vi PEEFACE. 



The illustrations in these pages are by Miss Annie Hunter, who has done nearly all 

 the drawing for Maudslay's series of publications. Her experience and artistic skill 

 render her reproductions faultless. The certainty with which she can trace the glyphs 

 of a nearly obliterated inscription amounts almost to divination. No mere perfunctory 

 discharge of duty satisfies her ; her whole soul is in her work, aquiver with anxiety to 

 attain the best and truest result. Students who have not had an opportunity for 

 comparing the mutilated originals with her perfect restorations will never know the 

 full debt they owe this admirable artist. 



I have expressed here some of my obligation to the living, and elsewhere to Landa 

 among the dead ; but there is another shade to whom I feel the greatest debt of all — 

 Brasseur de Bourbourg. Without his research Landa's work and a hundred other 

 essential aids to the study would be unknown, and without the stimulating effect of 

 his writings I should never have persevered in it. It has become fashionable with the 

 school of dilettanti that has succeeded him to speak lightly of Brasseur ; but he was 

 the grandest of them all — the only one to whom I uncover. He belonged to the old 

 Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo type — the Herculean mold — men who 

 achieve in a dozen different lines what we incompetents are incapable of accomplishing 

 in a single one. No advance can be made in any branch of the study but he supplied 

 all the preliminary stepping-stones. He was to its bibliology what Maudslay is to its 

 archaeology. What if he went astray at times 1 He was delving single-handed, but 

 with a zeal that will never be equaled, in the vague of an unexplored past. What if 

 he mistook the meaning of some of the treasures he exhumed 1 No one else would 

 ever have dragged them from their crypts to turn the glare of even a misfocused 

 searchlight upon them. If he could only live to-day in the fuller light he was chiefly 

 instrumental in creating ! His fevered life just- missed its triumph. The fore- 

 shadowed discovery that should place him in absolute ascendancy never came ; but 

 generous hearts will not the less do homage to the ardent soul that departed crownless 

 from a scene resplendent with regal promises. 



Alameda, California, J. X. G. 



November 1, 1895. 



