VITA SINE LITERIS. 35 



letter, a, the Maya word for "leg." In this way the bishop woiild proceed till he had 

 impressed upon his hearers the value of every souud in the Spanish alphabet. Such, 

 according to Dr. Valentini, is the true story of the genesis of the famous Landa alphabet. 

 He does not hesitate to pronounce it, without any reproach, a Spanish fabrication ; and, 

 perhaps, the strongest ground for the charge is the order of the alphabet itself It certainly 

 would be an extraordinary coincidence to hud a Central American alphabet following 

 exactly, in the sequence of the characters, the arrangement of our A, B, C. Right or 

 wrong. Dr. Yalentini's theory is most ingeniously worked out. Except in three instances, 

 /, M, and O, he has succeeded in identifying to his satisfaction the oltjects indicated by the 

 Maya symbols. Though his pamphlet is not a direct indictment of the good faith of the 

 discoverer, he expresses his surprise that Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg should have 

 omitted to give such detailed information as to the date, place and circumstances of his 

 discovery as might reasonably have been expected to accompany so important an announ- 

 cement. 



But if Dr. Valentini is sceptical, there are others, as already intimated, on whose 

 eager faith no shadow of doubt has been allowed to rest. The Eev. Isaac Taylor, though 

 he does not give Bishop Lauda's scheme in his work, " The Alphabet," writes of it as 

 deserving of alphabetic honours. " It appears," he says, " that, in addition to a certain 

 number of syllabic signs and a few ideograms, the Mayas employed twenty-seven charac- 

 ters which must be admitted to be alphabetic." But, after some words of praise to a 

 civilized people who had invented a system of writing superior to that of either the Assy- 

 rians or the Chinese, he adds : "The systems of picture-writing which were invented and 

 developed by the tribes of Central America, are, however, so obscure, and so little is 

 known about their history, that they must be regarded rather as literary curiosities than 

 as affording materials for enabling us to arrive at any general conclusions as to the nature 

 of the early stages of the development of the graphic art." ' 



Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, in his "Atlantis," endeavours to trace the alphabets of the 

 eastern hemisphere, through the Atlanteans, to the Maya symbols, devoting much learn- 

 ing to the hopeless task. Whether it be an alphabet or not, one thing is unhappily certain, 

 that the discovery which drew from Brasseur de Bourbourg the rapturous cry, " Eureka," 

 has hitherto, as Dr. Valentini insists, and even M. de Rosny has been forced to concede, 

 proved of little service in the decipherment of the Maya documents. In a review of M. 

 de Rosny 's edition of the Codex Corlesianns, in Science (April 11, 1884), Mr. Cyrus Thomas 

 wrote as follows : " That Rosny is largely influenced in his interpretation of characters by 

 Landa's alphabet and the names of the days, is quite perceptible in this vocabulary. I 

 am satisfied that no decided progress can be made in deciphering these aboriginal 

 documents until we break loose from these trammels and use as a key the few characters 

 which can be satisfactorily determined otherwise." " 



If the so-called " Landa alphabet " be nothing more than what Dr. Valentini repre- 

 sents it to be, there is nothing else on which palœographists can fall back to support the 

 theory that Americans had developed alphabetic writing. The numerous finds which have 



' Tlie Alphabet, i. 24, 25. 



= At tlie first meeting of the Congrès des Amérioanistes, at Nancy, .Senor Gavino racheco-Zof-'iirra read a paper, 

 in which he advocated the adoption of a plionetic alphabet of his own elaboration, instead of the Quichua language 

 of Peru which, he says, is still spoken by 1,500,000 people. 



