128 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull. 28 



it may formerly have belonged to the '' Miiseo Indiano " of the 

 Milanese historian and antiquary, Cavaliere Lorenzo Boturini Ber- 

 nadiicci. Since various other of these fragments, as I shall here- 

 after show, certainly did belong to Boturini's collection, and we 

 know that Gama actually knew of, used, and possessed a great part 

 of Boturini's collection, we may venture to conjecture that the 

 other pieces of the collection brought together by Alexander von 

 Humboldt were acquired in the same way. 



Fragments II and VI were j^ublished and described by von Hum- 

 boldt in the above-mentioned illustrated work, Vues des Cordilleres 

 et Monuments des Peuples Indigenes de TAmerique. Only a small 

 part of fragment II, however, was reproduced, and that without the 

 explanatory notes which accompany it, and neither of the two frag- 

 ments was quite perfectly and correctly reproduced. Fragments I 

 and II have also appeared in colors in the second volume of Kings- 

 borough's great work, Mexican Antiquities. Fragment II, however, 

 is without the explanatory notes. Close examination readily shows 

 that neither is b}'^ any means accurately nor exactly reproduced, either 

 in drawing or color. The Avhole collection was exhibited in the year 

 1888 in the rooms of the Royal Library, with the other manuscripts 

 and printed matter relating to the history and languages of America, 

 during the sessions of the International Americanist Congress at 

 Berlin. The four hundredth anniversary of the day on which 

 Columbus first trod the soil of the New World gave the managers of 

 the Royal Library the desired opportunity to render the entire col- 

 lection more accessible for general use by multipljdng it, photograph- 

 ically at least, as their means did not then admit of reproduction in 

 colors. To me was intrusted the honorable task of accompanying 

 those pages with a few words of explanation, for which I herewith 

 express my thanks to the administration of the Royal Library. 



FRAGMENT I 



This fragment (plates ii to vi) is a strip of agave paper 4.3 m. long 

 and somewhat more than 8 cm. wide, painted on one side and then 

 folded fourteen times, thus making a book about a foot in length. 

 The painted side is divided lengthwise by vertical lines into 5 strips, 

 and by other lines cutting the former at right angles into 75 sections. 

 I will designate the longitudinal strips from right to left by the let- 

 ters A, B, c, D, and E (plates ii to vi) , and the subdivisions beginning at 

 the bottom — -for there the reading begins — by the figures 1 to 75. 

 The lower end is imperfect. It is obvious that there was still another 

 section below, which was painted in similar fashion and possibly 

 formed the end of an entire missing row. The upper end looks as 

 if it had been sharply cut off. As the entries of material objects 



