2 HISTORY OF THE PALENQUE TABLET. 



a Spanish lady of large fortune.* According to information received from the 

 Dcpai-tment of State, he was appointed consul of the United States at Laguna 

 on the 5th of March, 1839, and died, while in that capacity, on the 10th of 

 February, 1843. 



There was some correspondence between Messrs. Russell and Stephens after 

 the last-named gentleman's return to the United States. Before leaving 

 Palenque, Stephens had instructed a Mr. Pawling to take jolaster casts of its 

 more important tablets, ornaments, etc., and arrangements had been made that 

 these casts should be forwarded to the United States by Mr. Russell. Pawling' s 

 work, however, was suddenly brought to a close by an order from the governor 

 of Chiapas, and the casts thus far made were seized and retained. It is not 

 altogether improbable that Mr. Pawling, while engaged at Palenque, collected 

 the fragments of the tablet and sent them to the American consul, who for- 

 warded them to the National Institute at Washington. Mr. Stephens had 

 cherished the plan " to lay the foundation of a Museum of American Antiquities, 

 which might deserve the countenance of the General Government, and draw to it 

 Catlin's Indian Gallery, and every other memorial of the aboriginal races, whose 

 history within our own borders has already become almost a romance and fable."f 



I am indebted to Mr. Titian R. Peale, of Philadelphia, for information as 

 to the history of the tablet after its arrival in Washington. On the return of 

 the United States Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the South Seas, under 

 Lieutenant Wilkes, the collections made during that expedition were sent to the 

 Patent Office at Washington, and Mr. Peale was appointed to arrange them, with 

 other collections then in the Patent OflBce, in the hall of that building. Among 

 the antiquities here deposited were the fragments of the Palenquean tablet, 

 which, as Mr. Peale expressly states, fitted exactly together. The tablet excited 

 some interest at the time, but no one, it seems, as yet duly appreciated its arch- 

 aeological importance. Subsequently, in 1848, when the Prussian envoy to the 

 United States, Baron von Gerolt, solicited a plaster cast of it for his govern- 

 ment, Mr. Peale employed Mr. Clark Mills, the sculptor, for making one, which 

 the Prussian ambassador sent to Berlin. It is not mentioned in Professor A. 

 Bastian's catalogue of the ethnological department in the Royal Museum at 

 Berlin. I The mould remained at the Patent Office until it was removed to the 

 Smithsonian Institution, together with the collections of the National Institute. 

 It probably had become unfit for further use in 1863 ; for in that year the late 

 Professor Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, charged 

 Dr. George A. Matile, then connected with that establishment, § to make a 

 new mould, in order to obtain a perfect cast of the slab. This work was success- 



* Stephens: Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan ; vol. ii, p. 390. 



f Ibid. ; vol. ii, Appendix. 



J This catalogue was published in 1872. 



^ Now in the United States Patent Office. 



*. 



