272 The American Naturalist. | [March, < : 
additional ample discussion of it by Dr. Seler. Fragments only of 
the padre’s great historical work have been known until now, 
these fragments, however, being so full of valuable, suggestive material 
to every student of Mexican antiquities that the apparent loss of the 
whole bulk of the work was universally deplored. It was known from 
the preserved preface that the padre had taken care to gather from 
the mouths of competent natives all that was still alive in their mem- 
ory of the traditional history of their ancestors, of their former social, 
hierarchic, and political institutions, and that the text of this collec- ; 
tive work had been written in the best language of their own, so as to 
preserve not only the material itself, but this to be also in the clothing 
of their technical vocabulary and syntactic phraseology. This work 
has recently been discovered, and in three different copies. One of 
these is preserved in the Biblioteca Laurentiana of Florence, patie: 
the combined Aztec-Spanish text; the two others in the Bi 
teca del Palario and the Biblioteca de la Academia de la ie 
toria, both of them in Madrid, give only the Aztec text. As it 
appears the printing of the Laurentiana copy has been undertaken at 
the expense of the Mexican government, it is to be feared that it will 
be long ere the whole work, embracing twelve volumes, will be in the 
hands of the students. To quote Dr, Seler’s own words: ‘‘ The pub- 
lication of Father Sahagua’s work would not only be an immense gain 
to linguistics and Mexican archeology proper, but also to the still 
unwritten history of the development of this race, of its degree of 
intellect, and its peculiar notions and conceptions.” ‘The paragraphs 
5-32, edited and commented by Dr. Seler, are only a ‘‘ minimal frag- : 
ment’’ of the whole, and were selected on account of the richness a 
of the costumes and attributes exhibited in the illustrations of the sev- vi 
eral deities in discussion. a 
In an appendix to the previous pamphlet (pages 183-188) a discus- | 
sion is given on twenty-three Zapotecan figure-vessels, with cuts. In 
following up the detailed analysis of the characteristic and sumptuous 
head-dresses that adorn the figure-heads of the aforesaid vessels, we 
cannot help noticing that what is said of them does not always quite 
up to that which we are taught to see. Apart from some 
splendia identifications which the author’s trained eye reveals, and 
which the student will readily accept, he will miss a comprehensive 
statement of each of the single components, of their material, their 
interlacing, their gradual growth, and the final outcome of that enor- 
mous ‘ toupée,’”’ of which nothing like it is found in the whole 
ancient and modern history of dress and costume. We are fully aware 
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