FORMER CONCLUSIONS CONFIRMED. 97 



purpose or other the monks incorporated it with 

 their convent. 



There is but one way to overthrow this latter 

 conclusion, and that is by contending that these 

 mounds were all ruined, and this building- too, at the 

 time when it was made to form part of the convent; 

 but then we are reduced to the necessity of suppo- 

 sing that a great town, the fame of which reached 

 the Spaniards at Campeachy, and which made a 

 desperate and bloody resistance to their occupation 

 of it, was a mere gathering of hordes around the 

 ruined buildings of another race ; and, besides, it is 

 a matter of primary importance to note that these 

 artificial mounds are mentioned, not in the course 

 of describing the Indian town, for no description 

 whatever is attempted, but merely incidentally, as 

 affording conveniences to the Spaniards in furnish- 

 ing materials for building the city, or as causing ob- 

 structions in the laying out of streets regularly and 

 according to the plan proposed. The mound on 

 which the convent stands would perhaps not have 

 been mentioned at all but for the circumstance that 

 the Padre Cogolludo was a Franciscan friar, and 

 the mention of it enabled him to pay a tribute to 

 the memory of the blessed father Luis de Villpan- 

 do, then superior of the convent, and to show the 

 great estimation in which he was held, for he says 

 that the adelantado had fixed upon this mound for 

 the site of one of his fortresses, but on the applica- 

 tion of the superior he yielded it to him readily for 

 Vol. L— N q 



