MISCELLANY. 89 



katun. Another is the occurrence, in a very obliterated glyph near the end of the 

 Tablet of Inscriptions, of an illegible character over what I believe to be the symbol 

 for Oc. I am at a loss in regard to its possible meaning. If it could be made out, it 

 might help to explain the importance that appears to attach to Oc in the Palenque 

 inscriptions. I shall refer to another case when I come to speak of declarative signs. 

 There remains only the employment of the bouquet-like sign, indicative of the 

 beginning of an ahau, in connection with symbols for other days than Ahau. But a 

 single instance of this occurs in all the Palenque, Quirigua and Copan inscriptions, 

 that on plate xvi. of Maudslay's Copan, and there I think it is a mistake in the 

 drawing — the day in the original being Ahau, not Lamat. In Menche, however, the 

 sign occurs unquestionably several times with other day symbols — a fact that will 

 furnish an interesting subject for investigation when the public is favored with the 

 inscriptions from that city. 



The characters used in composition to express a day or days, when no periodicity is 

 involved in the statement, are composed in nearly all cases of numeral signs whose 

 values multiplied together produce 260. The probable explanation of this is that in 

 their calendar capacity there were 260 specifically designated days, constituting the 

 day round, which fact was intended to be conveyed by a symbol denoting that number, 

 while the one or more days it was desired to distinguish from that total was indicated 

 by an accompanying numeral. 



BIOL. CENTR.-AMER., ArclliEol. 12 



