404 General Notes. [ May, 
Arctic coast, 2990; Indians 8401—total 30,178. The appear- 
ance and habits of the natives are also described, and a map gives 
the locality of all the places mentioned. The writer is exceed- 
ingly happy in his style, and the student will be agreeably disap- 
pointed who expects to find in this report a mere mass of arid 
details. 
Lanpa’s ALPHABET.—The story of the Abbé Brasseur de Bour- 
bourg and his discovery of the Landa alphabet in the archives of 
the Royal Academy of Madrid in a manuscript entitled “ Relacion 
de las Cosas de Yucatan,” has been told again and again. No 
ing daunted by these frequent repetitions, Mr. Philipp Valentini, 
the learned Mexicologist, advances to the front in a paper pub- 
lished in the April number of the Am. Antiquarian for 1880. We 
had occasion to speak of the judicious treatment of this subject 
by Professor Rau in his Palenque Tablet volume. Professor Val- 
entini sets out with the assumption that the alphabet is a Spanish 
fabrication, that the Central American hieroglyphics stood for 
objects and nothing else, and that the believers in this alphabetic 
table were laboring under a delusion. The literature of the Con- 
quest, particularly the Mendoza codex, is invoked in confirmation 
of this view. Coming to Bishop Landa himself, Mr. Valentini 
first examines his text and rejects it as insufficient; the remainder 
of the paper is devoted to the alphabet. Its genuineness is ques- 
tioned on the following grounds: 1. The number of letters does 
not agree with that of the Maya sounds; 2. The succession is the 
same as in the English Alphabet, though this is allowed to be not 
improbable; 3. There are various characters for the letters 4, 4, 
J, 0, pand u; 4. Attention is called to the fact that though this 
may be am alphabet, it is not #he Maya alphabet. Indeed, the pre- 
sumed phonetic key represents nothing else than one of the various 
attempts made by the Spanish missionaries to teach their Yuca- 
tecan pupils how to write the prayers or any other text phoneti- 
y by means of symbols. In attempting to substantiate his 
position, and to interpret the glyphs, however, the author fin 
himself in the presence of abbreviated and conventionalized sym- 
bols without even the Mendoza codex to guide him. Notwith- 
standing, he plants his foot firmly upon the three following prin 
ciples previously to making another step: All Central American 
hieroglyphics are either representations of (1) natural or (2) man- 
ufactured objects, or (3) they are symbols—objects conventionally 
chosen to represent some abstract idea, The twenty-seven letters 
of Landa are explained as follows: 1. a = ac,a turtle; 2, a= 
ach, obsidian knife; 3. a = a, the leg (in Quiche), 4. b= be, a 
path or footprint; 5. b, unexplained; 6. c = ¢zec, the fifth Maya 
month; 7. t = #, counting years, the sun; 8. 6 = ¢¢h, black ; 9- 
h = haaéd, the year tied- up; 10. unexplained; 11. ca=C@% | 
pull out hair; 12. k = cémich, death or skull; 13. unexplain 6. 
14. | = e/e/, the pod of the oxalis; 15, 17, 18. unexplained ; 19 
