[1039] Bandelier, Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., n. s., i. 92, calls the paper “not very valuable.”
[1040] This gentleman, since the death of his father, of the same name, succeeded, after an interval, the elder antiquary in the president’s chair of the American Antiquarian Society.
[1041] Cf. Short, p. 396. Le Plongeon retorts (Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., n. s., i. 282) by telling his critic that he had never been in Yucatan. Considering the effect of contact in many of those who have written of the ruins, it may be a question if the implication is valuable as a piece of criticism. Mr. Salisbury and Dr. Le Plongeon reported from time to time in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc. the results of the latter’s investigations, and the researches to which they gave rise. Those in April, 1876, and April, 1877, of these Proceedings, were privately printed by Mr. Salisbury, as The Mayas, etc. In April, 1878, Mr. Salisbury reported upon the “Terra-cotta figures from Isla Mujeres.” In Oct., 1878, there were communications from Dr. Le Plongeon, and from Alice D. Le Plongeon, his wife. In April, 1879, Dr. Le Plongeon communicated a letter on the affinities of Central America and the East. Since this the Le Plongeons have found other channels of communication. Dr. Le Plongeon expanded his somewhat extravagant notions of Oriental affinities in his Sacred mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 years ago; their relation to the sacred mysteries of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea, and India. Freemasonry in times anterior to the temple of Solomon (New York, 1886).
His preface is largely made up with a rehearsal of his rebuffs and in complaints of the want of public appreciation of his labors. He is, however, as confident as ever, and deciphers the bas-reliefs and mural inscriptions of Chichen-Itza by “the ancient hieratic Maya alphabet” which he claims to have discovered, and shows this alphabet in parallel columns with that of Egypt as displayed by Champollion and Bunsen. Mrs. Le Plongeon published her Vestiges of the Mayas in New York, in 1881, and gathered some of her periodical writings in her Here and There in Yucatan (N. Y., 1886). Cf. her letter on the ancient records of Yucatan in The Nation, xxix. 224.
[1042] Baldwin (p. 125), in a condensed way, and likewise Short (ch. 8) and Bancroft (iv. ch. 5), more at length, have mainly depended on Stephens. Cf. references in Bancroft, iv. 147, and Bandelier’s list in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., n. s., i. 82, 95. E. H. Thompson has contributed papers in Ibid. Oct., 1886, p. 248, and April, 1887, p. 379, and on the ruins of Kich-Moo and Chun-Kal-Cin in April, 1888, p. 162. Brasseur, beside his Hist. Nat. Civ., ii. 20, has something in his introduction to his Relation de Landa. The description of the ruins at Zayi, which Stephens gives, shows that some of the rooms were filled solid with masonry, and he leaves it as an unaccountable fact; but Morgan (Houses and House Life, p. 267) thinks it shows that the builders constructed a core of masonry, over which they reared the walls and ceilings, which last, after hardening, were able to support themselves, when the cores were removed; and that in the ruins at Zayi we see the cores unremoved.
[1043] Cf. the pros and cons in Waldeck and Charnay. Waldeck first named the ornaments as “Elephants’ trunks” (Voy. Pitt. p. 74). There are cuts in Stephens, reproduced in Bancroft. There is also a cut in Norman. Cf. E. H. Thompson in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1887, p. 382.
[1044] Stephens, Yucatan, ii. 265, gives an ancient Indian map (1557), and extracts from the archives of Mani, which lead him to infer that at that time it was an inhabited Indian town.
[1045] Bancroft (iv. 151) gives various references to second-hand descriptions, noted before 1875, to which may be added those in Short, p. 347; Nadaillac, 334; Amer. Antiquarian, vii. 257, and again, July, 1888.
Probably the most accurate of the plans of the ruins is that of Stephens (Yucatan, i. 165), which is followed by Bancroft (iv. 153). Brasseur’s report has a plan, and others, all differing, are given by Waldeck (pl. viii.), Norman (p. 155), and Charnay (Ruines, p. 62). Views and cuts of details are found in Waldeck, Stephens, Charnay,—whence later summarizers like Bancroft, Baldwin, and Short have drawn their copies; while special cuts are copied in Armin (Das Heutige Mexico); Larenaudière (Mexique et Guatemala, Paris, 1847); Le Plongeon (Sacred Mysteries); Ruge (Zeitalter der Entdeckungen, p. 357); Morgan (Houses, etc., ch. xi.), and in various others. One can best trace the varieties and contrasts of the different accounts of the various edifices in Bancroft’s collations of their statements. His constant citation, even to scorn them, of the impertinencies of George Jones’s Hist. of Anc. America (London, 1842),—the later notorious Count Johannes,—was hardly worth while.
[1046] Landa described the ruins. Relation, p. 340.