226 CENTRAL AMERICAN PICTURE-WRITING. 
Plate LX, and in other places. Other important questions can be 
settled by comparison of the two plates. For example, at Palenque 
we often find a sign composed of a half ellipse, inside of which bars 
are drawn. I shall elsewhere show that there is reason to 
believe the ellipse is to represent the concave of the sky, its 
diameter to be the level earth, and in some cases at least 
the bars to be the descending and fertilizing rain. The bars are some- 
times two, three, and sometimes four in number. Are these variants 
of a single sign, or are they synonyms? Before the discovery of the 
identity of the personages in these two plates, this question could not 
be answered. Now we can say that they are not synonyms, or at least 
that they must be considered separately. To show this, examine the 
‘bands just above the wristlets of the two figures. Over the left hands 
of the figures the bars are two in number; over the right hands there 
are four. This exact similarity is not accidental; there is a meaning 
init, and we must search for its explanation elsewhere, but we now have 
a valuable test of what needs to be regarded, and of what, on the other 
hand, may be passed over as accidental or unimportant. 
One other case needs mentioning here, as it will be of future use. From 
the waist of each figure depend nine oval solids, six being hatched over 
like pine cones and the three central ones having two ovals, one within 
the other, engraved on them. In Plate IV the inner ovals are all on the 
right-hand side of the outer ovals. Would they mean the same if they 
were on the left-hand side? Plate I enables us to say that they would, 
since one of these inner ovals has been put by the artist on that side by 
accident or by an allowed ecaprice. It is by furnishing us with tests and 
criteria like these that the proof of the identity of these two plates is 
immediately important. In other ways, too, the proof is valuable and 
interesting, but we need not discuss them at this time. 
These statues, then, are to us a dictionary of synonyms in stone—a 
test of the degree of adherence to a prototype which was exacted, and a 
criterion of the kind of minor differences which must be noticed in any 
rigid study. 
I have not insisted more on the resemblances, since the accompanying 
figures present a demonstration. Let those who wish to verify these re- 
semblances compare minutely the ornaments above the knees of the two 
figures, those about the waists, above the heads, and the square knots, 
etc., etc. 
