102 HarsJiberger. — Maize: 



of religious observance to gain her approval. She was the 

 first woman, the ideal, the matchless 1 Sahagun 2 pictures her 

 with a crown upon her head, and in the right hand a vessel, 

 her feet clothed wholly in red. In the ethnographical museum 

 at Berlin is preserved a stone image of the goddess with two 

 maize ears in her left hand. The Museum of Mexico ? ' has a 

 vase ornamented with the emblems of Centeotl. It is twenty- 

 one inches high and nineteen inches in diameter above. 



Of more questionable importance in the discussion are the 

 various codices of the Nahua people, in scraps and fragments, 

 preserved for us by the early Spanish writers, who translated 

 them along with many of very doubtful authenticity, but the 

 concurrent opinion of scholars seems to point to a pre-Co- 

 lumbian (if not very remote) origin of some of the better 

 known writings. An important record, written in Aztec 

 with Spanish letters, by an anonymous native author, and 

 copied by Ixtilcochitl, which belonged to the famous Boturini 

 Collection, 4 is the Codex Chimalpopoca, which, unfortunately, 

 has not been published, and references to which are to be 

 found only in the works of Brasseur de Bourbourg. The 

 quotation given by Bancroft 5 is clearly related to the Maya 

 narrative of the same event — the search for maize. 



Until within recent years, the incriptions on the ruined 

 Maya edifices were a sealed mystery to philological archaeol- 

 ogists. H It appears that the key at last has been found. 



In 1876, H. T. Cresson visited the ficole des Beaux-Arts, 

 in Paris, and there saw photographs of the left-hand doorway 

 of Casa No. 3, Palenque. "The design and technique of this 

 masterpiece of the Maya scribe sculpture art is especially 

 fine, particularly the ikonomatic ornament, the figure of the 

 god Kukuitz. The head-dress of the figure represents feathers, 

 maize leaves, the quetzal head, and other decorations, notably 

 the heron (Baac-ha) in the act of pinching a fish in its pow- 



1 Steffen, Max, Die Landwirthschaft beiden Alt. Americanischen Kulturvolkern. 



2 Sahagun, Historia General, Casas de Neuva Espafia, M£xico, 1829, cap. 7. 



3 Brocklehurst, Mexico To-day, 195, PI. xxxv. 



4 Una Historia de los Reynos de Culhuacan y Mexico, etc. Boturini Catalago 17-1S. 



5 Bancroft, Native Races Pacific States, v., 193. 

 Science, xxi, 1893, 8. Figs. 38, 39, 4°. P- 9- 



