MEXICAN MANUSCRIPT. 259 
uscript, as being of Aztec origin ; he thinks '•' it highly improbable thai 
it is Mexican, as nothing like it has yet been found among the monuments 
of that people ; while, on the other hand, it seems probable that it is the 
workmanship of the same race that reared and inhabited Palenque, 
seeing that similar characters abound among its ruins." One of the 
strongest circumstantial evidences, in all legal investigations of the au- 
thenticity of documents, is the material on which they are written. False 
wills have thus been detected by the date in the "water mark ; and, in this 
instance, it will be recollected that the material is precisely similar to 
that which is known to have been brought from Mexico, containing draw- 
ing, that were undoubtedly made by the Aztecs. In addition to this, it is 
a work written and painted on paper made of the Agave Americana, or 
American Aloe, not a single one of which is delineated by Mr. Cather- 
wood as growing wild among the ruins of Palenque. In fact, it is a plant 
almost unknown in the level and warmer territories near the coast ; it is 
peculiar to the elevated plateaus of the Valley of Mexico and the adja- 
cent country, and I do not remember to have seen it, in the course of my 
journey through the tierra caliente, even at the short distance of sixty 
miles south of the Capital in the vale of Cuernavaca. If it be replied 
to this that the paper or leaf may have been brought to Palenque from 
Mexico, the answer would at once show a connection of arts between the 
people, and go far to prove their national identity or close alliance and 
intercourse. It should be remembered, too, that works like this would 
very naturally have been the first to be destroyed in Mexico, and the 
smallness of their number would thus be successfully accounted for. 
From these facts we may fairly argue that this book of eighty yards in 
length, covered with written characters and illuminated with pictures, is, in 
all probability, a Mexican production. The figures of the men or demons 
are evidently similar, both in physignomy, posture and faces, to those on the 
monuments and idols I have already described to you. But who shall 
decipher their meaning, or that of the hieroglyphics ? 
For years the antiquarians of the Old World were guessing at the 
signification of Egyptian hieroglyphics, until, in 1799, a French engi- 
neer, when digging the foundations of Fort St. Julien, on the west bank 
of the Nile, between Rosetta and the sea, discovered the fragment of a 
stone which is now deposited in the British Museum. It contained an in- 
scription in hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek — two of which are ancient 
Egyptian languages. The Greek was deciphered and the translation 
applied to the Demotic, and both, again, to the hieroglyphic ; and, thus, 
after years of patient and unceasing toil, a key has been formed by which 
the present savans of Europe go among the relics of Egypt, and decipher 
the inscriptions on their tombs as easily as we read the mementoes over the 
graves of our friends in the cemeteries of Boston or Baltimore. But even 
if a Rosetta stone. were discovered in Mexico, there is no Indian tongue 
to supply the key or interpreter. 
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