34 JOHN READE: 



caused intense excitement in the antiquarian world. It was now taken for granted that 

 the inscriptions which had heretofore bafHed the ingenuity and patience of the most skilful 

 palœographist, could be readily interpreted, and that a flood of welcome light would be 

 shed on the origin and history of the Central American nations. Alas ! the hope was 

 destined to be disappointed. The key would not open the door to the mystery, which 

 must remain a mystery still. Some of the ardent believers in Landa's alphabet were, 

 indeed, said to have used it to good account. By means of it "Mr. Bollaert obtained 

 encouraging results from hieroglyphics figured in Stephens's works." But the author ' 

 who gives this testimony, virtually unsays it a little after. He has more faith in a distin- 

 guished French investigator, M. de Rosny, the learned editor of the Codex Cortesirinus. " M. de 

 Rosny," says Mr. Strong, "in his able essays on the decipherment of the hieratic writings of 

 Central America has undertaken the solution of this interesting and perplexing problem in a 

 scientific manner, and we have the fullest confidence that his system, constructed on Landa's 

 key, will open to us the books and inscriptions of the Mayas." Others discredited the great 

 discovery of M. de Bourbourg from the first, and among these none have denied its alpha- 

 betic character more vigorously than Dr. P. Valentini. In a paper, read before the American 

 Antiquarian Society and afterwards published in pamphlet form, he says : " My study of 

 the writers on the Spanish Conquest gaA^e me the firmest conviction that the Central 

 American hieroglyphics stand for objects and nothing else. From the day that I obtained 

 a copy of Landa's work (which was in the spring of 1871, in which year, after a prolonged 

 sojourn in Central America, I had come to New York), the impression was rooted in my 

 mind that the believers in this alphabetic table were laboring under a manifest delusion. 

 This impression grew stronger when watching the movements made in the phonetical 

 deciphering, I noticed that the specimens offered to the public were only so many wit- 

 nesses of the valueless character of the so-called phonetic key." Dr. Valentini gives 

 quotations from the historians of the Conquest to shew that in no case was mention made 

 of alphabetic writing as a native possession. The expressions used are invariably signs, 

 figures, characters or symbols. Everything, in Dr. Valeutini's opinion, goes to prove that 

 an alphabetic system was unthought of as pertaining to any of the American nations, 

 what was said of the Nahuas of Mexico being equally applicable to the Mayas of Yucatan. 

 Landa's is the only authority that has ever been adduced for the contrary hypothesis, but 

 even in Landa's work there is no passage " in which he positively states that the natives 

 in the period of their paganism used an alphabet composed of symbolic letters." It is 

 his meagre explanation of the plan, which he adopted to teach his converts the verities of 

 the Christian faith, that caused the grave misunderstanding. That plan was, in fine, a 

 mnemonic device not new to missionaries situated as Landa was, and consisted in the 

 choice of certain objects of which the names in the Maya tongue suggested the letters of 

 the alphabet. Repeating the sound a, for instance, Landa would ask one of his disciples 

 to draw a rough picture of the object which the sound called up in his mind. After 

 thinking a moment, one of the pupils would make a rude outline of a tortoise, saying, as 

 he showed it to his teacher, " ac." Seeking a better representation of the sound, Landa 

 would urge him to a second trial, and his obedient scholar would put down the counterfeit 

 presentment of a curved knife, ach. A third experiment would elicit the very echo of the 



' Strong's North American.s of Antiijuity, pp. 425, 42G. 



