Brinton,] 
(Jan. 4, 
Galvez, has ever been published, it was resolved at a meeting toward the 
close of 1888 to have this short grammar translated and printed, and the 
task was referred to me. 
A. close examination of the MS. showed that the copyist had not been 
always accurate, sometimes failing in a congistent orthography, and once 
or twice having manifestly neglected the observance of the proper order of 
the original. Where there was no doubt about such negligence, it has 
been corrected in the translation ; but elsewhere the original has been 
adhered to, even when another disposition of the subject seemed prefer- 
able to the translator, 
Fortunately, the exhibition of the language could be rendered more sat,- 
isfactory by the aid of two manuscript grammars in my own library. One 
of these is that of Fray Benito de Villacafias, a Dominican who died at 
the Convent of Guatemala in 1610, at the age of 73 years, and who for 
more than thirty years had been a missionary among the Cakchiquels. His 
knowledge of the language, therefore, dated back to the first century of 
the Conquest, and his works represent it in its primitive form. The second 
Grammar is by Fray Estevan Torresano, and was written shortly after the 
publication in 1758 of the Cakchiquel Grammar of P. Ildefonso Joseph 
Flores, and with the especial object of improving and correcting that un- 
necessarily complicated and ill-arranged book. Torresano’s is, I believe, 
the latest grammar of the Cakchiquel which has been composed, as that 
of Villacafias is the earliest now in existence, and they therefore offered 
particularly useful aids in this undertaking. 
All these grammars take as their plan that of the Latin or Spanish lan- 
guages, and apply it to this American dialect. To scientific linguists it is 
needless to say that this method is quite erroneous, and that it forces 
American tongues into a form wholly uncongenial to their spirit, But it 
would have been impossible to have adopted any better system, and at the 
same time to have maintained the semblance of a translation. Therefore, 
I have confined myself to an obedience of the plan chosen by the authors 
I had to follow, trusting that the material furnished for the study of the 
language will be sufficient to allow the linguist to complete a scheme of 
its organization and to arrange its elements in accordance with the de- 
mands of modern science, 
Ill. Literature of the Cakchiquel Language. 
The Maya group of languages, of which, as T have said, the Cakchiquel 
isa member, has several points of peculiar interest. It was the linguistic 
