xcii. 300-306). Norman was there in February, 1842 (Rambles, 104), and did not seem aware that any one had been there before him; and Stephens himself, during the next month (Yucatan, ii. 282), made the best record which we have. Charnay made his observations in 1858 (Ruines, 339,—cf. Anciens Villes, ch. 18), and gives us nine good photographs. The latest discoverer is Le Plongeon, whose investigations were signalized by the finding (1876) of the statue of Chackmool, and by other notable researches (Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1877; October, 1878).

It seems hardly to admit of doubt that the cities—if that be their proper designation—of Yucatan were the work of the Maya people, whose descendants were found by the Spaniards in possession of the peninsula, and that in some cases, like those of Uxmal and Toloom, their sacred edifices did not cease to be used till some time after the Spaniards had possessed the country. Such were the conclusions of Stephens, the sanest mind that has spent its action upon these remains; and he tells us that a deed of the region where Uxmal is situated, which passed in 1673, mentions the daily religious rites which the natives were then celebrating there, and speaks of the swinging doors and cisterns then in use. The abandonment of one of the buildings, at least, is brought down to within about two centuries, and comparisons of Catherwood’s drawings with the descriptions of more recent explorers, by showing a very marked deterioration within a comparatively few years, enable us easily to understand how the piercing roots of a rapidly growing vegetation can make a greater havoc in a century than will occur in temperate climates. The preservation of paint on the walls, and of wooden lintels in some places, also induce a belief that no great time, such as would imply an extinct race of builders, is necessary to account for the present condition of the ruins, and we must always remember how the Spaniards used them as quarries for building their neighboring towns. How long these habitations and shrines stood in their perfection is a question about which archæologists have had many and diverse estimates, ranging from hundreds to thousands of years. There is nothing in the ruins themselves to settle the question, beyond a study of their construction. So far as the traditionary history of the Mayas can determine, some of them may have been built between the third and the tenth century.

We come now to Chiapas. The age of the ruins of Palenqué can only be conjectured, and very indefinitely, though perhaps there is not much risk in saying that they represent some of the oldest architectural structures known in the New World, and were very likely abandoned three or four centuries before the coming of the Spaniards. Still, any confident statement is unwise. Perhaps there may be some fitness in Brasseur’s belief that the stucco additions and roofs were the work of a later people than those who laid the foundations. Bancroft (iv. 289) has given the fullest account of the literature describing these ruins. They seem to have been first found in 1750, or a few years before. The report reaching Ramon de Ordoñez, then a boy, was not forgotten by him, and prompted him to send his brother in 1773 to explore them. Among the manuscripts in the Brasseur Collection (Bib. Mex.-Guat., p. 113; Pinart, no. 695) are a Memoria relativa à las ruinas... de Palenqué, and Notas de Chiapas y Palenqué, which are supposed to be the record of this exploration written by Ramon, as copied from the original in the Museo Nacional, and which, in part at least, constituted the report which Ramon made in 1784 to the president of the Audiencia Real. Ramon’s view was that he had hit upon the land of Ophir, and the country visited by the Phœnicians. This same president now directed José Antonio Calderon to visit the ruins, and we have his “Informe” translated in Brasseur’s Palenqué (introd. p. 5). From February to June of 1785, Antonio Benasconi, the royal architect of Guatemala, inspected the ruins under similar orders. His report, as well as the preceding one, with the accompanying drawings, were dispatched to Spain, where J. B. Muñoz made a summary of them for the king. I do not find any of them have been printed. The result of the royal interest in the matter was, that Antonio del Rio was next commissioned to make a more thorough survey, which he accomplished (May-June, 1787) with the aid of a band of natives to fell the trees and fire the rubbish. He broke through the walls in a reckless way, that added greatly to the devastation of years. Rio’s report, dated at Palenqué June 24, 1787, was published first in 1855, in the Diccionario Univ. de Geog., viii. 528. Meanwhile, beside the copy of the manuscript sent to Spain, other manuscripts were kept in Guatemala and Mexico; and one of these falling into the hands of a Dr. M’Quy, was taken to England and translated under the title Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City discovered near Palenque in Guatemala, Spanish America, translated from the Original MS. Report of Capt. Don A. Del Rio; followed by Teatro Critico Americano, or a Critical Investigation and Research into the History of the Americans, by Doctor Felix Cabrera (London, 1822).

The results of the explorations of Dupaix, made early in the present century by order of Carlos IV. of Spain, long remained unpublished. His report and the drawings of Castañeda lay uncared for in the Mexican archives during the period of the Revolution. Latour Allard, of Paris, obtained copies of some of the drawings, and from these Kingsborough got copies, which he engraved for his Mexican Antiquities, in which Dupaix’s report was also printed in Spanish and English (vols. iv., v., vi.). It is not quite certain whether the originals or copies were delivered (1828) by the Mexican authorities to Baradère, who a few years later secured their publication with additional matter as Antiquités méxicaines. Relation des trois expéditions du capitaine Dupaix, ordonnées en 1805, 1806 et 1807, pour la recherche des antiquités du pays, notamment celles de Mitla et de Palenque; accompagnée des dessins de Castañeda, et d’une carte du pays exploré; suivie d’un parallèle de ces monuments avec ceux de l’Égypte, de l’Indostan, et du reste de l’ancien monde par Alexandre Lenoir; d’une dissertation sur l’origine de l’ancienne population des deux Amériques par [D. B.] Warden; avec un discours préliminaire par. M. Charles Farcy, et des notes explicatives, et autres documents par MM. Baradère, de St. Priest [etc.]. (Paris 1834, texte et atlas.) The plates of this edition are superior to those in Kingsborough and in Rio; and are indeed improved in the engraving over Castañeda’s drawings. The book as a whole is one of the most important on Palenqué which we have. The investigations were made on his third expedition (1807-8). A tablet taken from the ruins by him is in the Museo Nacional, and a cast of it is figured in the Numis. and Antiq. Soc. of Philad. Proc., Dec. 4, 1884.

During the twenty-five years next following Dupaix, we find two correspondents of the French and English Geographical Societies supplying their publications with occasional accounts of their observations among the ruins. One of them, Dr. F. Corroy, was then living at Tabasco; the other, Col. Juan Gallindo, was resident in the country as an administrative officer.

Fréderic de Waldeck, the artist who some years before had familiarized himself with the character of the ruins in the preparation of the engravings for Rio’s work, was employed in 1832-34. He was now considerably over sixty years of age, and under the pay of a committee, which had raised a subscription, in which the Mexican government shared. He made the most thorough examination of Palenqué which has yet been made. Waldeck was a skilful artist, and his drawings are exquisite; but he was not free from a tendency to improve or restore, where the conditions gave a hint, and so as we have them in the final publication they have not been accepted as wholly trustworthy. He made more than 200 drawings, and either the originals or copies—Stephens says “copies,” the originals being confiscated—were taken to Europe. Waldeck announced his book in Paris, and the public had already had a taste of his not very sober views in some communications which he had sent in Aug. and Nov., 1832, to the Société de Géographie de Paris. Long years of delay followed, and Waldeck had lived to be over ninety, when the French government bought his collection (in 1860), and made preparations for its publication. Out of the 188 drawings thus secured, 56 were selected and were admirably engraved, and only that portion of Waldeck’s text was preserved which was purely descriptive, and not all of that. Selection was made of Brasseur de Bourbourg, who at that time had never visited the ruins, to furnish some introductory matter. This he prepared in an Avant-propos, recapitulating the progress of such studies; and this was followed by an Introduction aux Ruines de Palenqué, narrating the course of explorations up to that time; a section also published separately as Recherches sur les Ruines de Palenqué et sur les origines de la civilisation du Méxique (Paris, 1886), and finally Waldeck’s own Description des Ruines, followed by the plates, most of which relate to Palenqué. Thus composed, a large volume was published under the general title of Monuments anciens du Méxique. Palenqué et autres ruines de l’ancienne civilisation du Méxique. Collection de vues [etc.], cartes et plans dessinés d’après nature et relevés par M. de Waldeck. Texte rédigé par M. Brasseur de Bourbourg. (Paris, 1864-1866.) While Waldeck’s results were still unpublished the ruins of Palenqué were brought most effectively to the attention of the English reader in the Travels in Central America (vol. ii. ch. 17) of Stephens, which was illustrated by the drawings of Catherwood, since famous. These better cover the field, and are more exact than those of Dupaix.

Bancroft refers to an anonymous account in the Registro Yucateco (i. 318). One of the most intelligent of the later travellers is Arthur Morelet, who privately printed his Voyage dans l’Amérique Central, Cuba et le Yucatan, which includes an account of a fortnight’s stay at Palenqué. His results would be difficult of access except that Mrs. M. F. Squier, with an introduction by E. G. Squier, published a translation of that part of it relating to the main land as Travels in Central America, including accounts of regions unexplored since the Conquest (N. Y., 1871).

Désiré Charnay was the first to bring photography to the aid of the student when he visited Palenqué in 1858, and his plates forming the folio atlas accompanying his Cités et Ruines Américaines (1863), pp. 72, 411, are, as Bancroft (iv. 293) points out, of interest to enable us to test the drawings of preceding delineators, and to show how time had acted on the ruins since the visit of Stephens. His later results are recorded in his Les anciennes villes du Nouveau Monde (Paris, 1885).

There have been only two statues found at Palenqué, in connection with the T emple of the Cross, but the considerable number of carved figures discovered at Copan, as well as the general impression that these latter ruins are the oldest on the American continent, have made in some respects these most celebrated of the Honduras remains more interesting than those of Chiapas. It is now generally agreed that the ruins of Copan do not represent the town called Copan, assaulted and captured by Hernando de Choves in 1530, though the identity of names has induced some writers to claim that these ruins were inhabited when the Spaniards came. The earliest account of them which we have is that in Palacio’s letter to Felipe II., written (1576) hardly more than a generation after the Conquest, and showing that the ruins then were much in the same condition as later described. The next account is that of Fuentes y Guzman’s Historia de Guatemala (1689), now accessible in the Madrid edition of 1882; but for a long time only known in the citation in Juarros’ Guatemala (p. 56), and through those who had copied from Juarros. His account is brief, speaks of Castilian costumes, and is otherwise so enigmatical that Brasseur calls it mendacious. Colonel Galindo, in visiting the ruins in 1836, confounded them with the Copan of the Conquest. The ruins also came Under the scrutiny of Stephens in 1839, and they were described by him, and drawn by Catherwood, for the first time with any fullness and care, in their respective works.

Always associated with Copan, and perhaps even older, if the lower relief of the carvings can bear that interpretation, are the ruins near the village of Quiriguá, in Guatemala, and known by that name. Catherwood first brought them into notice; but the visit of Karl Scherzer in 1854 produced the most extensive account of them which we have, in his Ein Besuch bei den Ruinen von Quiriguá (Wien, 1855).

The principal explorers of Nicaragua have been Ephraim George Squier, in his Nicaragua, and Frederick Boyle, in his Ride across a Continent (Lond. 1868), and their results, as well as the scattered data of others, are best epitomized in Bancroft (iv. ch. 2), who gives other references to second-hand descriptions (p. 29). Since Bancroft’s survey there have been a few important contributions.

III.Bibliographical Notes on the Picture-Writing of the Nahuas and Mayas.

IN considering the methods of record and communication used by these peoples, we must keep in mind the two distinct systems of the Aztecs and the Mayas; and further, particularly as regards the former, we must not forget that some of these writings were made after the Conquest, and were influenced in some degree by Spanish associations. Of this last class were land titles and catechisms, for the native system obtained for some time as a useful method with the conquerors for recording the transmission of lands and helping the instruction by the priests.

It is usual in tracing the development of a hieroglyphic system to advance from a purely figurative one—in which pictures of objects are used—through a symbolic phase; in which such pictures are interpreted conventionally instead of realistically. It was to this last stage that the Aztecs had advanced; but they mingled the two methods, and apparently varied in the order of reading, whether by lines or columns, forwards, upwards, or backwards. The difficulty of understanding them is further increased by the same object holding different meanings in different connections, and still more by the personal element, or writer’s style, as we should call it, which was impressed on his choice of objects and emblems. This rendered interpretation by no means easy to the aborigines themselves, and we have statements that when native documents were referred to them it required sometimes long consultations to reach a common understanding. The additional step by which objects stand for sounds, the Aztecs seem not to have taken, except in the names of persons and places, in which they understood the modern child’s art of the rebus, where such symbol more or less clearly stands for a syllable, and the representation was usually of conventionalized forms, somewhat like the art of the European herald. Thus the Aztec system was what Daniel Wilson calls “the pictorial suggestion of associated ideas.” The phonetic scale, if not comprehended in the Aztec system, made an essential part of the Maya hieroglyphics, and this was the great distinctive feature of the latter, as we learn from the early descriptions, and from the alphabet which Landa has preserved for us. It is not only in the codices or books of the Mayas that their writing is preserved to us, but in the inscriptions of their carved architectural remains.

When the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg found, in 1863, in the library of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid, the MS. of Landa’s Relacion, and discovered in it what purported to be a key to the Maya alphabet, there were hopes that the interpretation of the Maya books and inscriptions was not far off. Twenty-five years, however, has not seen the progress that was wished for; and if we may believe Valentini, the alphabet of Landa is a pure fabrication of the bishop himself; and even some of those who account it genuine, like Le Plongeon, hold that it is inadequate in dealing with the older Maya inscriptions. Cyrus Thomas speaks of this alphabet as simply an attempt of the bishop to pick out of compound characters their simple elements on the supposition that something like phonetic representations would be the result. Landa’s own description of the alphabet accompanying his graphic key is very unsatisfactory, not to say incomprehensible. Brasseur has tried to render it in French, and Bancroft in English; but it remains a difficult problem to interpret it intelligibly.

Brasseur very soon set himself the task of interpreting the Troano manuscript by the aid of this key, and he soon had the opportunity of giving his interpretation to the public when the Emperor Napoleon III. ordered that codex to be printed in the sumptuous manner of the imperial press. The efforts of Brasseur met with hardly a sign of approval. Léon de Rosny criticised him, and Dr. Brinton found in his results nothing to commend.

No one has approached the question of interpreting these Maya writings with more careful scrutiny than Léon de Rosny, who first attracted attention with his comparative study, Les écritures figuratives et hiéroglyphiques des différens peuples anciens et moderns (Paris, 1860; again, 1870, augmentée). From 1869 to 1871 he published at Paris four parts of Archives paléographiques de l’Orient et de l’Amérique, publiées avec des notices historiques et philologiques, in which he included several studies of the native writings, and gave a bibliography (pp. 101-115) of American paleography up to that time. His L’interprétation des anciens textes Mayas made part of the first volume of the Archives de la Soc. Américaine de France (new series). His chief work, making the second volume of the same, is his Essai sur le déchiffrement de l’écriture hiératique de l’Amérique Central (Paris, 1876), and it is the most thorough examination of the problem yet made. The last part (4th) was published in 1878, and a Spanish translation appeared in 1881.

Wm. Bollaert, who had paid some attention to the paleography of America, was one of the earliest in England to examine Brasseur’s work on Landa, which he did in a memoir read before the Anthropological Society, and later in an “Examination of the Central American hieroglyphs by the recently discovered Maya alphabet.” Brinton calls his conclusions fanciful, and Le Plongeon claims that the inscription in Stephens, which Bollaert worked upon, is inaccurately given, and that Bollaert’s results were nonsense. Hyacinthe de Charency’s efforts have hardly been more successful, though he attempted the use of Landa’s alphabet with something like scientific care. He examined a small part of the inscription of the Palenqué tablet of the Cross in his Essai de déchiffrement d’un fragment d’inscription palenquéene.

Dr. Brinton translated Charency’s results, and, adding Landa’s alphabet, published his Ancient phonetic alphabet of Yucatan (N. Y., 1870), a small tract. His continued studies were manifest in the introduction on “The graphic system and the ancient records of the Mayas” to Cyrus Thomas’s Manuscript Troano. In this paper Dr. Brinton traces the history of the attempts which have thus far been made in solving this perplexing problem. The latest application of the scientific spirit is that of the astronomer E. S. Holden, who sought to eliminate the probabilities of recurrent signs by the usual mathematical methods of resolving systems of modern cipher.

There are few examples of the aboriginal ideographic writings left to us. Their fewness is usually charged to the destruction which was publicly made of them under the domination of the Church in the years following the Conquest. The alleged agents in this demolition were Bishop Landa, in 1562, at Mani, in Yucatan, and Bishop Zumárraga at Tlatelalco, or, as some say, at Tezcuco, in Mexico. Peter Martyr has told us something of the records as he saw them, and we know also from him, and from their subsequent discovery in European collections, that some examples of them were early taken to the Old World. We have further knowledge of them from Las Casas and from Landa himself. There have been efforts made of late years by Icazbalceta and Canon Carrillo to mitigate the severity of judgment, particularly as respects Zumárraga. The first, and indeed the only attempt that has been made to bring together for mutual illustration all that was known of these manuscripts which escaped the fire, was in the great work of the Viscount Kingsborough (b. 1795, d. 1837). It was while, as Edward King, he was a student at Oxford that this nobleman’s passion for Mexican antiquities was first roused by seeing an original Aztec pictograph, described by Purchas (Pilgrimes, vol. iii.), and preserved in the Bodleian. In the studies to which this led he was assisted by some special scholars, including Obadiah Rich, who searched for him in Spain in 1830 and 1832, and who after Kingsborough’s death obtained a large part of the manuscript collections which that nobleman had amassed (Catalogue of the Sale, Dublin, 1842). Many of the Kingsborough manuscripts passed into the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (Catalogue, no. 404), but the correspondence pertaining to Kingsborough’s life-work seems to have disappeared. Phillipps had been one of the main encouragers of Kingsborough in his undertaking. Kingsborough, who had spent £30,000 on his undertaking, had a business dispute with the merchants who furnished the printing-paper, and he was by them thrown into jail as a debtor, and died in confinement.

Kingsborough’s great work, the most sumptuous yet bestowed upon Mexican archæology, was published between 1830 and 1848, there being an interval of seventeen years between the seventh and eighth volumes. The original intention seems to have embraced ten volumes, for the final section of the ninth volume is signatured as for a tenth. The work is called: Antiquities of Mexico; comprising facsimiles of Ancient Mexican Paintings and Hieroglyphics, preserved in the Royal Libraries of Paris, Berlin, and Dresden; in the Imperial Library of Vienna; in the Vatican Library; in the Borgian Museum at Rome; in the Library of the Institute of Bologna; and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford; together with the Monuments of New Spain, by M. Dupaix; illustrated by many valuable inedited MSS. With the theory maintained by Kingsborough throughout the work, that the Jews were the first colonizers of the country, we have nothing to do here; but as the earliest and as yet the largest repository of hieroglyphic material, the book needs to be examined. The compiler states where he found his MSS., but he gives nothing of their history, though something more is now known of their descent. Peter Martyr speaks of the number of Mexican MSS. which had in his day been taken to Spain, and Prescott remarks it as strange that not a single one given by Kingsborough was found in that country. There are, however, some to be seen there now. Comparisons which have been made of Kingsborough’s plates show that they are not inexact; but they almost necessarily lack the validity that the modern photographic processes give to facsimiles.

Kingsborough’s first volume opens with a fac-simile of what is usually called the Codex Mendoza, preserved in the Bodleian. It is, however, a contemporary copy on European paper of an original now lost, which was sent by the Viceroy Mendoza to Charles V. Another copy made part of the Boturini collection, and from this Lorenzana engraved that portion of it which consists of tribute-rolls. The story told of the fate of the original is, that on its passage to Europe it was captured by a French cruiser and taken to Paris, where it was bought by the chaplain of the English embassy, the antiquary Purchas, who has engraved it. It was then lost sight of, and if Prescott’s inference is correct it was not the original, but the Bodleian copy, which came into Purchas’ hands.

Beside the tribute-rolls, which make one part of it, the MS. covers the civil history of the Mexicans, with a third part on the discipline and economy of the people, which renders it of so much importance in an archæological sense. The second reproduction in Kingsborough’s first volume is what he calls the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, and formerly owned by M. Le Tellier. The rest of this initial volume is made up of facsimiles of Mexican hieroglyphics and paintings, from the Boturini and Selden collections, which last is in the Bodleian.

The second Kingsborough volume opens with a reproduction of the Codex Vaticanus (the explanation is in volume vi.), which is in the library of the Vatican, and it is known to have been copied in Mexico by Pedro de los Rios in 1566. It is partly historical and partly mythological. The rest of this volume is made up of facsimiles of other manuscripts,—one given to the Bodleian by Archbishop Laud, others at Bologna, Vienna, and Berlin.

The third volume reproduces one belonging to the Borgian Museum at Rome, written on skin, and thought to be a ritual and astrological almanac. This is accompanied by a commentary by Frabega. Kingsborough gives but a single Maya MS., and this is in his third volume, and stands with him as an Aztec production. This is the Dresden Codex, not very exactly rendered, which is preserved in the royal library in that city, for which it was bought by Götz, at Vienna, in 1739. Prescott (i. 107) seemed to recognize its difference from the Aztec MSS., without knowing precisely how to class it. Brasseur de Bourbourg calls it a religious and astrological ritual. It is in two sections, and it is not certain that they belong together. In 1880 it was reproduced at Dresden by polychromatic photography (Chromo-Lichtdruck), as the process is called, under the editing of Dr. E. Förstemann, who in an introduction describes it as composed of thirty-nine oblong sheets folded together like a fan. They are made of the bark of a tree, and covered with varnish. Thirty-five have drawings and hieroglyphics on both sides; the other four on one side only. It is now preserved between glass to prevent handling, and both sides can be examined. Some progress has been made, it is professed, in deciphering its meaning, and it is supposed to contain “records of a mythic, historic, and ritualistic character.”

Another script in Kingsborough, perhaps a Tezcucan MS., though having some Maya affinities, is the Fejérvary Codex, then preserved in Hungary, and lately owned by Mayer, of Liverpool.

Three other Maya manuscripts have been brought to light since Kingsborough’s day, to say nothing of three others said to be in private hands, and not described. Of these, the Codex Troano has been the subject of much study. It is the property of a Madrid gentleman, Don Juan Tro y Ortolano, and the title given to the manuscript has been somewhat fantastically formed from his name by the Abbé Etienne Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg, who was instrumental in its recognition about 1865 or 1866, and who edited a sumptuous two-volume folio edition with chromo-lithographic plates.

While Léon de Rosny was preparing his Essai sur le déchiffrement de l’Ecriture hiératique (1876), a Maya manuscript was offered to the Bibliothèque Impériale in Paris and declined, because the price demanded was too high. Photographic copies of two of its leaves had been submitted, and one of these is given by Rosny in the Essai (pl. xi.). The Spanish government finally bought the MS., which, because it was supposed to have once belonged to Cortes, is now known as the Codex Cortesianus. Rosny afterwards saw it and studied it in the Museo Archeológico at Madrid, as he makes known in his Doc. Ecrits de la Antiq. Amér., p. 79, where he points out the complementary character of one of its leaves with another of the MS. Troano, showing them to belong together, and gives photographs of the two (pl. v. vi.), as well as of other leaves (pl. 8 and 9). The part of this codex of a calendar character (Tableau des Bacab) is reproduced from Rosny’s plate by Cyrus Thomas in an essay in the Third Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, together with an attempted restoration of the plate, which is obscure in parts. Finally a small edition (85 copies) of the entire MS. was published at Paris in 1883.

The last of the Maya MSS. recently brought to light is sometimes cited as the Codex Perezianus, because the paper in which it was wrapped, when recognized in 1859 by Rosny, bore the name “Perez”; and sometimes designated as Codex Mexicanus, or Manuscrit Yucatèque No. 2, of the National Library at Paris. It was a few years later published as Manuscrit dit Méxicain No. 2 de la Bibliothèque Impériale, photographié par ordre de S. E. M. Duruy, ministre de l’instruction publique (Paris, 1864, in folio, 50 copies). The original is a fragment of eleven leaves, and Brasseur speaks of it as the most beautiful of all the MSS. in execution, but the one which has suffered the most from time and usage.