1901.] MINUTES. 53 



Stated Meeting February 15, 1901. 

 Vice-President Barker in the Chair. 



Present, 27 members. 



Mrs. Zelia Nuttall exhibited proofs of & facsimile of the an- 

 cient Mexican Codex which she has recently brought to light. 

 She described how she learned of the existence of this Codex ; 

 how it had once belonged to the Library of San Marco, 

 in Florence, whence it was stolen and sold ; and how she suc- 

 ceeded in tracing it and obtaining from its present owner, 

 an English nobleman, the permission to publish it m facsimile, 

 and thus place it within the reach of the scientific world. 



The costly reproduction of the Codex has been rendered 

 possible by the generosity of Mr. Charles P. Bowditch, of Bos- 

 ton, a patron of the Peabody Museum of American Archae- 

 ology and Ethnology, Cambridge, Mass., under whose auspices 

 the publication will be shortly issued, with an introduction 

 and notes by Mrs. Zelia Nuttall. 



The original Codex is painted on a long, delicately prepared 

 strip of deerskin, which is painted on both sides, is folded 

 zizzag fashion and forms forty- four pages on one side and 

 forty-three on the other, making a total of eighty-seven pages 

 covered with pictography. 



The Codex commemorates wars and victories and gives the 

 names of a number of conquered towns and vanquished chief- 

 tains. It is a native historical document of unparalleled im- 

 portance, and is, besides, the best preserved, most carefully 

 executed specimen of Mexican pictography known, its artistic 

 excellency being only comparable to that of the Vienna Codex. 

 The latter, preserved at the Imperial Library at Vienna, 

 appears, indeed, to be the work of the same native scribe. 

 What is more, both Codices furnish internal evidence proving 

 that they deal with the same period of native history and 

 contain references to some of the same events and localities. 

 The inference is that they belong together, complement each 

 other, and were sent from Mexico to the Old World at the 



